Weaving pluriversal entanglements for urban wetland regeneration

Abstract

This article advances pluriversal entanglements, a conceptual framework that reimagines urban wetland regeneration through a heterogeneous approach grounded in dweller-led epistemologies and praxis, building on insights from an actually existing restoration initiative. Responding to the escalating degradation of urban wetlands amid climate change and exclusionary development, pluriversal entanglements critiques dominant technocratic governance paradigms rooted in colonial legacies and modernist planning. Our argument is that restoration frameworks for southern urban wetlands need to engage with livelihoods, embodiment and commoning as political processes. In conversation with scholarship from decolonial planning, feminist political ecology and critical urban theory, the framework comprises three overlapping lenses: wetland-livelihood assemblages, which explores the socio-ecological labour and material practices through which degraded wetlands are (re)produced; contested commoning, which analyses collective stewardship processes that contest state-centred and market-based models; and embodied knowledges, which factors in how environmental change is differentially experienced, generating situated forms of knowledge and resilience. The article foregrounds the tensions within pluriversal modes of governing as productive spaces for ongoing theory-making and negotiated actions. Emerging from ongoing engagements in the Global South, specifically a wetland restoration initiative, pluriversal entanglements challenges dominant conceptions of urban nature and offers pathways for cultivating multispecies flourishing, climate resilience and social-ecological justice in 21st century urban wetlands.