Welcome to the website for the research project The Anthropocene City: multispecies stories of climate challenges in the Öresund region!
Do you have a story of a more-than-human urban encounter that you would like to share? Add it to the map! Or simply explore the ones that are already there by clicking on each entry.
Human-induced climate change, or the Anthropocene, is forcing humankind to confront its impacts, attachments and reliance on other-than-human life. The escalation of extreme weather events has made our vital entanglement with the “natural” world impossible to ignore, inviting a “rethinking [of] human–environment relationships – particularly those relationships that perpetuate the idea of human separation from the complex biophysical worlds that we inhabit” (Houston et al. 2018). In theory and in practice, we need to take seriously “our ecological embeddedness” (Plumwood 2002) on this planet if we and other species are to survive.
Yet, the planning profession is too often slow to embrace the latest advances in environmental scholarship for building sustainable urban futures. Intent on narrowing this gap, the project asks, “How can multispecies stories of climate challenges transform urban planning practices?” Focussing on three urban climate challenges (heatwaves, floods, storms), it interrogates the encounter between multispecies life-worlds and urban planning practices in the Öresund region (Copenhagen & Malmö).
Funded by Formas – a Swedish Research Council for Sustainable Development, the projects seeks to develop new theorisations of the Anthropocene city, advance a distinct multispecies urban methodology, and develop practical guidelines to inform Nordic urban planning and public debates.
Houston, D, Hillier, J, MacCallum, D, Steele, W, & Byrne, J (2018) ‘Make Kin, Not Cities! Multispecies Entanglements and “Becoming-World” in Planning Theory’.Planning Theory 17(2), 190–212
Plumwood, V (2002) Environmental Culture: The Ecological Crisis of Reason. Psychology P.d multispecies social sciences with natural scientific and humanistic perspectives) to create sustainable cities in times of drastic climate change.
Career Grant for Early-career Researchers (grant number: 2025-00488)
Formas – a Swedish Research Council for Sustainable Development
I am a visual anthropologist and urban geographer with a research focus on environmental and more-than-human ethnographies of cities and urban life in the Anthropocene. My work takes inspiration from social and cultural anthropology, more-than-human geography, multispecies ethnography, urban political ecology, landscape studies, and the environmental humanities.
Circling around three nodes of enquiry – multispecies spatial justice, urban nature time and temporalities, and more-than-human artistic practices – my research is based on an extended interest in questioning the anthropocentric vision of cities that has long dominated urban planning and design.
Between 2026 and 2029, I am heading the project “The Anthropocene City: multispecies stories of climate challenges in the Öresund region” (funded by a Formas Career Grant for Early-career Researchers). Focussing on urban climate challenges (heatwaves, floods, storms), it interrogates the encounter between multispecies lifeworlds and urban planning practices in the Öresund region (Copenhagen & Malmö) in the Anthropocene.
I hold a PhD in geography from the University of Cambridge (2020) and an MA in Visual and Media anthropology from Freie Universität Berlin (2014).