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Multispecies Cities: Solarpunk Urban Futures

2022; Penn State University Press; Volume: 33; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/utopianstudies.33.1.0162

2154-9648

Heather Alberro,

Geographies of human-animal interactions

How to conjure up a picture, for instance, of a town without pigeons, without any trees or gardens, where you never hear the beat of wings or the rustle of leaves—a thoroughly negative place in short?—Albert Camus (1948) Though now home to the majority of the world’s human population, cities—indeed the politics of life itself—have always been multispecies endeavors. The quote above is Albert Camus’s description of Oran, the fictional town that is the site of a devastating plague outbreak in his seminal work, The Plague (1948). It is meant to conjure a decidedly dystopian urban landscape due to its marked absence of nonhuman life. Such a scenario is precisely what the visionary artistic and literary movement Solar Punk seek to counter in their (ecotopian) publication Multispecies Cities: Solarpunk Urban Futures (2021). This timely collection of imaginative essays and short stories seeks to (re)envision cities as living spaces of multispecies flourishing, variedly exploring the joys—as well as trials—of living with our myriad terrestrial kin in increasingly climate-ravaged environments. Nonhumans occupy the foreground in the stories throughout, and even frequently feature as central characters. Andrew Dana Hudson’s “The Mammoth Steps,” for instance, envisions a future Phuket wherein “elephants roam the streets and work with allied humans to construct elephant-sized buildings.”1 E. H. Niebler’s “Crew” depicts the initial difficulties a human woman experiences in understanding and working with her cephalopod and cetacean colleagues.2Multispecies Cities thereby aims to challenge dominant technocratic, capitalist, and anthropocentric visions of cities as spaces largely or even exclusively of, by and for humans.3From the perspective of characters occasionally situated in distant spatial-temporalities, this collection presents a mosaic of visions of more inclusive and diverse urban spaces with all manner of living and purposive entities who speak—if only humans strive to listen well and deeply. Interspecies communication thus emerges as a central theme or problematic throughout many of the stories. And one needn’t grasp another’s language in order to understand what their needs and desires might be. Rather, attention and imagination are key starting points.4 Plants, for instance, “speak through space, in the manner they open their leaves, spread petals, turn to the light . . .,” while animals such as dogs, cats and elephants communicate with us through body language and vocalizations.5 Through a little stretch of the imagination, and perhaps some technological assistance, we might come closer—though we’ll never know for certain—to understanding how a rat experiences the world.6Multispecies Cities’ visions of urban futurities are thoroughly posthuman (Braidotti 2016), with cybernetic-orca hybrids engineered against their will for human military exploits to drones described as “beings” and robotic dogs on Mars with uncannily dog-like mannerisms.7 As such, the collection critically reflects on and deconstructs boundaries between the living and nonliving, and around who and what matters.In the story “Vladivostok,” two Metropolis enthusiasts from Canada set off to the Russian wilderness to film the elusive Amur tiger so that it can be incorporated as a new species entry into a virtual-reality game.8 Like other nonhumans throughout the collection, the Amur tiger is depicted as not merely seen but seeing (Derrida and Wills 2002, 383): Ronan had read online that you could go and see them [the Amur tigers] now, track them through the forest. Of course you and they were always tracking each other—they knew you were there and watched back.9 For the character Bryan, Metropolis is more alluring than real life, where you can be anyone you want and have anything you desire, including nature and other species. However, his partner Ronan is quick to remind him that the animals in Metropolis “aren’t actually there. . . . They’re just programs.”10 This is especially telling within the context of the sixth mass extinction (Ceballos et al. 2020) and the creeping absence of our terrestrial kin. Attempts to digitally preserve threatened species, or bring lost species back through genetic engineering feats such as “de-extinction splicing,”11 as in Hudson’s exploration of human relations with mammoths spliced from elephant genesin “The Mammoth Steps,” don’t revoke the loss of these singular evolutionary achievements.12 In D. K Mok’s story “The Birdsong Fossil,” protagonist Yuzuki, reflecting on what it is that we actually “bring back” when we resurrect a species like the thylacine, remarks: “Once we lose a species—it’s gone. You might bring back the body, but you’re not bringing back the mind, the culture, the ecological systems.”13 The most sophisticated technological intervention can never recreate or substitute what’s been lost—singular constellations of memories, experiences, capabilities, personalities—embodied by each individual and species. This is what is meant by the well-known phrase, “Extinction is forever.”Many other stories in the collection also highlight—though perhaps this might have been explored in even greater depth—the joys and difficulties, cooperation and conflict that attend living with and caring for others. As an elderly man meticulously tending to a rooftop garden in Singapore observes in the short story “Untamed” by Timothy Yam, “Taking care—not easy. I do for forty years already—every day in the sun, hard work to maintain this place, make sure the plants and animals are well.”14 There is no purity (Shotwell 2016) or perfection to be had in our dealings with others; living with others—human and nonhuman—requires continuous effort, attentiveness, and careful deliberation of conflicting interests. For Latour, two crucial and inseparable queries with respect to existing and coming collectives include (1) how many actants there are to take into account, and (2) the ethical (or utopian) question of what the best of possible worlds ought to consist of (2004, 93).In Latourian cosmopolitical (Latour 2004, 454; Stengers 2010) fashion, Phoebe Wagner’s “Children of the Asphalt” illustrates the messy politics of cohabitation when a new arrival (a species later named the “Landrus”) begins causing damage to local food sources. The town’s human denizens have resolved never to kill or hurt any nonhuman kin unless they display malicious intent. As such, they convene, taking as many voices as possible into account, to deliberate on why the landrus might be flattening the town’s crop fields, how much food and other resources this potential new kin member might need in order to thrive, and generally how the city’s existing collective of humans and nonhumans might make adjustments to their own habits so as to accommodate and respectfully live alongside this new kin member.15Another central message in Multispecies Cities is that in light of our limited tenure on this earth, we ought to, following John Berger (2007), “hold everything dear” whilst there is still time: Terns, I realise, they are terns. The scientist in me wants to jot down the observation, inform HQ and then do what . . . ? Write a paper about the return of terns? Petition to have the old species recorded? I marvel at the tern’s beauty. This will suffice. Things are fleeting . . . better to cherish them now.16 Though one might add that marveling at the singular beauty of the many creatures we share urban and other spaces with17 will not suffice amid times plagued by widespread climate and biodiversity breakdown.Staying with the trouble (Haraway 2016) of the damage wrought by oppressive and exploitative systems such as capitalism and anthropocentrism on our nonhuman kin requires facing up to our responsibilities to them (Latour 2017). There is no going back to undo past harms, as many of the stories in the collection allude to. So, how do we make amends? How does one “apologise to a river”?18 How do those of us in “shiny air-controlled cars and our plastered dome megawalls [who’d] been deaf to all songs . . . listen to the songs of empathy again”?19 By tuning in. By promising to do better in the essential task of co-creating more livable worlds in the here and now that take the interests, needs and desires of our nonhuman kin into careful consideration. By embracing an ethic of care and responsibility for the agentic more-than-human beings with whom we are always inextricably entangled.20 In D. A. Xiaolin Spires’s story “The Exuberant Vitality of Hatchling Habitats,” the two young protagonists create biodegradable structures to serve as new dwelling places for seagulls and other threatened sea birds; one such structure, named “Promise Rock,” signifies “a pledge that we’ll do our best”. . . to “continue to treat this land, shared by humans, drones, gulls and other beings alike, with respect.”21 Forging more caring and respectful lifeways amidst the blasted landscapes (Tsing 2012) of the present might begin with such a promise, and the conviction espoused by Multispecies Cities that a better world is always possible.