Debra Solomon

PhD, Alumni

This research examines a framework for fostering collaboration between citizens, experts, and more-than-human communities in the planning, design, implementation, and maintenance of urban greenspace. It seeks to integrate the concept of the right to the city into urban policymaking by establishing reciprocal relationships with a multispecies common. Central to this inquiry is the question of how a more-than-human ecosystem, an ecological collective embodied in public urban greenspace, can achieve a right to the city and the associated right to the urban metabolism?

To investigate, the research addresses how urban greenspace maintenance, socio-ecological integrity, and continuity are organised, and how a policy framework facilitates this. Secondly, how the production of urban greenspace necessitates co-production between humans and more-than-humans, and what the nature of this co-production is. Finally, how such a co-productive practice expands the notion and praxis of public space, transforming it from a landscape of consumption to one of production.

Recent publications

Methodological rift: Applying infrastructure activism’s ‘skin in the game’ embodied art research methods to urban green infrastructure planning

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