*2.4. Towards a More-than-Human Approach to Smart and Sustainable Urban Development*

Houston et al. [13] argued that the recasting of urban development processes from the more-than-human perspective could result in innovations such as more responsive and improved climate-adaptive planning tools and narratives for diverse forms of future city growth. The authors concluded by arguing that, "planning theory requires a thicker, relational and more responsive form of post-humanism to imagine and enact just and sustainable cities in a time of global environmental uncertainty and change" (p. 203). This was further corroborated by Roös [110] who argued for the merits of employing a design pattern language approach to embed biophilia in planning practice. This design pattern language, see also [111–113], provides a foundation to better recognise human–nature interactions and inform a new theory for the sustainable development and planning of human settlements and cities, which is also supported by Liaros [40,94,95].

Our horizon scan has identified a need for scholars of urban studies to investigate the possibilities of a spatial planning regime that considers more-than-human perspectives. The approaching planetary ecocide urges us to recast spatial planning across the built environment and environmental professional competencies from a more-than-human perspective. Spatial planning is a vital task in guiding sustainable development outcomes with its associated technologies and design instruments [28,32,114]. Urban planning intends to create a rational and transparent 'development envelope' at the local scale to guide the activities of public and private interests [115,116].

Adams and Tiesdell [117] understood the purpose of local plans and associated development processes under four broad categories:


Cities require more compelling visions of environmental harmony in which human activities can be seen as contributing to the restoration of sensitive ecologies, the net reduction of carbon emissions, and an overall push towards what Birkeland called netpositive design and development [81]. These city visions are required to be translated into refined strategies and methods at the neighbourhood and/or district level. The

neighbourhood unit is deemed to be an appropriate scale where urban sustainability can be proactively planned for in terms of public services, networked infrastructures, and greater community participation [80,118,119]. A new generation of Neighbourhood Sustainability Assessment (NSA) tools have the potential to better measure the sustainability of urban systems [120], and these assessments of built environment sustainability performance could benefit greatly from a more-than-human perspective on integrative planning and development [31]. By combining these recent thrusts in urban studies, a framework can be developed to articulate a more-than-human spatial planning praxis. Such a framework requires a taxonomy of concepts and emerging practices, similar to the way that the *Feral Atlas* [121], for example, has documented the diversity of shared encounters and entanglements between humans and nonhumans in the form of a digital encyclopaedia grounded in 79 ethnographic field reports "on diverse topics as 'radioactive blueberries' and the spread of coffee rust, all accompanied by drawings, music, and films." [122]. Applying and expanding the framework, translating it into practice, evaluating its impact, and on that basis, refining its methods may start to address the knowledge gap of how to overcome human exceptionalism in urban studies [123].
