ABSTRACT
Any form of concrete urban planning is inevitably cosmopolitical in the sense that Isabelle Stengers gives to this term, that is: it is fundamentally engaged in the composition of common worlds. Such work, in turn, always produces effects of inclusion and exclusion. Environments are constructed with the purpose of facilitating the flourishing of some ways of life and existences – and not other. Thus, claiming that we should build the city for ‘all’ is but a deceitful trick that obfuscates and dodges the responsibility for the life-and-death decisions that are constantly being made in these processes, responsibility for the life-and-death decisions that are constantly being made in these processes. However, a cynical acceptance of the inevitability of incompossible lifeforms and the necessity of exclusion risks throws us into a fascist decisionism: if it’s them or us, I prefer us! So how can a recognition of the inevitability of exclusion ever be brought together with a more-than-human sensibility founded upon an awareness of the fundamentally entangled fates of humans and non-humans, from the individual body to the planetary scale? Perhaps by going ‘upstream’ and investigating the production of infelicitous conditions of multispecies co-existence instead of simply accepting the givens of a seemingly tragic situation.
