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Since 2018, a group of Amsterdam Zuidoost expert-citizens are collaborating with municipal partners to produce a 55 HA urban food forest in already designed parcels of public space greens. Amidst contestation and unclear routes to institutional mandate, this institutionally diverse community of practice is co-establishing an experimental governance infrastructure driven by multispecies interrelations that give primacy to care for the ‘natural world’. In Urban Dialogue #5 Debra Solomon describes this case study project and her PhD research which enquires how producing an urban food forest can contribute to extending the right to the city as a right to urban natures. Based on this case study – and a decade-plus of critical spatial practice, Solomon is developing 'multispecies urbanism' as a research terrain. Proposed as a means to survive ongoing crises of democracy, planetary climate catastrophe and uneven resource distribution, multispecies urbanism proposes methods, values and domains that centre ‘more-than-human’ inhabitants – and engage human inhabitants in multispecies communities. This new urban planning and urban design paradigm is only now beginning to take shape in municipal practice and in long-term action research projects such as the Amsterdam Zuidoost Food Forest. Short bio Debra Solomon is an artist-researcher and PhD candidate at the University of Amsterdam in the department of Urban Planning and with the PhD group Designing Urban Experience. Both Solomon's critical spatial practice and academic research ask how to produce urban natures for and with the people that require them and how groups from civil society might collaboratively engage in the production of a democratically landscaped public space. In 2019 she introduced the term multispecies urbanism to describe urban development driven by multispecies interrelations that give primacy to the care of the 'natural world'. Solomon’s PhD research is supervised by professors Caroline Nevejan (Chief Science Officer Municipality of Amsterdam, Cultural Sociology) and Maria Kaika (Dept. of Urban Planning, director of the Centre for Urban Studies) at the University of Amsterdam's AISSR.
