Multispecies urbanism Refining urban greenspace through ecological, reciprocal, and situated planning practices for interspecies coproduction

This dissertation develops multispecies urbanism as a situated planning praxis that rethinks urban greenspace governance in response to climate crisis, biodiversity loss, and democratic challenges in cities. It asks whether urban ecosystems – understood as more-than-human communities embedded in public greenspace – can lay claim to the right to the city and its underlying metabolic flows, and how planning practices might be reorganised to recognise ecological agency, labour, and care.
Drawing on feminist political ecology, urban political ecology, and more-than-human geography, the research advances a conceptual framework challenging anthropocentric and technocratic planning paradigms. It argues for a shift towards reciprocal, care-based forms of stewardship that treat greenspace as a site of co-production between planning institutions, residents, and more-than-human ecological assemblages.
The dissertation is grounded in two long-term, practice-based case studies: the Amsterdam Southeast Urban Food Forest (VBAZO) and Krater, a former gravel quarry in Ljubljana stewarded by the Trajna Collective. These function both as research sites and as participatory artistic and infrastructural interventions in which the author operated as a co-initiator and embedded practitioner. Through action research, infrastructure activism, and the development of the Radical Observation method, the research demonstrates how theory is enacted through situated practice.
Rather than proposing universal solutions, the dissertation offers a praxis of situated transformation, highlighting the political, temporal, and institutional conditions under which multispecies urbanism may take root. It contributes to planning theory, methodology, and practice by reframing urban greenspace as a multispecies commons and expanding debates on the right to the city beyond the human.