Cities are increasingly becoming a multispecies landscape, but with human forces most dominant, the question of how humans value urban nature arises for a more harmonious cohabitation. This thesis explores how passionate immersion in wild urban nature can shift human valuation of wild urban nature towards more relational and intrinsic perspectives. Building on multispecies theory and plural valuation frameworks, a measuring framework was developed that operationalizes passionate immersion through indicators of attention, affect, and care intersecting with instrumental, relational, and intrinsic values. Fifteen participants in Amsterdam engaged in a “Multispecies Safari”, a set of activities designed to foster attentive and affective interactions with more-than-human urban species to understand what their agency meant to them. Qualitative analysis of journals and interviews before, during, and after the activities revealed that participants became more aware of the presence of other urban species, experiencing a stronger relational connection to nature. While instrumental and relational values were initially dominant, participants increasingly expressed plural valuations, acknowledging instrumental, relational, and, to a lesser extent, intrinsic values, following their immersive experiences. However, challenges emerged in communicating posthuman concepts, and language barriers limited the understanding and explicit articulation of intrinsic values, as well as the formation of reciprocal more-than-human relationships. The results suggest that passionate immersion can catalyze shifts in human-nature relationships within short timeframes, although a deeper and longer-term engagement may be necessary to foster more fundamental transformations toward pluricentric thinking. This thesis contributes a novel, empirically tested operationalization of passionate immersion, offering a practical tool for researchers and planners interested in making explicit the values beyond instrumental utility in multispecies entanglements. ... Read more

The Netherlands has created a large nitrogen pollution problem in its soils, which is harming biodiversity. By intensifying and industrialized farming, by importing animal feed for dairy production and fertilizer for crop farming, too much nitrogen has accumulated in the soil. Consequently, ecological processes are disturbed due to eutrophication (over-feeding of nutrients), from which only a few species profit, causing other species to lose the competition and cease, with detrimental effects on reliant other species.
This project explores how this intensive/industrial farming can be substituted by more sustainable alternatives in which creating and maintaining biodiversity is key. An alternative system is proposed based on the spatial intergrading between cities and protected natural areas with typologies that focus on balancing food production and biodiversity creation. This alternative system is then detailed concerning the small-scale effects it has, the necessary process of policy creation and the necessary systemic changes as preconditions for a successful execution. The transformation design is developed along a framework of values which are reflecting on current best practices in the discipline of urbanism touching on issues of planetary boundaries, justice and transitional thinking.
Our key takeaways are to keep the city and adjacent areas productive, close to where consumption of goods is high but also where functions like education and food markets can be sensibly integrated. Further from the city and closer to already biodiverse and protected areas of the Nature Network Netherlands (NNN), the gradient leans more towards focussing on the creation of biodiversity. Humans and non-human species can find their thriving space on the gradient, food production is still an integral part as well. By creating a system in which farmers are working together, and are guided to create this balance on their farms and are paid for their efforts and the services they provide to society, they can be encouraged to change their farming practices for the better. ... Read more