Abstract

How to conjure up a picture, for instance, of a town without pigeons, without any trees or gardens, where you never hear the beat of wings or the rustle of leaves—a thoroughly negative place in short?Though now home to the majority of the world's human population, cities—indeed the politics of life itself—have always been multispecies endeavors. The quote above is Albert Camus's description of Oran, the fictional town that is the site of a devastating plague outbreak in his seminal work, The Plague. It is meant to conjure a decidedly dystopian urban landscape due to its marked absence of nonhuman life. Such a scenario is precisely what the visionary artistic and literary movement Solar Punk seek to counter...