The term ‘sustainability’ has become an overused umbrella term that encompasses a range of climate actions and environmental infrastructure investments; however, there is still an urgent need for transformative reform work. Scholars of urban studies have made compelling cases for a more-than-human conceptualisation of urban and environmental planning and also share a common interest in translating theory into practical approaches and implications that recognise (i) our ecological entanglements with planetary systems and (ii) the urgent need for multispecies justice in the reconceptualisation of genuinely sustainable cities. More-than-human sensibility draws on a range of disciplines and encompasses conventional and non-conventional research methods and design approaches. In this article, we offer a horizon scan type of review of key posthuman and more-than-human literature sources at the intersection of urban studies and environmental humanities. The aim of this review is to (i) contribute to the emerging discourse that is starting to operationalise a more-than-human approach to smart and sustainable urban development, and; (ii) to articulate a nascent framework for more-than-human spatial planning policy and practice.

This paper presents a collaborative approach for designing, implementing and deploying situated urban HCI interventions. It draws on field studies that use HCI technologies for collecting feedback from citizens. Based on an analysis of these field studies and a discussion of top-down and bottom-up initiatives currently used in community engagement we propose that both decision makers and local communities should be involved in the city making process. We relate our approach, which we refer to as middle-out design, to other co-design and participatory design movements in HCI and conclude on a discussion on how our work can contribute to the discourse around urban HCI particularly for the purpose of community engagement to inform change

Media architecture’s combination of the digital and the physical can trigger, enhance, and amplify urban experiences. In this paper, we examine how to bring about and foster more open and participatory approaches to engage communities through media architecture by identifying novel ways to put some of the creative process into the hands of laypeople. We review technical, spatial, and social aspects of DIY phenomena with a view to better understand maker cultures, communities, and practices. We synthesise our findings and ask if and how media architects as a community of practice can encourage the ‘open-sourcing’ of information and tools allowing laypeople to not only participate but become active instigators of change in their own right. We argue that enabling true DIY practices in media architecture may increase citizen control. Seeking design strategies that foster DIY approaches, we propose five areas for further work and investigation. The paper begs many questions indicating ample room for further research into DIY Media Architecture

The ready availability and widespread deployment of IoT devices and sensors enable a high granularity of quantitative data to be collected to give a real-time appraisal of a building’s environmental performance. Rating and assessment frameworks are increasingly taking advantage of insights that can be derived from both new building technology and big data analytics. Yet, climate change action requires new perspectives that move towards a post-anthropocentric and more-than-human viewpoint. This paper makes a threefold contribution. In order to highlight a gap, we (1) critique select Green Building Rating Tools, (2) contrast current achievements and targets with what climate change action demands of the built environment’s performance; and (3) we discuss several causes for the disconnect between actual and aspirational ends of the performance measurement spectrum and offer some possible responses and actions with a view to stimulate scholarly debate and engagement to leapfrog the performance of the built environment.

Applying the concept of perpetual beta to cities proposes a continual and never complete process of city-making. Building on this notion, this chapter employs a conceptual framework of urban acupuncture for conducting and analysing localised small-scale community engagement activities through situated pop-up interventions. Pop-up interventions ‘hack’ public space by temporarily changing the feel of a place to promote awareness around civic issues. We argue that the use of situated pop-up interventions has the potential to provide more inclusive forms of community engagement by combining digital and physical media. The proposed framework employs pop-up activism to facilitate a middle-out approach that encourages citizens to actively identify topics for discussion. Two pop-up interventions in different locations in Australia are discussed in the chapter to assess in what way a systemic level of impact can arise from different processes of city hacking that are facilitated through a distributed, decentralised, yet concerted and regular local approach. We argue that a concerted process of implementing small urban interventions can contribute to an ongoing commitment to participatory city-making. Further work will show how each local intervention can contribute to translating the notion of perpetual beta into systemic change beyond the boundaries of their individual locale and—taken together—across different urban environments of the city.