Oral Presentation The Institute of Australian Geographers Conference 2023

Thinking with touch in the multispecies city: Towards a more-than-human conceptualisation of urban wellbeing. (18407)

Helga Simon 1
  1. Discipline of Geography and Planning, School of Social Sciences, Macquarie University, NSW, Australia

Multispecies cities are complex places of human and more-than-human entanglements and co-production with uneven distributions of more-than-human liveability. This presentation will describe a central theme in my PhD research in which I engage posthuman care scholar Maria Puig de la Bellacasa’s thinking with touch to get closer to multispecies circulations of care and to contemplate thicker, more-than-human conceptualisations of urban wellbeing. Using urban ecosystem recovery projects in the Sydney Basin as case studies, this research examines care labours at the coalface of extinction. I draw on multispecies ethnography and interviews with scientists, conservationists, and volunteers at Car-ring-gal North Head, near Manly, and Indigenous knowledge holders and scientists at Gamay Botany Bay, Sydney, and argue that when touch is attuned to, the connections and disconnections in and between living webs of care are elucidated. Through thinking with touch, I question who gets to care and what ‘recovery’ or ‘repair’ means in urban environments, so that decisions become guided by the value of the situated relationships rather than a ‘return to’ an ‘untouched’ state. I conclude that thinking with touch in this context forwards relationalintra-active, more-than-human conceptualisations of wellbeing helpful to the multispecies cities agenda.