Multispecies Urbanism (MU) concept proposes that cities be designed and governed for the multispecies whole. In her manifesto, artist, infrastructure activist, and researcher Debra Solomon argues that healthy urban environments for humans are inseparable from the flourishing of other species and their microbial consortia. MU treats ecological labour—cooling, water buffering, pollination, soil formation—as infrastructural work that must be recognised in briefs, budgets and maintenance regimes. It calls for de-commodified food systems, governance tuned to ecological time, and a pragmatic approach to novel ecosystems.

Debra Solomon is finalising her PhD in Urban Planning at the University of Amsterdam Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences, which brings multispecies justice in planning to academic discourse. Coining, defining and practising Multispecies Urbanism, she presented the concept at the Dutch Pavilion at the 2021 Venice Biennial. In the exhibition titled Who is We?, the works presented MU in its practices, methods, and theoretical underpinnings, – all addressing the social and ecological urgencies of the more-than-human.

In this conversation, we speak with Debra Solomon about her Multispecies Urbanism manifesto and the practice she developed with communities who have experimented with it. What is important to note is that MU is ecological stewardship, which, devoid of romanticism towards the messy, puts living systems’ health and wellbeing in the forefront.

Please tell us more about Multispecies Urbanism.

Multispecies Urbanism is a form of socio-ecological justice, or just urban development, in which its drivers are multispecies communities. Humans are part of that, of course, but the focus is on the requirements of more-than-human communities, because the pattern is constant: when urban ecosystems are healthy, humans thrive too. Insects, the soil biomes, plants, birds—their ecological labour pollinates food, cools air, buffers water, sequesters carbon, and forms new soils. Yet this labour is largely unrecognised, precarised, and under-supported—much like reproductive or care labour in human economies.

Multispecies Urbanism is a form of socio-ecological justice, or just urban development, in which its drivers are multispecies communities. It extends the right to the city—and more specifically, the right to the urban metabolism—to more-than-humans. Animals and plants are landscape architects and planners too.

What a MU approach does is make that labour legible and protected. It asks planning, design and maintenance to lead with supporting the needs of the most marginalised—whether that is people or other species—because the policies that produce robust ecosystems also create the healthiest human environments. This isn’t sentimentality or “tree-hugging”; it is systemic. Market logics have delivered species extinction and brittle, overheated cities. MU imagines something else: an ecological reset based on care, repair and regeneration.

It also extends the right to the city—as Henri Lefebvre thought about it, and more specifically, the right to the urban metabolism—to more-than-humans. Microbes, insects, plants are not a backdrop; they are co-producers of the urban fabric. Animals and plants are landscape architects and planners too. To practise MU means training ourselves to become less binary and see that urban nature is continuously co-produced with this cohort and to open up planning to this possibility.

What are the MU’s crucial points?

First, MU develops a value system where basics—food, shade, moisture, soils—are not amenities, but infrastructure, co-produced by a multispecies community. Ecological labour—pollination, cooling, soil formation, water buffering—is infrastructural work, not decorative “green” for leisure activities.

To practise MU means training ourselves to become less binary and see that urban nature is continuously co-produced with this cohort and to open up planning to this possibility.

MU’s method is learning through practice and application. It requires experimentation, intentional observations and adjustments. Ecological succession is stewarded over seasons by shared care—not as tokenistic “nature-inclusive” gestures, but as an understanding and bolstering of interspecies collaboration in biodiversity co-creation. MU highlights that we co-produce urban nature every day. Stewardship is understood as governance: maintenance contracts, schedules and KPIs are de facto design. Reward tidiness and you erase habitat-resources; reward flowering, edge depth, refugia, soil moisture—and you generate meadows, gradients, and cooler microclimates.

Biodiversity needs scale: balcony diversity is nice, but the ecological effect appears only in networks of tens of hectares. Stitch these areas together, and the rest of the web becomes possible. Real impact begins around the 50-hectare threshold for biodiversity hotspots.

Third, MU develops a spatial grammar to defragment biodiversity caused by urbanisation, by creating ecological connectivity. Planning must allow for sequestration of carbon and water in living soils, create habitats and resources for all species of urban inhabitants. That means shifting from monocultures to ensembles—meadows, scrub, woodland edges, wetlands—knitted into street trees and stormwater systems. And importantly, MU’s biodiversity demands scale: balcony planting may ease individual consciences, but meaningful ecological impact comes only from networks of tens of hectares.¹.

MU considers the spatial configuration of resource provision. That includes de-commodifying food production where possible. The field agriculture that we associate with food production sits more comfortably in peri-urban landscapes run by professional farmers working on stable, fair contracts, with direct subscription models to adjacent districts, avoiding market logistics. Buschberghof in Germany is an example of a community-supported model that works on an annual subscription for food supply to residents, which also supports their regenerative agriculture efforts. The urban greenspace in cities is, on the other hand, well-suited to perennial, high-value nutrition—berries, nuts, foraged greens—for biodiversity co-creation, and for learning.

Finally, governance. Institutions must acknowledge ecological time and support multi-year horizons, allowing seasonal “no-harm” windows, and favour redundancy rather than one-off heroic clearings. More-than-human stakeholders must be held in view when decisions are made. Cities are good places to start because they are dense with contradictions and resources; MU argues that heat mitigation, ecological connectivity and food/environmental justice should drive urban processes, instead of functioning as afterthoughts or add-ons.

MU in practice?

In Amsterdam I work with the Urbaniahoeve Collective, which I founded as a social design lab for urban agriculture in the most species-inclusive sense. Since 2010 we’ve been transforming under-programmed public greenspace into foodscapes and food forests—spaces that provision humans and more-than-humans alike.

Our most ambitious project is the Amsterdam Southeast Food Forest (VBAZO), developed with Renate Nollen and K-district residents. Across 56 hectares, we’ve re-stitched lawns and decorative greens into a connected foodscape of orchards, woodlands and flowering meadows. The design follows permaculture: fruit and nut trees, shrubs, berry bushes, edible groundcovers and soil-building plants layered so that food and biodiversity reinforce each other.

The approach is technically simple: phased mowing converts turfgrass lawns into meadows. In some meadows, residents maintain mini-orchards and berry bushes, ensuring biodiversity for pollinators, birds and insects. This extends flowering—and thus food for pollinators—across the seasons, while also providing insect habitats over their one- to two-year life cycles. Guiding ecological succession also means removing tree saplings before they establish as forest thickets, which would reduce biodiversity. I call this practice of sustaining maximum biodiversity, and proliferating ‘charismatic’ plant species in former turfgrass lawns, meadow styling.

Beyond the ecological, the practice is also social and political. Sites are identified together with residents and the municipality through walk-mapping and the co-creation of strategies to help defragment ecological corridors. Planting and maintenance are acts of community co-production: local people engage in ecosystem care that treats these landscapes differently from “standard” public greenspace. At the same time, we negotiate with municipal departments, without whose aligned governance these spaces would remain precarious.

Eradication of biodiversity in cities is often a result of “bad nature”.

Biodiversity in cities is repeatedly erased by the very systems set up to manage it. Zoning rules and maintenance routines tend to prioritise certain understandings of neatness, uniformity, and safety. A single mowing can undo a year of ecological growth of several species webs. Maintenance is governance, and we need new alliances between greenspace workers, policy-makers and residents—so that greenspace is understood not as an image of human order, but as an ever-changing living space where biodiversity and ecological justice for multispecies lifeworlds take the lead.

Maintenance is governance. More-than-human stakeholders must be held in view when decisions are made. Heat mitigation, ecological connectivity and food/environmental justice should drive urban processes, instead of functioning as afterthoughts or add-ons.

Cities are already novel ecosystems. That’s not a failure—it’s the condition we live in. The real question isn’t simply “native or not”; it’s compositional: does this assemblage contribute to multispecies flourishing and to socio-ecological justice here, now, and into the climatic futures that are arriving?
Where indigenous species can be supported, we should embrace them. But blanket nativism can be as blunt—and as unjust—as blanket exoticism. Take the knotweed plant: eradication campaigns using electric shocks, deep-soil freezing or drowning do more harm than good to the wider ecosystem. Care tactics work better. They create conditions in which other species can thrive and compete with the knotweed, and they acknowledge that we humans are part of that flourishing too.

Soil is one of the city’s most vital layers. In your work, you explore how alive a greenspace is through tuning in—what you call radical observation—and through soil chromatography.

From a Multispecies Urbanism perspective, soils sit at the intersection of ecological, social and governance relations. Human–soil relationality is based on three points. First, soil organisms are part of socio-ecological systems and subject to regulation. Second, when the needs of soil organisms are attended to, we are speaking of just urban development. Usually, the soils are treated as a support surface for landscape architecture, infrastructures and architectures. Third, MU proposes collaboration with the soil biome as a partner in climate crisis mitigation. That means recognising soils as having a right to the urban metabolism. This contrasts sharply with contemporary urban human-soil relations, in which the role of the soil organism is largely ignored except in extractive or monistic relationships.

How to “design” with microorganisms, which are hard to see?

Microbes and fungi inhabit soils, leaves, bark, air, and our own bodies. Their activity underlies biodiversity, temperature moderation and resilience. When they disappear, humans end up replacing their work—badly, and at great expense.

So how do we design for these invisible species? By creating habitats, not spectacles. We keep soils moist and shaded; allow leaf litter to accumulate at forest edges; let bark host mosses and lichens; maintain cooler, wetter forest pockets. For all species kingdoms—animals, fungi, plants, protists—layering is key. And we keep habitats contiguous—functionally if not always physically—so microbes and insects can disperse. This brings us back to scale: balcony diversity is nice, but the ecological effect appears only in networks of tens of hectares. Stitch these areas together, and the rest of the web becomes possible. Real impact begins around the 50-hectare threshold for biodiversity hotspots.

Reading list for further research?

I love Katrin Bohn and André Viljoen’s Continuous Productive Urban Landscapes, which—when it appeared—gave many of us the spatial grammar for continuity and productivity in cities. Add the widely cited urban-ecology syntheses on scale and contiguity (think thresholds at the order of tens of hectares and what “functional contiguity” really means).

Read across urban political ecology on inequality, microbiomes and metabolism; feminist labour theory for the structural parallels with ecological labour; and agroecology/regenerative agriculture for peri-urban transitions that value living soils as the asset rather than the afterthought.

Other books and articles I love:

Büscher, Bram, and Robert Fletcher. The Conservation Revolution – Radical Ideas for Saving Nature beyond the Anthropocene. Verso, 2020.
¹An academic article about the spatial requirements of high-impact biodiversity: Beninde, Joscha, Michael Veith, and Axel Hochkirch. ‘Biodiversity in Cities Needs Space’. Ecology Letters 18 (2015): 581–92. https://doi.org/10.1111/ele.12427.

Solomon, Debra. ‘Radical Observation: A Series of Awareness Exercises for Developing Inter-Relationalities with Natural World Ecosystems’. Journal of Delta Urbanism Fall-Winter, no. N.4 | Prospects | Practice | 01 | (2023): 88–101. https://doi.org/10.59490/jdu.4.2023.7333. (Read especially the subsoil contemplation, pp. 90-92.)

*all images Debra Solomon for Stichting Urbaniahoeve unless otherwise stated.