Multispecies Flourishing in Urban Spaces: More-Than-Human Forms of Justice in the Anthropocene

The Anthropocene is looming large and the human communities inhabiting cities have surpassed the rural population since 2007. This has provoked urban experts to coin the term ‘Urbanocene’ that captures dramatic dynamics of contemporary urbanization and its socio-ecological impacts at planetary scales. Moreover, the coastal and delta cities of the global South are encountering ‘multiple disruptive risks’, leading to discussions and debates surrounding implementation of urban resilient designs. ‘Smart’, compact, and eco-cities are being planned and initiated in low-lying urban areas – the implementation provisions hugely borrowing from western technocratic discourses, making space for trans-national capitalist investments, promising huge returns on expenditures. However, grounded ethnographies from multi-sited cityscapes demonstrate the fallacies inherent in these top-down engineered resilience, creating sharper divide between the urban bourgeois and poor – an outcome of interconnected processes of commodification and gentrification. This paper will not only use the urban political ecology literature in addressing social inequities and injustices, but will also apply the environmental humanities framework to study the more-than-human entanglements, investigating the complex relationship within and between (socially stratified) humans and their non-human counterparts such as animals, weeds, algae, bacteria, etc. in the making of urban nature. The paper will use ‘multispecies flourishing’ as a conceptual-theoretical traction in advancing the justice lens beyond human actors – deriving key lessons of urban resilience from collective cohabitation and stewardship, towards disAnthropocentric imaginaries of the future.