Chapter 13: Being a voice of nature in urban transformations

The transformation process needed to achieve the symbiotic city requires a whole subset of transformative changes in cities. These range from re-embedding cities in the biotic and abiotic foundations of water, soil and organisms to building new institutional, technical, circular and socio-ecological networks in the city. Examples of these transformative practices have been described in the previous chapters with case studies in which people express different voices of nature. First, they point to the importance of the agency of urban actors, i.e. their ability to change existing urban practices in symbiotic ones. Second, they stress the importance of new networks, including governance arrangements that favour nature-based thinking. Third, economics needs to be re-embedded into society and ecology, resulting in new economic narratives that embrace nature. Finally, the inclusion of all people and their expressions of the values of nature as well as their heterogeneous knowledge is central to enforcing the transformations. Grouped in six categories of citizens, businesses, NGOs, corporates, municipalities and knowledge organisations, actors can work together on the transformation to make the symbiotic city happen. In this chapter we introduce these actors and we address the challenges that every type of actor can work on starting from tomorrow, from strategic, to tactical, to operational and reflexive activities that can be performed to become a voice of nature in urban transformations.