From Foreground, an Australian web site about “Cities, places and the people who make them,” an article by Cecily Maller (posted October 25, 2018) that seeks to move “beyond binary categories of nature/culture or wild/tame, and recognising the agencies of non-humans such as plants and animals. These entry points help generate alternative ways of conceptualising the world and connect to a richer, less human-centric understanding of what healthy urban environments might mean, and look like.”
The author concludes: “More-than-human thinking helps to reframe how cities are conceived, beyond the current human-centric fame, so that they can be designed, governed and lived in as biodiverse, eco-centric places that are healthier for both humans and other life-forms.”
Dr Cecily Maller has recently published a book on this subject with Routledge titled ‘Healthy urban environments: More-than-human theories’.
She is Senior Research Fellow at RMIT University’s Centre for Urban Research in Melbourne. Her research focuses on human-environment interactions in urban settings in the context of everyday life. She is particularly interested in how people interact with animals and plants in homes and neighbourhoods, how these interactions affect health and wellbeing, and the implications for making cities greener and more biodiverse.
E.D. – 4 Nov 2018