Cosmopolitics of place: Towards urban multispecies living in precarious times

Abstract

The chapter considers place-making as cosmopolitical issues in urban environments. An emerging emphasis on the ethics and politics of sharing spaces with others, including other species, in a globalised world, with finite resources, requires a re-thinking of what place is, and who and what makes places. Much of the work on place in education focuses on ‘place-based’ learning which takes the local as its site of enquiry. I suggest to conceptualise place as a complex and messy network, loosely bound by (local) histories, politics, and cultures as well as by (global) mobilities, flows, and uneasy alliances. The chapter introduces a Berlin multispecies art project to suggest that imagining place-making as an open-ended practice which involves a commitment to cosmopolitics may well generate new possibilities for living sustainably, especially in urban multispecies environments.