A Multispecies Right to the City? Reimagining the Speculative Narratives of Urban Sustainability

Abstract

Animals are often conspicuous by their absence in the future-driven enterprise of town-planning and urban design. In Australia, as elsewhere, they are either an obstacle to be removed, like the mobs of kangaroos who pose an inconvenient problem for residential developers, or, like the animals destined for slaughter, deliberately positioned on the fringes of human habitation in feedlots, slaughterhouses, and “farms.” In residential areas, animals are included in urban design when their presence offers a direct benefit to humans, as a way of “reconnecting” humans with “nature,” or as a gesture toward “sustainable” urban development. Urban design is a speculative endeavor. Like the best utopian fictions, its accompanying texts offer carefully crafted narratives of multispecies cohabitation which are inevitably and deliberately selective about which animals are included in this future dream of harmonious urban coexistence. In this chapter we antagonize urban design principles, drawing on our sociological, literary, and scientific backgrounds to present an alternate vision of the futurity of human-animal relations in Melbourne 2050. This reimagining offers an alternative to the existing 30-year planning strategy, one that gestures to the broader potential for science and imagination to co-create a future where all species are afforded equal rights to thrive.