URBANRON · The Rights of Urban Natures. Theory and Policy of Multinature Urbanism

This project explores the application of the rights of nature to cities. At a moment in history, when mounting environmental crises face an increasingly urbanized planet, URBANRON asks how to apply a non-anthropocentric ethic to an anthropogenic world. Current efforts addressing this juxtaposition frequently remain too sectoral, disciplinary, or narrow. In this project, I develop multinature urbanism as a new research area that makes use of the multiplicities of concepts and rights of nature within cities. The resulting ‘rights of urban natures’ position nature not as a passive building material and design element but as an active stakeholder in decision-making processes. Rather than replacing current mechanisms of ‘urban environmental justice’, which focus on humans only, the rights of urban natures aim to augment them with more-than-human ‘ecological justice’. Eventually, URBANRON inspires novel ways to imagine, negotiate, and build more just and sustainable urban futures.Five Work Packages (WPs) form the core of the Fellowship: Following the development of a theory on multinature urbanism (WP1), I conduct a comparative case study analysis of two exemplary urban rights of nature initiatives in Mexico City (Secondment) and Amsterdam (WP2). Building on the theoretical and empirical findings, in WP3, I develop actionable policy recommendations (at TU Delft and the OECD). Scientific, methodological, and professional training activities will enhance both core research and transferable skills to improve and strengthen my employability (WP4). A combination of academic discussions and high-impact publications, a policy brief, two stakeholder engagement workshops, the first-ever Conference on the Rights of Urban Natures, multiple guest lectures and media outreach, help to disseminate, exploit, and communicate the knowledge of URBANRON in both academic and policymaking communities, supporting the establishment of the rights of urban natures as an independent research area.