Make kin,not cities! Multispecies entanglements and ‘becoming-world’ in planning theory

Abstract

Much planning theory has been undergirded by an ontological exceptionalism of humans. Yet, city planning does not sit outside of the eco-social realities co-producing the Anthropocene. Urban planners and scholars, therefore, need to think carefully and critically about who speaks for (and with) the nonhuman in place making. In this article, we identify two fruitful directions for planning theory to better engage with the imbricated nature of humans and nonhumans is recognised as characteristic of the Anthropocene – multispecies entanglements and becoming-world. Drawing on the more-than-human literature in urban and cultural geography and the environmental humanities, we consider how these terms offer new possibilities for productively rethinking the ontological exceptionalism of humans in planning theory. We critically explore how planning theory might develop inclusive, ethical relationships that can nurture possibilities for multispecies flourishing in diverse urban futures, the futures that are increasingly recognised as co-produced by nonhuman agents in the context of climate variability and change. This, we argue, is critical for developing climate-adaptive planning tools and narratives for the creation of socially and environmentally just multispecies cities.

Keywords

Anthropocene becoming-world cities climate change multispecies

Introduction: the challenge of the Anthropocene

Planning theory, in its many permutations, is imbued with deeply humanistic modes for working in and engaging with the social, political and ecological realities of urban worlds and the processes that sustain and make them. Over the past three decades, radical planning theory has challenged the stratified exclusions and injustices of the city. It has challenged the European and masculine subject of planning knowledge (Hayden, 1980; Sandercock and Forsyth, 1992; Watson, 2014; Yiftachel, 2007; among others). It has also considered how the creation of just and inclusive cities should be sustainable and climate-adaptive (Beatley and Bekoff, 2013; Steele et al., 2012; Wolch, 2002). However, it has not yet substantively challenged the ontological exceptionalism of humanism in planning.

We argue that planning theory requires radical rethinking of its modes of (post)humanistic value in the Anthropocene, a proposed new geological era in which earth systems are being transformed by human activity (Crutzen and Stoermer, 2000).¹ The Anthropocene marks a shift in the material composition of the world, including the biophysical worlds of cities and the social worlds of planners. It raises ‘fundamental questions of meaning, value, responsibility and purpose’ in the face of global environmental change (Rose et al., 2012: 1). Planning theorists have an important place in this discussion.

The multifaceted environmental crises of the Anthropocene call for enlarged understandings of the entanglements between human and nonhuman worlds (Castree, 2014). Within the social sciences and humanities, including especially urban and cultural geography, a significant set of conversations about how humans should collectively respond to the Anthropocene is emerging under the banner of the ‘environmental humanities’ (Lulka, 2013; Ruddick, 2015; Sundberg, 2013). The common thread that runs through this literature is the Anthropocene as a cause for rethinking human–environment relationships – particularly those relationships that perpetuate the idea of human separation from the complex biophysical worlds that we inhabit (Davison, 2015). This body of critical post-humanist research asks, ‘How are human identities and responsibilities to be articulated when we understand ourselves to be members of multispecies communities …?’ (Rose et al., 2012: 3). We are after all but one species among many inhabiting diverse urban worlds (Byrne, 2011), and any presumed exclusive human ‘right to the city’ and the biosphere is increasingly untenable. As Sue Ruddick (2015) argues, we urgently need to address ‘the intractable divide between scholars interrogating the meaning of the human itself, the more-than human that expresses the dreams of a biophilic world, and the less-than-human that is, increasingly for many, its living nightmare’ (p. 1114).

This article considers the question of human identities and responsibilities within multispecies communities in relation to how planning theory might better respond to the social, ecological and ethical challenges posed by the Anthropocene. We ask, ‘how can planning theory articulate its core principles, ethics and values in a “more-than-human” vein?’

We further this discussion through two key terms developed in the environmental humanities – multispecies entanglements and becoming-world – and consider how these terms offer new possibilities for overcoming human exceptionalism in planning theory. This, we conclude, is critical for developing narratives for the creation of socially and environmentally just multispecies cities.

The nature of cities

Urban planning has a history of viewing cities as somehow separate from nature (Byrne et al., 2014; Metzger, 2015a, 2015c). This comes from understanding the ‘urban’ in a human exceptionalist manner: regarding cities as the sole domain of humans, constructed out of the ‘raw materials’ of nature (Wolch, 2002), and failing to see how humans and nonhumans co-construct and cohabit urban life-worlds (Byrne and Wolch, 2009: online). Urban exceptionalism (like human exceptionalism) encourages modes of thought that regard cities as places that have somehow risen above the physical constraints of ‘nature’ – as places of enlightened human value and technological mastery. Moreover, as Juanita Sundberg (2013) cautions, the universalising tendency of dualist constructions of nature and culture serve to reinforce Eurocentric knowledge in ways that ‘reproduce colonial ways of knowing and being by enacting universalizing claims and, consequently, further subordinating other ontologies’ (p. 33). Ideas of progressive human mastery continue to dominate urban narratives and spaces, where Indigenous ontologies that may offer modes of critique and/or alternative modes of practice are being ignored (Porter, 2010).

The ‘more-than-human’ dimensions of cities have for some time been a theme in urban geography discussions about complex human–animal relationships in urban spaces, politics, histories and places (Hinchcliffe and Whatmore, 2006). For example, recent research on the material and ethical-political dimensions of the (co)production of ‘urban natures’ and ‘urban political ecologies’ (Heynen, 2014) has challenged urban spatial orderings, which separate nature from culture, arguing instead for modes of urban politics, governance and practice that ‘extend beyond the bounds of the human’ (Braun, 2005). Within planning theory, however, this concern seems only now to be emerging (e.g. Beatley and Bekoff, 2013; Hillier, 2015; Hillier and Byrne, 2016; Metzger, 2014a, 2014b, 2015a). On the whole, it seems that the discipline of planning has been less inclined to take up Wolch’s (2002) call in her seminal essay ‘Anima urbis’ for animals – and, we add, flora – to be considered as part of the life and spirit of the city, as vital to ideals of what the city ought to be and as lively and sentient participants in the co-production and planning of urban spaces.²

As Kaika and Swyngedouw (2014: online) observe, it is not just ‘about nature in the city, but the urbanisation of nature itself’ (and the diverse knowledge and practices that underpin this). Social and physical elements fuse, producing a cyborg city (Swyngedouw, 1996) with distinct physical forms (such as suburbia, manicured parklands and so on) and ‘incongruous socio-ecological consequences’ (Kaika and Swyngedouw, 2014: 4, 8). Such consequences include, for example, the emergence of ‘pests’ and ‘weeds’ as social and ecological ‘problems’ requiring a policy response:³ banning cats in residential areas (Hillier and Byrne, 2016), destroying nests and eggs of white ibises (McKiernan and Instone, 2015), extermination of flying foxes (Rose, 2012, 2013), rabbits (Mathews, 2012), wolves, (Metzger, 2015c), mosquitoes and midges (Ali, 1995) and garden slugs (Ginn, 2014), all of which are dismissed and disregarded as ‘awkward creatures’ (Ginn et al., 2014).

And yet, awkward or not, these diverse organisms co-produce our urban worlds; we need not only to recognise the complex relationships between multiple organisms but also to understand ‘the human as emergent through these relations’ (Ogden et al., 2013: 6, our emphasis). The collision of human and nonhuman stories demands an expanded and more generous notion of ‘life’, which ‘challenges the construction of the Anthropocene as an undifferentiated social stratification’ (Yusoff, 2015: 1). The challenge is to critically rethink temporal and spatial scales of eco-social responsibility – without collapsing all of humanity into an amorphous ‘us’ or by ignoring the lively multispecies assemblies gathered in the margins of the contemporary theorisation of urban planning.

We therefore argue that planning theory would benefit from developing approaches better attuned to how humans are shaped by, and intervene in, more-than-human worlds (Greenough, 2010; Hinchliffe and Whatmore, 2006). Interlocking urban and planetary crises of the Anthropocene compel us to consider what the ‘good city’ might be from a ‘more-than-human’ frame. As Douglas (2014) asserts, planning theory must work towards a transformational recognition and integration of nature in and of the city in order to foster ‘fair and desirable [urban] places that nurture a multitude of life-forms, livelihoods and lifestyles’ (p. xix). We would like, therefore, to engage in ‘decolonising’ and ‘unlearning’ planning’s dominant knowledges (Sandercock, 2003) to foster the project of advancing ‘multispecies flourishing’ – so that the social and political constitution of the ‘good city’ does not rely on deeply ingrained boundaries between humans and other species. As Wolch (2002: 734) has previously asked, ‘how are planners to handle and practise the radical proposition of moving towards a post-humanist city?’

Beyond human exceptionalism

As residents of the Anthropocene, we inhabit a world that is rapidly being reconfigured by profound human–environment connections, such as climate change, which are radically disrupting and reshaping our urban future(s). In her influential essay ‘Nature in the Active Voice’, the environmental philosopher Val Plumwood (2009: online) called for all academic disciplines and governing institutions to embark on ‘a thorough and open rethink which has the courage to challenge our most basic cultural narratives’. Her call addresses the urgency of what is at stake for all of us in a climate-changed world – the spectre of uninhabitable Anthropocene futures. For Plumwood (2009), current public discussions about climate change and environmental crises are ‘dominated by the tyranny of narrow focus and a minimum rethink’ (online).

In urban planning, for example, much of the focus on climate change mitigation and adaptation focuses on ‘risk’, ‘vulnerability’ and ‘resilience’ frames that seek to minimise impacts on the economic and social functioning of cities and, paradoxically, on the very institutional structures that constrain effective climate action (Hillier, in press-b; Hillier et al., 2013; Houston et al., 2016). To enact flourishing socio-ecological futures, Plumwood argues that we must move beyond such limiting frames. The problem, as she sees it, is that Western knowledge relies on ‘hyper-separated’ categories based in stratified modes of dualistic thinking (mind–body; nature–culture; feminine–masculine), which conceive the human ‘as not only superior to but as different in kind from the nonhuman, which is conceived as a lower non-conscious and non-communicative purely physical sphere that exists as a mere resource of instrument for the higher human one’ (Plumwood, 2009: online) – that is, as exceptional, ‘we set ourselves sharply apart from everything else as essentially mindful beings’ (Plumwood, 2009: online).

The critique of human exceptionalism is not a rejection of humans or modes of inquiry into what makes us human (Anderson, 2014). Rather, Anderson (2014) argues, it challenges the persistent idea ‘that human reason, meaning, knowledge-making and creativity – what humanists call culture – lies in rising above our worldly and indeed our animal existence’ (p. 14, emphasis in original). Human exceptionalism has been described as ‘conceit’ (Anderson, 2014) and as something which ‘blinds us’ (Tsing, 2012) to the worlds we co-inhabit with a multitude of earthly creatures and nonhuman agents – from the bacteria living in our guts to the persistent organic pollutants currently stockpiled under melting Arctic ice (Carrington, 2011).

Decentring human exceptionalism and imagining the alternatives, for Plumwood, imply two key tasks: ‘to resituate the human in ecological terms’ and to ‘resituate the nonhuman in ethical terms’ (Plumwood, 2002, 2009; discussed in Rose and Robin, 2004). Taken together, Plumwood’s two tasks move us beyond a view of humans as autonomous individuals housed within sovereign bodies, whose everyday actions somehow exist outside of ecological consequences, and into a ‘co-emergent world based on intimate human-more-than-human relationships of responsibility and care’ (Bawaka Country et al., 2015: 16). From such a position, we may develop relational understandings of planning as ‘co-becoming’ in and for diverse multispecies communities, where humans, plants, soils, microbes, birds, fungi, insects, native and non-native animals shape urban landscapes and interactions and where we are more attentive to the storied contexts of multispecies places within cities and regions (Van Dooren and Rose, 2012).

So how might planning theory begin to engage with these ideas? Is it possible to imagine and enact the post-human ‘good city’? Metzger (2015b) provides a clue, observing that ‘myriads of creatures and existences are speaking to us all the time’ and that humans have a responsibility to listen properly to their voices (Despret, 2005). For planners, such listening requires ‘fashioning the space, manner and language to experiment with ways of being- [or becoming-] together where the human is not the centre of activity or meaning-making’ (Lestel et al., 2014: 126). While this may be more easily said than done, in the sections that follow, we make the case for two fruitful directions for planning theory to engage with more-than-human thinking. We begin with the notion of ‘multispecies entanglement’.

Multispecies entanglement: rethinking urban connectivity

‘Connectivity’ is an important discourse in urban planning, an aspirational and affirmative keyword which functions as an antidote to fractured, or splintering (Graham and Marvin, 2001), urbanism and facilitates the mutual benefits of urban mobility, active living, ecological and community resilience, and economic growth. Planning policies frequently claim to support these aims by forging and enhancing linkages, networks, in other words, connectivities, between different land uses within and between cities (Hajer and Zonneveld, 2000). But when it comes to practising socio-ecological connectivities in cities, the limits of this idea in urban planning become apparent (Bakker, 2011).

The political and ontological separation of nature from culture in urban planning practice continues to reinforce a division between environmental and land-use planning such that, while environmental planners may be concerned with landscape scale connectivities such as wildlife and riparian corridors or the range, occurrence and dispersal of species (Garrard and Bekessy, 2014), it is the economic drivers of landscape change that dominate the land use planning agenda (Brenner and Theodore, 2002). ‘Connectivity’ is often interpreted by planning agencies to mean infrastructure to facilitate economic development and human health (Healthy Places, 2009). Recent critiques of ‘urban ecosystem services’ (Pincetl, 2015), ‘informal green spaces’ (Rupprecht and Byrne, 2014) and ‘eco-gentrification’ (Quastel, 2009; Wolch et al., 2014) highlight the dilemmas of planning cities in ways that amplify human control over the environment and an infinitude of resources, rather than recognising interspecies dependencies and interrelationships mutually shaping unique ‘urban biomes’ (Pincetl, 2015). ‘Connectivity’ is thus susceptible to neoliberal co-option because it does not counteract the linear trajectories of stratification and expansionism. It assumes that there are always new spaces of capital and land with which to connect, and the benefits arising from enhancing connectivity in city planning are often linked to urban growth and gentrification (Millington, 2015; Smith, 2002).

Connectivity, as a goal of urban planning, thus, risks being situated in ‘post-political’ consensus rather than in eco-social responsibility. In contrast, Jessica Weir (2008) describes what she calls ‘connectivity thinking’. The conceptual basis for Weir’s ‘connectivity thinking’ is found in Australian Indigenous connections to Country as well as ecological science and environmental philosophy. The focus is on the diversity of multi-scaled ecological interactions that take place across time and space. Connectivity thinking rejects hierarchical binary structures that place humans outside of the ecologies they inhabit (Plumwood’s (2002) ‘hyper-separation’). ‘In an expanded connectivity’, writes Weir (2008: online), ‘we can move beyond considerations of a separate, subordinate nature to consider living ethical engagements within a dynamic nature’.

The concept of ‘multispecies entanglement’ thus takes ‘connectivity thinking’ further and has significant implications critiquing the conceptual problems of human exceptionalism in planning. It critiques deeply ingrained ideas about the human-centeredness of planning practices in which humans are unquestionably situated as active knowers, decision-makers and place makers. Reduced to bare life (life that is killable⁴), nonhumans are not included in planning policies or deliberative processes as political subjects (Metzger, 2015a, 2015c). Attuning humans to dynamic worlds of sentient and communicative urban ecologies, where participation in biological, social and economic lives of the city is also enacted by nonhuman living beings, calls for an ‘ethics of entanglement’ (Wright, 2014: online). As Wright (2014) argues, ‘an ethics of entanglement is directed towards the relational connections between lives and worlds, and it takes as its ethical subject the organism-plus-environment’ (online).

Deborah Bird Rose’s (2012, 2013) work on grey-headed flying foxes in metropolitan Sydney (Australia) emphasises this approach. The lives of flying foxes are entangled in disparate decisions about urban land use: the protection of orchards, the clearing of native bushland, wildlife protection initiatives, the clearing of unwanted flying fox camps – such as removal of flying foxes from the Royal Botanic Gardens in the city centre (Rose, 2012: 111). The entanglement of flying foxes in metropolitan everyday life tells many stories of death, fragmentation and dispersal, which contribute to the overall decline of flying fox populations throughout eastern Australia, and in turn undermining the long-term viability of the Sydney bioregion. In Rose’s (2012) words,

Trees put out their delectable and beckoning flowers, and flying foxes leave their home camp and come racing to the blossoming trees. Their responses include their long tongues that are well adapted to sucking up the nectar, and their body fur that picks up thousands of grains of pollen and distributes over 70 percent of it intact every night. Flying foxes carry Eucalyptus futures on their furry little bodies, and across the patchy and increasingly fragmented landscapes of contemporary Australia, the renewal of woodland and forest life hinges on this mutualism. Forest futures are borne on fur and tongue, and on the wings that beat through the night. (p. 109)

Flying foxes, as well as bees and other pollinators, are vital to plant food-chain assemblages (Abrol, 2011). Yet, even when such ecological connectivities are recognised in urban planning – as in models deriving from ecosystems services – they are frequently mired in what Davison (2010: 10) calls a ‘paradox of management’ where ‘command and control’ approaches take precedence over more adaptive practices grounded in the recognition of the co-evolution of multispecies landscapes (Garrard and Bekessy, 2014).⁵

How we respond to entangled multispecies landscapes is important (Bawaka Country et al., 2015; Van Dooren, 2015). Tsing (2012) writes that ‘Biological and social diversity huddle defensively in neglected margins’ (p. 151, emphasis in original). Multispecies landscapes are heterogeneous and rich in the diversity of life and, as Tsing suggests, their existence on the margins of commodified urban spaces is not accidental. The liminality of urban wilds – like other forms of urban marginality – makes them crucial sites for unsettling dominant spatial relations of power and injustice (Gandy, 2011). Flying foxes dwell at the edges of urban matters of concern – yet, the multispecies landscapes they nourish and inhabit are critical to humans and many other species in eastern Australia.

Stories of flying foxes – and those of other species who are pollinators, foragers, predators, parasites and mutualists – raise the significance of understanding expanded knots of biological and social connectivity in urban planning (Lulka, 2013). Human intervention may cause changes in ecosystem structure, often with disastrous results for humans and nonhumans: toxic algal blooms, trophic cascade, extinctions, plagues, contamination of food sources and so on (among many examples, Department of Agriculture and Food (DAF), 2015; Slezak, 2016). Command-and-control responses to these impacts – such as spraying of waterways to control outbreaks of mosquitoes – further disrupt ecosystems and exacerbate malign ecological interactions (Lulka, 2013).⁶ Visible nonhuman bodies (bats, bees, birds, plants) are frequently caught between contradictory discourses of belonging and invasiveness in urban contexts (McKiernan and Instone, 2015).

The flying fox stories, like those of white ibises (McKiernan and Instone, 2015), wolves (Metzger, 2015c) and ‘weeds’ (Kopnina, 2013; McHenry, 1998), are stories of the hyper-separation, which structures approaches to the management of nonhuman ‘others’ in cities. The fate of flying foxes, ibises, wolves and weeds unfold across ecological time-spaces that are not synchronised or particularly well understood in urban planning contexts (Garrard and Bekessy, 2014), and difficult to weigh against immediate local – and hyper-separated – concerns such as noise, smell, inconvenience, damage to private property, conservation or public health. As Wright (2014: online) observes ‘unwanted bodies are easily disposed of when entanglements are ignored’.

But there is another sense in which ecologically connected thinking extends the ethics of urban encounter. Much of our focus on animals and plants in the city relies on bodily encounters (the visibility of wanted or unwanted nonhuman others). Entanglement is a mode of ethical urban encounter that ‘extends ethics beyond the body and out into the shared multispecies worlds’ (Smith, 2011 in Wright, 2014: online). Nurturing multispecies relationships is also about what we cannot see: micro and non-individuated organisms, nonhumans who may not know even exist (Wright, 2014).

The point we make here is that for planning theory and practice to further develop inclusive and ethical relationships that can nurture possibilities for flourishing urban futures in the Anthropocene, they need to engage with imbricated nature–society relations and multi-scalar and temporal conditions inherent in urban ecologies. ‘Responding ethically and responsibly from this position’, writes Wright (2014: online), ‘demands an acceptance of entanglement without idealisation or despair’. On a planet where urban life is driving planetary change and is conditioned by it, re-enchanting urban connectivities through multispecies relationships is a vital component of refiguring rights to the city and finding ethical, just and inclusive forms of urban planning. Connectivity thinking situates urban planning in ecological terms (Plumwood, 2009) and thus gives us cause to consider how we can develop planning discourses and processes that are alert to, and respectful of, multispecies entanglements necessary for all urban life.

From becoming-with to becoming-world

Connectivity thinking, as outlined above, highlights the politics, spaces and ethics of encounter (Weir, 2008). Spaces of encounter incorporate the coming together of human and nonhuman bodies and things. As Johnson (2015) explains, ‘they seek to account for how moving, more-than-human parts take hold of one another to produce our worlds’ (p. 297). Thinking about connectivity and encounters takes us into what Haraway (2008) calls ‘trackless territory’: a realm without ‘best practice’ guides or formulae to tell practitioners how to live and act in multispecies, connected worlds.

Humans have traditionally identified with other beings on the basis of shared subjectivity, conceptual reasoning and consciousness. Nonhuman species have, consequently, tended to be regarded as Other: incomplete. Even when humans recognise others as embodied, sentient beings, however, an ‘impassable division’ (Brown, 2007: 260) often remains, which has typically exonerated us as humans from responsibility to those with whom we do not share language and/or mode of consciousness.

Two key questions for planners, then, are (1) how multispecies relationships can be ethically and politically considerable in spatial land use planning decisions and (2) how socially and environmentally just planning can meaningfully engage nonhumans in deliberative practice without reducing nonhumans to objects or symbols of urban political struggle (Metzger, 2014b, see also Byrne, 2011). Urban planners and scholars need to think carefully and critically about who speaks for the nonhuman in city and place making, and about whether and how the nonhuman might speak for themselves.

We believe that, in some areas of scholarship at least, ‘the very cry of the nonhuman’ (Johnston, 2008: 636) is gradually finding voice. Researchers are exploring approaches, which focus on nonhuman animals as ‘embodied individuals’ and plants as ‘intelligent beings’, whose lives are entangled with human and other nonhuman species and environments (Hall, 2011) in new modes of human–nonhuman existence, which go beyond those of traditional anthropocentric spatial orderings (e.g. Metzger, 2014a, 2014b).

Furthermore, scholars are paying special attention to what Deleuze (1992 [1968]) would call ‘sad’ or ‘bad’ encounters: encounters with other bodies, which damage one’s physical or mental constitution. Work with ‘awkward creatures’, such as slugs (Ginn, 2014), with ‘uncharismatic invasives’, such as marine invertebrates (Clark, 2015), introduced ‘ferals’, such as cane toads (Simpson, 2014) and cats (Hillier and Byrne, 2016; Marks, 2013, 2014), helps us to think more carefully about those with whom we share our worlds, while that on slaughterhouses (Roe, 2010; Thierman, 2010), zoos (e.g. Anderson, 1995; Chrulew, 2011) and city parks (Kopnina, 2013) particularly highlights human–nonhuman encounters facilitated by practices of spatial planning. Attempts are increasingly being made to understand how humans and nonhumans are relationally engaged in what Brown (2007: 261) calls a ‘collaborative approach to living’ and Burke et al. (2004) term ‘mutual decision making’ and ‘co-creation of behaviour’: ‘a kind of mutual becoming’ (p. 174).

Donna Haraway’s (2008) concept of becoming-with emphasises the importance of human response-abilities in our relationships with companion animals, later broadened to imply ‘critters of all kinds’ (Haraway, 2010: 54). The notion of becoming-with is grounded in connectivity and encounter rather than in difference and separation: ‘becoming is always becoming with, in a contact zone where the outcome, where who is in the world, is at stake’ (Haraway, 2008: 244, emphasis in original). Despite their different emphases, Haraway acknowledges the work of Deleuze and Guattari (1987 [1980]) in her discussion of the notion of becoming. To Deleuze and Guattari, animals are ‘disruptive signs’ which can ‘potentially dislocate our commonsense understandings of the world’ (Young, 2008: 245).

For Deleuze and Guattari, becoming involves an encounter between elements, which affects a transition of those elements from one state to another (Hillier, in press-a). Becomings are not an imitation of, or literal transformation into, another element, but a dissolution of frames of thought and action in a creative alliance of heterogeneities. With regard to the more-than-human, for example, becoming would involve a process of encounter in which humans accept the alterity of the nonhuman and introduce the latter’s manner of existence into the way humans think and act (Lawlor, 2008). In such a process, binary codings of human/nonhuman dissolve into a coding of more-than-human.

Further extending Haraway’s (2010, 2015) ‘becoming-with’, we advocate a process of becoming open to the capacity of all nonhumans. To this end, we turn to the notion of ‘becoming-world’ (Braidotti, 2013). Deleuze and Guattari (1987 [1980]: 10–11) develop the idea of becoming-world from Chauvin’s work on reproductive biology – ‘we are not in the world; we become with the world’, (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994 [1991]: 169) – and from Spinoza’s physics of the body (Deleuze, 1992 [1968]). Becoming-world is a relational process of ethico-political interaction, which moves away from speciesism and away from individualised rights (Braidotti, 2006b: 106–109; MacCormack, 2012: 59) towards an ethical appreciation of what human, faunal, floral and abiotic elements (such as rock, water, sand, fire and so on) can do together.

Becoming-world is a post-human process, which appreciates the shared, common condition of the world as a whole: the world worlding itself (Barad, 2012: 46). Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987 [1980]) phrase ‘devenir-tout-le-monde’ may be translated ‘becoming everything and everybody’ (Massumi, 1997: 756); it equally implies or ‘becoming-imperceptible’: this is ‘the immanent end of becoming’, when one becomes like everybody (or everything) else; open to the possibilities of life; indiscernible; worlding (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987 [1980]: 279–280).⁷ Rather than integrating the nonhuman into our worlds, we attempt to become enmeshed and interconnected into theirs. Braidotti (2006a: 154) explains that this would entail fusion between the self and his/her habitat: replacement of the self by ‘a living nexus of multiple inter-connections’ and alliances that empower the collective. We are all in this together.

Descola (2014) points out that what is at stake is the entire conceptual framework that we (as planning theorists and practitioners) typically engage for socio-political organisation of collectives:

The messianic regime of historicity that we have imposed upon other, very different, ways to deal with the unfolding through time of a common prospect, and the basic notions by the means of which we buttress our thinking about why humans are distinctive. (p. 279)

In order to ‘demote’ such thinking ‘from its imperial position’ (Descola, 2014), there is a need to think and act otherwise. Recognition of becoming-world places a burden of responsibility on humans to develop new tools of analysis and for ‘copoietic’ (Ettinger, 2005) planning in the meshwork of relations we share with nonhumans (Braidotti, 2013: 22–23). Becoming-world entails a process of redefinition of human connection with difference in a shared world. Going beyond Healey’s (1993) ideas of ‘living together differently but respectfully’ (p. 238) which could regard life in static terms, becoming-world enlists affectivity and imagination to ‘the crucial task of inventing new figurations and new ways of representing the complex’ (Braidotti, 2013: 24) world in which we live and plan. Becoming-world disavows human exceptionalism and performs a transversal politics of joining with another and of ‘see[ing] together without claiming to be another’ (Haraway, 1991: 193). Examples exist of Indigenous societies’ human–nonhuman symbiosis, which demonstrate forms of becoming-world.⁸

Becoming-world is also an ethical frame, which goes beyond Derrida’s (2000 [1996]: 77) notion of hospitality and Levinas’ (1998) response to the other. Both suggest that one can have responsibility only to others capable of having responsibilities (Jones, 2000; Llewelyn, 1991). Also, both recognise the other as a being like oneself. There is a danger here, not only of an anthropocentrism which simply ‘drag[s] nonhumans up to human level’ (MacCormack, 2014: 5), but also of relativism, in which individual humans take decisions based on their own criteria (Jones, 2000). Although Derrida (2003) argues that ethics are frequently and unpredictably situation-dependent, to be negotiated without affirmative or negative responses determined in advance,⁹ he stresses the need to avoid any binary or hierarchical notion of nonhumans possessing less ethical consideration or standing than humans (Calarco, 2008). Furthermore, Derrida and Levinas both advocate a pre-ontological transcendent ethics of absolute responsibility for the other, which is impossible. It is a transcendent imperative whose effect serves to separate beings from their capacity to act (Smith, 2003: 62). The ethics of becoming-world, in contrast, are ontological as they are derived from the immanent relation of beings to Being at the level of their existence (see Spinoza, 2009 [1677]). Transcendence is thus inimical to ethics (Smith, 2003).

Yusoff (2015) criticises the often-proclaimed notion of ‘man’ as responsible for the world:

As if the earth were available for human responsibility. As if the world originated from the conscience of man … rather than the pleasure of snails or the proliferation of bacterial ingestations over millennia, or the shuffling of pebbles and erratic boulders, as if the genesis of the world was for ‘us’ alone. (pp. 14–15)

She argues a need to decentre humans from origin stories and to recognise the importance of the more-than-human, both nonhuman critters and ‘things’, such as mountains, rivers and so on. Recognition of becoming-world could enable humans to recognise with respect the role of nonhumans as active, responsive participants, ‘making kin’ (Haraway, 2015) in planning-related encounters, in which humans would yield their position of dominance.¹⁰ However, as Brown points out, such a relationship does not necessarily deliver more positive ethical consequences for the more-than-human.

As Haraway (2015: 161) writes, making kin is not necessarily making kind. Becoming must be accompanied by an interest in the well-being of our partner (Brown, 2007: 263). For MacCormack (2012, 2014), this may include affording grace to the other, an ethics of ‘leaving be’. The strength of grace is grounded in its demonstration of the capacity to leave be and to give freedom to both ourselves and the other (MacCormack, 2014: 4), such as capacity to live without nonhuman animal slavery, abuse and murder, to leave fossil fuels in the ground and so on. MacCormack (2012: 12) identifies this as a trajectory of ‘not’, not in a negative sense, but rather seeking to create an affirmative vitalism through joyful encounters of friendship (O’Sullivan, 2004) and from grace (Hardt and Negri, 2000: 413).

Signs of life

A multispecies and multi-thing becoming-with – becoming-world or worlding – renders us open to ethical, perhaps grace-full encounters with more-than-human assemblages. It challenges us to consider not only other lives and organisms but also the geological strata, air and waters which form the earth. Differences become points of encounter rather than of consumption, closure or exclusion.

This line of thinking raises three critical challenges of planners. Are planners prepared for the following?

Abandon the traditional idea that political rights, entitlements and deserts only apply to people;

Confront the very real problem of defining political subjects in a world where the boundaries between humans and nonhumans are hard to discern and arguably tenuous;

Expand political reasoning to include nonhumans, without resorting to the idea that the latter exist ‘in themselves’ (Castree, 2003: 207, in Metzger, 2014b: 208).

We recognise that the ethico-political and cultural challenges necessary for such a radical displacement of thinking and acting are daunting. Is change possible?

We might start by looking along the borders or margins of stratifications to discern where becoming might already be happening. Despret (2005), for example, demonstrates that nonhuman animals, such as sheep, ‘do have opinions’; honey bees and cockroaches have forms of democracy (Seeley, 2010). Van Dooren (2015) illustrates how, as ecosystems change, crows ‘move into cities and learn new ways of life, they conduct experiments in emergent forms of crow-ness’ (p. 10). He suggests that humans need to support, rather than deter, diverse forms of more-than-human becoming in a changing world. This may involve disempowering the ‘pest’ narrative, for example, ‘forcing critical endeavour [of thinking and acting] to cohabit no matter how uncomfortable’ (McKiernan and Instone, 2015: 16). We need to learn how to ask ‘what kinds of relationships and forms of life are x interested in taking up and where and how can our actions as planners respect or even enable this?’ (where x may be crows, flying foxes, white ibises, feral cats, mosses, ferns, E. coli, termites, tapeworms, cabbage moths and so on).

Within the fields of planning and urban studies, Jennifer Wolch’s (1998) Zoopolis (also 2002; Wolch et al., 1995) has been extended to critique and reimagine the role of ‘nature’ – including plants and ecosystems, as well as animals – in a range of practices and urban spaces (Asikainen and Jokinen, 2009; Holmberg, 2015; Leino et al., 2015; Lulka, 2013). Notions of entanglement and encounter are increasingly informing a rich set of engagements with plants as co-producers of urban space (Cook, 2004; Guitart et al., 2015; Head and Atchison, 2009; Jones and Instone, 2016; Rupprecht and Byrne, 2014). And Purcell (2013, 2016) and Banville (2014; Banville and Torres, 2016) have both grappled with how becoming-imperceptible (becoming-world) might actualise in planning.

At this point, it is important to distinguish between becoming in a conditioned or sensible form and in an absolute or conceptual form. Deleuze and Guattari (1994 [1991]) explain conditioned becoming as ‘the action by which something or someone continues to become other (while continuing to be what it is)’ and absolute becoming as ‘the action by which the common event itself eludes what is’ (p. 177). Becoming-world would be an absolute becoming in which entities are divorced from everything that constitutes their worldly identity (Patton, 2010).

Becoming-world is virtual and, therefore, cannot be fully actualised. However, as Deleuze (2001 [1995]: 31) writes,

What we call virtual is not something that lacks reality but something that is engaged in a process of actualisation following the plane that gives it its particular reality … in a state of things of the lived that make it happen.

In such a state of becoming, former entities are already gone and new ones are not yet there.

The eruption of reconfigured planning thought and practice in the future actualises virtual possibilities in the present. Becoming-world ‘opens up towards the unexpected and unprogrammed’ (Braidotti, 2006a: 156). Yet, how far can we push such recognition of embodied selves? As Braidotti (2006a) emphasises, becoming-imperceptible ‘plunges us into the impossible’ (p. 156). If becoming-world is counterfactual and unattainable, perhaps the realm of conditioned becomings is all that planning might aspire to? Categories and classifications are already being problematised and challenged. Several political parties across the globe, which incorporate justice and rights for animals and plants in their titles and manifestos, are being taken increasingly seriously by electorates. People are gradually realising that, with regard to the cartography of interconnected problems we face in the world, we, as assemblages of more-than-human actors, are truly in this together.¹¹

Are moves towards a form of becoming-world as radical displacement possible, however, without it assimilating anthropocentric, colonialist assumptions? We suggest that it can do so by refusing to contain the threat/emergence of wildness and the more-than-human within its own framing. By recognising that ‘what entraps also offers a line of flight’ (Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, 2014: 171), we think it may be possible for what Williams (2009) terms a ‘creative shift from the anthropocentric spatio-temporal world’ (p. 50) towards making kin and kind in a more-than-human world in dynamic intra-action. This involves more than simply having regard of multiple perspectives. Edging towards becoming-world for political, ethical – and we would add spatial planning, requires experimentation (Hillier, 2015).

Conclusion – ‘make kin-not cities!’

This article concerns the need to critically rethink the city–nature nexus if planning theory (and in turn practice) are to develop and expand an idea of the ‘good city’ that is materially just and climate-adaptive. Many modern planning systems reinforce hyper-separated categories of nature and culture. This is reflected in the separation between land-use planning and environmental conservation planning – which adhere to different government logics and procedures that frequently contradict one another (Garrard and Bekessy, 2014). The ‘unreflected imposition of human primacy upon the desires and habits of other beings’ (Metzger, 2014b: 210) and resulting asymmetric ‘negotiations’ between human planners and nonhuman others, have contributed to the current path towards catastrophic changes on a planetary scale.

We have argued in this article that Plumwood’s tasks, to ‘resituate the human in ecological terms’ and ‘resituate the nonhuman in ethical terms’, offer potentially rewarding ways in which to renew and revitalise the conversation for planning multispecies cities in the context of the Anthropocene. This does not mean that issues of identity, diversity and rights to urban spaces and politics are dismissed, but that bringing the nonhuman within the scope of existing forms of moral and legal subjectivity is not a ‘genuine solution’ to the issues at stake (Calarco, 2008: 132). We therefore urge planning theorists to critically question the subtle and unsubtle forms of human exceptionalism in planning theory by developing modes of intellectual inquiry that explore how nonhuman species and things get caught up in (and reconfigure) conflicting urban desires. Planning theory requires a thicker, relational and more responsive form of post-humanism to imagine and enact just and sustainable cities in a time of global environmental uncertainty and change. ‘What emerges’, as McKiernan and Instone (2015) observe, ‘are new ethical dilemmas of how to pay attention to specific and inter-specific differences, experiences and potentials’ (p. 16).

One such potential is the possibility to reanimate projects for decolonising urban space – to expand the ‘good city’ into new creative and queer alliances between ‘bio-social’ diversities and multispecies environmental justice (Gandy, 2012; Houston et al., 2016). As urban ecologists begin to piece together novel environmental histories and the properties of unique ‘urban biomes’ (Pincetl, 2015) – we argue that this knowledge should be woven together with the messy contexts of multispecies entanglement, and becoming-world urban realities, to inform critical conversations that in turn will foster better planning practices.

As Haraway (2015: 159–165) notes, humans do not act alone – in the Anthropocene there are countless ways in which nonhumans assert their particular agencies – and it is key that we recognise this as we come to terms with the uneven burdens of toxic pollution, extreme climate variability, humanitarian crises and mass extinction. City planning does not sit outside of the eco-social realities co-producing the Anthropocene – we can no longer approach the task with the idea that cities are bounded, exceptional spaces. Haraway’s call to action is ‘to make kin, not babies!’ For it is in the recomposition of kin that we are connected to ‘all earthlings in the deepest sense’ (Haraway, 2015: 165). As she asserts, ‘it is past time to practice better care of kinds-as-assemblages (not one species at a time)’.¹² So, we suggest that planners make kin, not cities! Deepening planning theory’s engagement with more-than-human thinking is a step in this journey.

Footnotes

Funding

We acknowledge support from ARC Project DP150100299, Enabling social innovation for local climate adaptability.

Notes

Author biographies

Donna Houston is a Senior Lecturer in the Department if Geography and Planning ay Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia. Her current research explores the political ecologies of urban nature, critical and creative geographies of activism and place-making and urban planning and environmental/climate justice in multispecies worlds.

Jean Hillier is Emeritus Professor of Sustainability and Urban Planning at RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia. Her research interests include poststructural planning theory and methodology, planning with non-human animals and problematisation of cultural heritage practices. Recent publications include ’Is extermination to be the legacy of Mary Gilbert’s cat?’ (with Byrne J.) Organization (2016) and ‘Cat-alysing attunement’ Journal of Environmental Policy & Planning (2016).

Diana MacCallum is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Planning and Geography at Curtin University, Perth, Western Australia. Her research interests include the practices and discourses of planning governance, community involvement in urban and regional development, and social innovation.

Wendy Steele is an Associate Professor with the Centre for Urban Research and the School of Global, Urban and Social Studies at RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia. Her research focuses on the governance and planning of wild cities in a climate of change. Specific projects include an emphasis on the climate just city and re-thinking critical urban infrastructure. She is an international editorial member of the journal Urban Policy and Research.

Jason Byrne is an Associate Professor of Urban and Environmental Planning with the Griffith University School of Environment, Gold Coast City, Australia. His research focuses on urban political ecologies of greenspace and climate change adaptation, addressing environmental injustices stemming from urban planning and management. Recent projects include thermal inequities arising from urban greening policies. He is an editorial board member of Local Environment and the Journal of Political Ecology.

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