Urban nature landscapes: the possibility of multispecies commoning?

The affective, ethical, and embodied engagements of care and commoning have recently been explored by several STS and feminist scholars (Puig de la Bellacasa 2017, Singh 2017, Barad).
The paper presents findings relating to how and when multispecies commoning takes place according to situated and embodied encounters. While questioning to what extent multispecies commoning and care is possible within an exploitative urban development framework, it also shows the cracks and micro-utopias happening in urban natures, opening up for imaginaries of future multispecies cohabitation in the city.

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 relationality? 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 potentially enact encounters between species.

The performative urbanism lab is a collaborative, transdisciplinary lab exploring embodied and situated relations in post-industrial urban landscapes (Juhlin & Samson 2023). During the past three years the lab has explored multispecies commoning and community-making through artistic research and participatory design. We found that each landscape enacted situated but asymmetric relationalities, and that multispecies commoning were highly dependent on various complex entanglements, encompassing regulations and policies. This, in particular became clear in the case of Amager commons in which a commoning of environmental activism, the European Habitats Directive, and a thriving habitat of water salamanders succeeded in putting the development of “Commons City” on hold. Departing from the lab’s explorations of urban natures, the paper presents comparative findings on the complex entanglements and the possibility for multispecies agency beyond human exceptionalism.