Multispecies Cities: Solarpunk Urban Futures ed. by C. Rupprecht et al. (review)
- Multispecies Cities: Solarpunk Urban Futures ed. by C. Rupprecht et al.
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, [End Page 162] 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.2 Multispecies Cities thereby aims to challenge dominant technocratic, capitalist, and anthropocentric visions of cities as spaces largely or even exclusively of, by and for humans.3
From the perspective of characters occasionally situated in distant spatialtemporalities, 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.6 Multispecies 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 [End Page 163]
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...
