A pluriversal approach to urban planning
Modern urban planning’s goal is to keep cities liveable and attractive amidst growing populations, global warming and housing shortage. It is also very human-focused. Seems fair, right? After all, cities are built for and by humans. The fallacy here is that our human centric approach loses sight of other communities that inhabit, and help build, our cities, to the detriment of the liveability of the city for all.
Image by Chris Curry
The pluriverse is a concept that has been making its way into the fields of anthropology, ecology and movements questioning the Euro- and human centric way we build our societies. Although it’s an intuitive concept it is not easily caught in one definition, true to the very nature of the pluriverse itself. One of the first to use the term was Colombian-American anthropologist Arturo Escobar in his book Designs for the Pluriverse. He states the pluriverse is “a concept for the global world as made up of a multiplicity of mutually entangled and co-constituting but distinct worlds”. It is beautifully illustrated by the anti-anarchist Zapatista movement in Mexico as a world that fits many worlds. The pluriverse provides a way beyond universal knowledge and world building and a plurality of perspectives to be taken into account when, for example, building a city.
If we apply the pluriverse to urban areas, and search the city for ‘other worlds’ we are apt to find many. An example is the hidden, underground world of mycelia, the fungi connecting urban trees and neighbourhood gardens, transporting nutrients to plants in exchange for carbon. There are many non-human species that actively seek out urban areas as living environments. Cities located in important biodiversity hotspots play a crucial role in the resilience of the entire ecosystem.
Image by Mathew Schwartz
We tend to think of cities as conglomerations built on top of a surface, while in reality there is a whole world below the ground, like illustratrated by the mycelium network. When we disregard these other worlds, this leads to costly and potentially dangerous situations. The practice of closing streams to free up building land has led to flooding of urban areas.
Researchers Debra Solomon and Caroline Nevejan confirm that there is a lack of soil awareness in today’s world. Soil is a fundamental element in future ecologies that needs to be taken into account in urban planning.
Japanese cities are creating edible landscapes as multispecies commons for socio-ecological restoration of vacant land within urban areas.
Het Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam is one of the first organizations located in urban areas that actively seek out multispecies cooperation to shape and expand their organization and take into account the pluriversal environment in which they operate.
When we are aware of the other worlds around us and our mutual entanglement, we can create safer, more inclusive and sustainable cities.
Image by Alexander Ant
A pluriversal approach to city planning is not just to include the perspective of non-human species. The pluriverse contains a plurality of human worlds as well and including them leads to more inclusive and accessable cities. Melbourne’s new “beacon navigation system” uses audio to provide users with directions via their smartphones, flagging escalator outages and other irregularities. For people with a visual impairment this means areas of the city that where previously inaccessible open up to them.
Planning for a city that city that holds many cities, many ecosystems and many tribes, human or otherwise will lead to more sustainable, inclusive, accessible and vibrant cities. The solar punk book Multispecie Cities edited by Christoph Rupprecht offers 24 speculative stories of infectiously joyous future visions for future cities. There’s so much inspiring stuff to pick and choose from, it’s a good thing that the future will contain a pluriverse of worlds.