More-Than-Human Urban Foraging: Designing Landscapes for Multispecies Sustainability in Shrinking Urban Japan

Can a city be turned into a more-than-human feast? Edible landscapes are increasingly valued for their multiple socio-ecological benefits. Here we propose that making the urban fabric fertile grounds for foraging by humans, birds, bees, and other inhabitants alike expands the potential of edible cities as a paradigm for sustainability transformations to answer recent calls in sustainability research for meeting more-than-human needs. To this end, we reflect on ongoing landscape design research across shrinking Japanese cities: (1) a multispecies community garden concept, (2) bird and pollinator-oriented edible restoration of vacant lots, (3) wild-keeping of Japanese honeybees in urban contexts as entry to multispecies landscape stewardship.