*2.3. Encountering the More-than-Human City*

Despite the global recognition of a need for sustainable cities, the perpetuation of the unsustainable status quo of the built environment necessitates bold and brave new responses to urban and environmental planning [82]. Drawing on empirical urban ecology research (e.g., street cats of Singapore and fruit bat colonies in Sydney), Franklin [27] argued for a more-than-human perspective to urban studies underpinned by theoretical constructs of 'becoming/worlding cities' and 'urban ecology' that went beyond previous approaches to design and planning such as biophilic design [83–85] and carbon-positive design [86]. Metzger [87] shared an optimism for a new focus in urban studies, but critically asked, "Are there any signals indicating that planning methodology is moving in such a direction? Not many would be my short answer" (p. 1005).

Studies in more-than-human, post-humanist, and post-anthropocentric perspectives have emerged from critical human geography and deep ecology, and have provided compelling examples of how a 'more-than-human turn' in social science and design research has been starting to grapple with the agencies of nonhuman actors [11,30,88–91]. When nonhuman agencies are better understood, complex problems such as conflict resolution in the law-space nexus of land management can be better managed, as illustrated, for example, in the research by Brown et al. [92] on wildlife corridors. Yigitcanlar et al. [1] proposed that designing post-anthropocentric cities of the future required a deeper engagement with the possibilities of ecological human settlement. This, in turn, requires increased attention to the temporalities, the wisdom of alternative knowledge systems (e.g., decolonising design and learning from Indigenous knowledge), and more sensitive design pedagogy [3,4,40,93–95].

The need to incorporate urban ecology concerns with the sustainable cities and smart cities movement is imperative to avoid a planetary ecocide [1] and transcend human exceptionalism [93]. Furthermore, cities are the next frontier in biodiversity conservation [96]. In Australia, cities support 30% of the threatened plant and animal species, which is the highest proportion of land use on a unit-area basis [97]. Scholars are calling for novel approaches to the scientific premise of a more-than-human city [27]. Biodiversity sensitive urban design (BDUD) considers intricate ways in which human and nonhuman lives are entangled in urban spaces [82,98]. In landscape theory, provocations for animal-aided design (AAD) seek ways in which conservation can be incorporated into the master plans of new urban development [99]. Incorporating more-than-human design and planning through new practices such as BDUD and ADD could contribute to the rewilding and realisation of more-than-human cities [100], but obstacles remain such as citizen's willingness to coexist with animals and wildlife conflicts [11,101–104].

Urban studies have suffered from human exceptionalism for too long [100,105]. The challenge for urban theorists is to formulate responses to this perceived 'turn' in social sciences emanating from human geography, ecofeminism, and critical STS, highly influenced by the more-than-human geography of Bruno Latour, Sarah Whatmore, and Donna Haraway [100,106–109].
