The possibility of multispecies commoning? Environmental justice and the rights of nature on Amager Common and Lynetteholmen

If commoning is understood as the reclaiming the power of making basic decisions about our lives and doing so collectively (Federici 2018), how can we understand this in relation to posthuman and multispecies right to the city? Furthermore, how are such multispecies commoning affected by human exceptionalism in urban development? Commoning is also about human-nature relationships (Bollier and Helfrich 2015, Haldrup, Laurien, Samson 2022), hence it is relevant to explore what constitutes a multispecies common, and how they give rights to nature and prefiguratively make environmental justice claims as collaborations between species.
While environemntal justice is often associated with indigenous peoples defence of land and nature, environmental justice has recently also been associated with defending the rights of nature in Western urbanization projects. Drawing on empirical material gathered from two ongoing urbanization projects (Lynetteholmen and Amager Commons) in and around Copenhagen, Denmark, the article will define environmental justice and the rights of nature in relation to Nordic urban planning. The prefiguaritve potential in environmental justice claims from more-than human stakeholders in particular became clear in the case of Amager commons in which environmental activism, the European Habitats Directive, and a thriving habitat of water salamanders succeeded in putting the large scale urban development of “Commons City” on hold. This case opens up towards discussions of other species rights to the city, and the agencies and collaborations between legislation, other species and humans in environmental justice claims related to urbanization.