In this time of cascading climate and biodiversity crises, western planning systems have a serious problem with material imaginaries of death and life. Australian State of Environment Reports at both state and federal levels, along with key independent reports by scientists, paint an increasingly grim picture of mass species loss and unravelling of life, while planning systems tinker at the edges, ‘adjudicating’ multispecies spatial relations of development that perpetuate death and loss rather than meaningfully address them. In popular terminology this slow process is called ‘death by a thousand cuts’. We argue for more sustained and storied attention to such processes as an active form of extractive, settler-colonial planning. Thus, rather than seeing it as a destructive, but unintended, consequence of planning, we argue that death by a thousand cuts reverberates across time, species and places in cascading aftermaths. Drawing on examples from the urban fringes of Perth and Sydney, we aim to story multispecies relations of slow death, highlighting some key practices of planning adjudication (for example, biodiversity offsetting, development lobbying) and emphasising alternative possibilities.
Keywords: urban planning, extinction, extraction, slow death