VIRTUAL Barcelona Livable Cities

Abstract

To fully account for urban liveability, we must extend our definitions of liveability to include the multispecies relationships that shape our cities. In Seattle’s Lake Washington watershed, salmon species have defined the region for millennia as kin for the Muckleshoot and Duwamish peoples and iconic symbols of regional identity for post-colonial populations. Since colonization began in 1851, these anadromous fish have experienced declining liveability as urban infrastructure, shoreline hardening, and pollution transformed their habitat. While Seattle grapples with human quality of life issues such as housing affordability, it also must confront how continuing urbanization impacts more-than-human residents whose temporal rhythms and spatial networks are now inextricably bound with human intervention. This work examines the Lake Washington watershed, almost entirely contained within the Seattle metropolitan area, where three salmon species migrate yearly through urbanized areas. However, anthropogenic climate change and after effects of overfishing and infrastructural impact means that these salmonid species require human intervention to survive, rendering new challenges for urban and regional planning. Following Gan and Tsing’s (2018) perspective that landscapes emerge from “material enactments of space and place by many historical actors—human and non-human,” this work concludes with critical cartography documenting how cities must be understood not merely as human-centered designs but as co-created multispecies environments. This reframing of urban liveability invites cross-disciplinary conversations about how cities worldwide might better accommodate their non-human inhabitants in addition to their human residents.