In a time marked by climate collapse and the technocratic colonisation of cities, the imperative to reframe urban governance through more-than-human perspectives becomes a critical epistemological and ontological project; rejecting anthropocentric, extractivist paradigms, Sheikh, Mitchell and Foth (2023) propose a research agenda for more-than-human smart urban governance that intertwines the digital, urban, and political realms via an ethics of multispecies inclusion and spatial-temporal attunement; this framework synthesises urban inclusion (redefining urban space as cohabited and co-constituted by human and nonhuman agents), digital inclusion (transforming data infrastructures and sensor technologies from surveillance tools into mediums of interspecies communication), and political inclusion (foregrounding nonhuman agency through the politics of interspecies partnership rather than reductive legal personhood); this shift is operationalised through hybrid methods like multispecies ethnography, semiotic analysis, and Indigenous relational ontologies—epistemological moves that subvert the dominance of Western knowledge systems and instead amplify ecological intelligences and kin-based cosmopolitics as found in the Māori concept of whakapapa or the fungal-root networks of urban trees; exemplary cases include the incorporation of bee communication into urban design via “Insectology” and UV-visible glass interventions for birds, as well as digital databases like the Feral Atlas and birdsong-mapping platforms that invite counter-cartographies of nonhuman subjectivity; the approach critiques the instrumentalisation of smart technologies for algorithmic control and proposes their reconfiguration into attuned, non-intrusive mediators of more-than-human worlds, in parallel with Indigenous counter-maps and oral governance traditions like those of the Tlingit and Tagish; ultimately, this agenda challenges the colonial legacy of the smart city by proposing a co-designed, co-governed urbanism where multispecies justice becomes infrastructural logic, resisting both techno-solutionism and ecological erasure; it invites designers, policymakers, and scholars to listen across species boundaries and to build governance systems that honour not only the presence but the political and communicative capacity of nonhuman life, reweaving the urban fabric into a shared, pluriversal dwelling. Sheikh, H., Mitchell, P., & Foth, M. (2023). More-than-human smart urban governance: A research agenda. Digital Geography and Society, 4, 100045. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.diggeo.2022.100045
