**1. Introduction**

Urban development processes are increasingly under the spotlight due to their potential for contributing to lowering the carbon footprints of cities, to achieving greater levels of sustainability, and to restoring sensitive ecologies and biodiversity hotspots. However, urban studies, in a similar way to many other social sciences, suffer from human exceptionalism in the ontological framing of these issues. So far, human concerns such as comfort and convenience usually take priority over ecological imperatives and the urgent need to avoid a planetary ecocide [1,2].

Scholars in environmental humanities as well as in urban design and planning are calling for a more-than-human approach to smart and sustainable urban development in order to grapple with how nonhuman agencies shape geographies and urban places. Other future directions for research include the role of planning in learning from Indigenous knowledge systems and cultures such as 'Caring for Country' [3–5]. These issues have been acknowledged as high priorities by the Planning Institute of Australia (PIA), and PIA's Indigenous Planning Working Group continues to identify new planning approaches [6]. In this article, we respond to industrial, governmental, societal, and environmental needs by addressing an identified gap in knowledge within the urban development domain.

Here, we present a horizon scan [7–10] of recent investigations and studies offering a more-than-human perspective on urban planning. We elaborate upon these concepts in the main literature review section below. By way of an introduction, 'more-than-human' is considered to be an umbrella term that encompasses a diverse set of theories and practices

**Citation:** Fieuw, W.; Foth, M.; Caldwell, G.A. Towards a More-than-Human Approach to Smart and Sustainable Urban Development: Designing for Multispecies Justice. *Sustainability* **2022**, *14*, 948. https://doi.org/ 10.3390/su14020948

Academic Editor: Nikos A. Salingaros

Received: 6 December 2021 Accepted: 10 January 2022 Published: 14 January 2022

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with origins in and interrelationships across diverse fields of study including critical geography, urban studies, ecofeminism, new materialism, science and technology studies (STS), and decolonial studies. Just as the term 'nature-based solutions' has become an umbrella term that encompasses a range of environmental infrastructure interventions in response to anthropogenic climate change, the term 'more-than-human' is considered to be an approach to account for nonhuman agencies [11,12], recognise humanity's entanglements with ecosystems and the planet [13], work towards multispecies justice [14], and design for cohabitation [14–16]. Such new ways of conceptualising sustainable development perhaps the most pressing global agenda in the wake of what Earth scientists call the 'Holocene (or sixth mass) extinction'—are a pressing and urgent endeavour [17].

The focal lens we apply to this scholarship domain is spatial planning. Spatial planning is a critical component in sustainability strategies, because at the command of the spatial planner is a set of diverse procedural, regulatory, design, and implementation tools that are usually premised on and enacted by government policy frameworks [18–20]. The purpose of spatial planning is to balance human development and economic activities within ecological boundaries [21]. Spatial plans should have foresight based on credible evidence that includes population growth modelling [22], urban development pressures, ecologically vulnerable areas, and other landscape considerations such as regenerative design approaches to deal with the environmental legacy of exhausted quarry and abandoned mine sites [23]. These plans should be backed by normatively 'good' design principles contained within design and planning traditions of new urbanism, smart growth, sustainability, and ecological urbanism. Since spatial planning implicates the allocation of scarce resources, it is inherently a political activity by nature [19,20,24–26], and it also has the role of setting agendas for harmonious human–environment interactions. Plans and design guidance inform a range of urban and environmental planning instruments such as strategic environmental assessments, population growth and distribution, housing, ecological corridors, land use planning, and transport planning [22].

The significance of developing a more-than-human approach to smart and sustainable urban development in this article is derived from two domains, that is, more-than-human scholarship and spatial planning. While some human geography and urban theorists, for example, [13,27–29], have engaged with the possibilities of more-than-human cities, so far, there has been no concerted effort to strategically review the literature at this intersection with the aim of informing smart and sustainable urban development and spatial planning practices drawing on the domains of knowledge identified in more-than-human scholarship. By offering this horizon scan literature review, we endeavour to stimulate and extend debate and discourse about an emerging, yet still nascent, more-than-human spatial planning framework [30–32]. This article contributes to creating more nuanced understandings of sustainable and smart cities, which are stated objectives in the Sustainable Development Goals and the New Urban Agenda of the United Nations.

Our motivation in presenting this horizon scan is to start to articulate some of the possible implications of enacting and subscribing to a more-than-human sensibility in the practice of spatial planning. We draw attention to some of the key works emerging in the field as possibly trendsetting and game changing, and we start to organise their proposed ideas towards a nascent framework that can be utilised to design for multispecies justice [13–15,30]. Such a framework cannot be accommodated within the limited scope of this one review. As such, we can only offer a nascent research agenda, and accordingly, our aim is not and cannot be to attempt to present a fully formed framework. This would likely require a monograph-length treatment as well as many contributions from colleagues across different fields. Nonetheless, in this paper, we acknowledge that this movement is now underway, and our hope is that the findings of this review will recruit further supporters and contributors to this urgent task.

A more-than-human framework to smart and sustainable urban development can shape and inspire the practices of planners, geographers, and designers, who are working on a variety of spatial scales. These practitioners might be working in government agencies, design firms, environmental peak organisations, community organisations, or could be interested members of the community. While there has been a recent spike in interest in design competitions, conference proceedings, and special research teams, we believe there is still a need for this academic scholarship to be made more accessible to practitioners.

Scholars have identified the ontological and epistemological roots of a more-thanhuman approach in the environmental humanities, social sciences, and design. Such studies tend to be grounded in constructivism and are influenced by theoretical orientations in critical geography and humanities such as decolonial theory, deep ecology, posthumanism, urban studies, and human geography. The guiding objective of this review is to start orientating spatial planning practice towards such more-than-human sensibilities. This strategic horizon scan of the literature identifies the ontological foundation, on which a more-than-human approach to spatial planning practice can be built. We suggest that this ontological foundation can offer fertile ground for timely and urgent research questions to be posed by the urban studies research community at large. These can include questions such as:


While the limited scope of this review does not allow us to offer a book-length treatment of these questions that can offer a satisfactory scope for answering them, we also suggest that what is important is not so much the scope and scale of any one output but a strong commitment to engaging, on an ongoing basis, with these questions with a more-than-human sensibility. As such, we want to be modest in offering this review as one step on the way, whilst, at the same time, acknowledging the many other steps other colleagues have taken and their contributions. By jointly working towards informing this ontological framework, our objective is to contribute to proliferating more-than-human perspectives on spatial planning across disciplines. The transformational change agenda implicit in this work is to provide evidence of the potential, the merit, and the urgency for reforming smart and sustainable urban development processes in spatial planning praxis to create and design post-anthropocentric urban futures [1,33].
