Urban Futures Entangled * Designing Spatial Planning for Multispecies Justice in the Post-Anthropocene

The shift from anthropocentric paradigms toward more-than-human spatial planning signals a vital epistemic and political reorientation in smart and sustainable urban development, as articulated by Fieuw, Foth, and Caldwell (2022), who present a horizon scan that synthesises environmental humanities, Indigenous epistemologies, and critical urban studies to scaffold an emerging framework for multispecies justice; this post-anthropocentric sensibility, rooted in ontologies of ecological entanglement, decolonial stewardship, and planetary cohabitation, foregrounds spatial planning as a transformative instrument not merely for human-centric efficiency but for the equitable inclusion of nonhuman agencies in the governance of urban ecologies; drawing from sources as diverse as deep ecology, biophilic design, and animal-aided architecture, the authors advocate for a planning praxis that embeds nonhuman stakeholders into regulatory and design systems through process philosophy, rights of nature jurisprudence, and spatial justice theory; operationalised at multiple scales—from the neighbourhood as biocultural habitat to global urbanisation pressures in the Capitalocene—the framework critiques the technocratic assumptions of the smart city and repositions digital technologies (e.g., IoT, sensor networks) as potential allies in mapping, listening to, and designing with nonhuman life; methods include leveraging design pattern languages, ecological infrastructure typologies, and planning instruments that enable net-positive development, while resisting green gentrification and extractivist urban growth; further, the model incorporates Indigenous knowledge systems such as Caring for Country, proposing not just new metrics but new relational ethics of place, co-creation, and kinship across species; crucially, the study insists that sustainability without decolonial more-than-human governance remains a form of spatial violence, and that the imperative to rewild, regenerate, and redesign cities must be driven by pluralist ontologies, not capitalist efficiencies; this article thus initiates a nascent research agenda and calls for collaborative refinement of a truly post-human urbanism—an agenda as philosophical as it is procedural, inviting planners, designers, and policymakers to undo the human exception and design futures in which cities become ecosystems of reciprocity, not domination. Fieuw, W., Foth, M., & Caldwell, G.A. (2022). Towards a More-than-Human Approach to Smart and Sustainable Urban Development: Designing for Multispecies Justice. Sustainability, 14(2), 948. https://doi.org/10.3390/su14020948

More-than-Human Urbanism * Toward a Multispecies Epistemology of Smart Governance

 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