BEES alum, Abigail Del Grosso, and Drexel professor of Politics, Dr. Christian Hunold, will present “Toward Multispecies Justice in Urban Biodiversity Work.” Join us!
Abstract:
The recognition that cities are spaces shared by humans, animals, plants, and microorganisms has inspired a rich body of multispecies research in urban planning and design. This work builds on a broader more-than-human turn in urban scholarship that challenges the conceptual separation of city and nature and instead attends to the entangled relations among species through which urban environments are produced and inhabited. Multispecies urban planning and design research moves beyond human-centric frameworks by recognizing ecological processes—such as pollination, evapotranspiration, and wetland buffering—as integral forms of urban infrastructure. Scholarship on the persistence of anthropocentrism in urban planning takes these concerns a step further by calling for reorienting the design and implementation of nature-based solutions (NBS) toward multispecies justice (MSJ) goals. From this perspective, NBS can remake urban spaces to better support multispecies flourishing rather than primarily human wellbeing. MSJ is theorized not as an attainable endpoint of infrastructure design but as an ongoing practice of multispecies negotiation. Within this literature, initiatives that care for other-than-humans can serve as a bridge between MSJ’s normative commitment to multispecies flourishing and the practical work of NBS. These initiatives are prefigurative projects that may offer insight into the policies and institutional practices needed to operationalize multispecies approaches to urban planning and design, including ways of making other-than-human agencies legible in decision-making processes. We examine how and to what extent the interests of both humans and other-than-human species and ecologies animate efforts to advance urban biodiversity in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Bird Safe Philly seeks to make the city less deadly to birds by raising awareness of bird-building collisions and modifying infrastructure to reduce them. Wetland restoration is the ecological focus of redeveloping the Delaware River waterfront and remaking FDR Park. We ask whose interests are represented in planning processes, how benefits and harms are distributed across species and ecological communities, and how other-than-human agencies are recognized, incorporated, or constrained. In doing so, we assess whether and how biodiversity initiatives prefigure practices of multispecies justice, and what these practices reveal about the possibilities and limits of translating MSJ from a normative framework into urban planning and design.
Bios:
Abigail Del Grosso is an environmental scientist and independent scholar. Their research engages the political and emotional dimensions of human-wildlife interactions, multispecies justice, and more-than-human thinking. Their previous work examines prairie grouse lice population genetics and the impact of agriculture on louse infestations.
Christian Hunold is a professor in the Department of Politics at Drexel University. He is an environmental political theorist and human-animal studies scholar. His work explores the politics of multispecies placemaking. If nonhuman animals are subjects of justice who exercise political agency, how might we reimagine animals as members of political communities rather than merely recipients of human protection?