Planning in the shadow of extinction: Carnaby’s Black cockatoos and urban development in Perth, Australia

This paper explores the shifting ecological proximities of urban-human-animal relations in Perth via a story of Carnaby’s Black Cockatoos, urban planning and extinction. The story is framed around a challenge and a provocation. The challenge, calls for a deeper consideration of urban planning in the shadow of extinction. Such a consideration involves two entangled elements: a deepening ethical and practical engagement with diverse urban lifeforms and temporalities; and an exploration of the more-than-human communities that emerge, are threatened or made possible in extinction’s shadows. The provocation, involves asking questions about what kinds of responses to extinction in urban contexts are desirable, or even possible? The paper experiments with the concept of planning in and with ‘ethical time’ as one way of thinking about how commitments to urban nature and urban justice might be re-imagined in a time of mass extinction. With the help of Carnaby’s Black Cockatoos, I argue that planning multispecies cities requires re-setting coordinates for ethical decision-making, coordinates that are embedded in the rhythms, knots and relations of ecological time and in the responsibilities involved with living in more-than-human urban communities of difference.