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This paper positions the now-redundant Australian Renew Newcastle scheme for temporary building occupation as an example of ‘meanwhile use’: the UK term for the sanctioned short-term use of vacant urban properties awaiting redevelopment. Renew Newcastle was a direct response to the very particular urban conditions of its regional host city, yet its approach reflects the increasing normalisation of temporary urban tenure as a technique of urban renewal. From late 2008 until early 2019, it populated the regional city’s vacant shopfronts and offices with arts and cultural activities using 28-day occupation licenses. Renew Newcastle’s successes were widely lauded and contributed to the city’s 2011 recognition as one of the world’s top ten global tourist destinations (Lonely Planet, 2011). The paper situates Renew Newcastle’s approach within the historical continuum of spatial practices extending from the twentieth-century radical grassroots form of UK ‘licensed squatting’ through to more recent for-profit examples. It also highlights the differential impacts and implications of commercial and non-commercialised forms of meanwhile use to reinforce their interdependency with wider urban renewal policies processes and conditions — radical or otherwise.

© 2017, © The Author(s) 2017. Much planning theory has been undergirded by an ontological exceptionalism of humans. Yet, city planning does not sit outside of the eco-social realities co-producing the Anthropocene. Urban planners and scholars, therefore, need to think carefully and critically about who speaks for (and with) the nonhuman in place making. In this article, we identify two fruitful directions for planning theory to better engage with the imbricated nature of humans and nonhumans is recognised as characteristic of the Anthropocene – multispecies entanglements and becoming-world. Drawing on the more-than-human literature in urban and cultural geography and the environmental humanities, we consider how these terms offer new possibilities for productively rethinking the ontological exceptionalism of humans in planning theory. We critically explore how planning theory might develop inclusive, ethical relationships that can nurture possibilities for multispecies flourishing in diverse urban futures, the futures that are increasingly recognised as co-produced by nonhuman agents in the context of climate variability and change. This, we argue, is critical for developing climate-adaptive planning tools and narratives for the creation of socially and environmentally just multispecies cities.

Cosmopolitical action in a climate-changed city represents different knowledges and practices that may seem disconnected but constellate to frame stories and spaces of a climate-just city. The question this article asks is: how might we as planners identify and develop counter-hegemonic praxes that enable us to re-imagine our experience of, and responses to, climate change? To explore this question, we draw on Isabelle Stengers's (2010) idea of cosmopolitics-where diverse stories, perspectives, experiences, and practices can connect to create the foundation for new strategic possibilities. Our article is empirically informed by conversations with actors from three Australian cities (Sydney, Brisbane, and Perth) who are mobilizing different approaches to this ideal in various grassroots actions on climate change.