DAAD Planetability Phase 1
Planetary Health and Multispecies Cohabitation
Research
Integrating Planetary Health and Multispecies Cohabitation in Urban Design and Research
Building on the foundations laid in phase 1, the follow-up project “Planetability: Integrating Planetary Health and Multispecies Cohabitation in Urban Design and Research (Phase 2)” continues to develop a robust interdisciplinary network of junior and senior scientists from Brazil and Germany cutting across the life, engineering, social, and spatial sciences. Collectively, our aim is to advance and promote a new research and action field that we call “planetability”. This combines three overlapping and interlinked dimensions: planetary health, planetary thinking, and planetary transformations, where each dimension fills a gap and enriches the others. For example, the emerging field of planetary health, which is well-represented in contemporary Brazilian debates and emphasises the interconnection of human and environmental health under climate change, is complemented by advanced critical theoretical work on multispecies cohabitation and contemporary urban and spatial theory currently being developed in Berlin – we refer to this as planetary thinking. The uniqueness of our approach empirically considers the social and spatial transformation of fragmented urban natures through the theoretical and methodological lens of human and nonhuman health relations. In global health research, the category of “environment” is all too often reduced to a determinant of human health. In our framework, the environment is opened up to reveal the multiple species and their health relations, eff ects, and outcomes that constitute it; in this way, we place human and nonhuman health on equal footing in the constitution of urban nature space. Our approach can be thought of as trans-scalar, which means we aim to examine how the planetary is inscribed into specific urban sites and therefore, how urban places, subjects, and communities, understood from the perspective of their multispecies urban health relations, are interlinked across the planet. In this way, our research is comparative, in that it seeks out the diff erences, connectivities, and shared histories between unevenly urbanised transatlantic spaces in Germany, São Paulo, and Porto Alegre. Our primary goal in phase two is to advance this mission by consolidating binational relations, supporting junior scientists develop research findings, and submitting a high-value international research proposal.
PI: Prof. Dr. Jamie Scott Baxter