As urban practitioners there is, traditionally, minimal focus on providing for the needs of other species in cities, towns and suburbs. As urban theorists there are limitations from language in rethinking our anthropocentric interaction with other species in urban environments. We conducted an analysis of cross-disciplinary work, from post-anthropocentric design to urban ecologies, presented at the resent symposium ‘Untaming the Urban’. From this analysis we identify a core pattern of emerging characteristics for this cross-disciplinary discourse on urban cross-species cohabitation. This presentation references and consolidates the voices of the many participants into a conceptual understanding for untaming the urban. This emerging concept seeks to broaden the visible inhabitants of the urban environment to the more-than-human others and to consider the built environment as accommodating and negotiating colliding umwelten through complex compromises to imagine post-anthropocentric cities. Umwelt is a useful term from the work of Jakob von Uexküll, used by some of our participants, and applied here to consider the many different urban umwelten that species (human and non-human) inhabit, how they overlap, mismatch, compete, the positives and negatives from colliding umwelten and new opportunities for interactions.

The urban wilds are largely imagined as being outside, or subordinate to, the sphere of human power, interests and politics, despite attempts to breakdown and transcend the divide between the human and non-human. In this paper we consider creative ways to challenge conventional human centered approaches to urban policy and scholarship by focusing on how this might be redressed through a critical research agenda that involves: transformational mapping of the possibilities for translation and creation; a diagrammatic of the relational forces that are in play as effective emergences; and sketching what new assemblages and potentialities might be able to emerge - or already exist outside the gaze of urban policy and research (Deleuze and Guattari 1987). We draw on examples from an interdisciplinary workshop held at ANU in December 2016 on 'Untaming the Urban', as well as our own exploratory work on elemental matter (e.g. earth, air, fire, wind and water) and the different temporal dynamics of human/non-human relations in the city (e.g. everyday routines, ageing). At the heart of this critical agenda is finding equitable, ethical ways to re-imagine and embrace the complexity of the wild, hybrid nature of the city.

Enhancing urban biodiversity is an objective shared by the disciplines of urban ecology and urban design, but approached from very different epistemological positions. Broadly speaking, ecology seeks to establish evidence, through observation and experimentation, to develop guidelines which inform policy. Planning and urban design alternatively, when serving the objectives of ecological restoration, adopt a more inductive approach. These disciplines also differ in their focus, ecological science concerns itself with non-anthropological outcomes, whereas the attention of planning and urban design is primarily anthropological in its concern. The result of these different approaches is different conceptualisations of the ‘success’ urban greening projects.
This paper contends that these different approaches are complimentary and can be used in parallel to enhance biodiversity in cities. Ecologists can benefit from an anthropological perspective in understanding the barriers and challenges toward cohabitation between human and non-humans in urban open space. Using the European honey bee as a case study, we illuminate how community acceptance presupposes all other objectives to endure in planning and urban design practice. In this way the empirical value of the experiment over time becomes more representational as it helps to educate and engage citizens in conserving biodiversity in their community.

The anthropocentric tendency in Western philosophy has successfully extracted humans from natural systems, through forms of objectification and human exceptionalism, resulting in the epoch of the Anthropocene. In the face of growing pollution, extinction events and human population growth it becomes clearer every day that we need to shift society onto a more efficient and sustainable trajectory. One path that offers insights into this is urban biomimicry. Architecture, urban design and engineering have readily employed biomimetic practices, yet there is a paucity of work on how urban planning can use this bioinspired approach in practice. Urban planners like Howard, Olmstead, Geddes, Cerda and Doxiadis, to name a few, long strived for settlements that integrated with nature to various degrees and purposes. This paper presents insights from a literature review of the practice and theory of applied urban biomimicry, with a view to highlighting the potentialities and limitations of bioinspired approaches to urban planning for post-anthropocentric settlements. The literature suggests that there are tensions within bioinspired urban geographies that require a deeper grounding in environmental ethics. From these insights, it is possible to construct a conceptual framework to evaluate the innovations and barriers to bioinspired planning for more-than-human cities.