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However, the tension is technical, of course, but is more a crisis of what we consider plausible. It would seem absurd to many of us to imagine a future where GDP ceases to be the primary measure of urban success within 15 years, or where a high-rise district is governed not by property management firms but by a multispecies council. These scenarios feel "unbearable" or "implausible" because our current mental frameworks are deeply dependent on the statu quo. We are trapped in a binary logic that treats nature and the city as distinct entities, limiting our capacity to imagine truly sustainable urban futures. This article posits that the tension between density and greening is an ontopolitical challenge (Blaser, 2013;Cadena, 2015). Ontopolitics differs from the sociology of imagination in that it does not primarily concern how futures are envisioned, but how realities are constituted (Blaser, 2010). While urban political ecology interrogates the political-economic production of socio-natures (Swyngedouw and Heynen, 2003), it often retains a shared ontology of "nature" and "society" as analytical categories. An ontopolitical approach instead foregrounds conflicts over the very existence and status of entities within urban governance, asking not merely who controls green space, but whether green space is understood as infrastructure, commons, habitat, or political subject. This ontological shift has material consequences for planning instruments, institutional design, and regulatory frameworks. The challenge, therefore, is not simply to insert plants into high-rises, which is a practice that often devolves into 'greenwashing', but mostly to fundamentally reconfigure our relationship with the biosphere. We must shift from a paradigm of domination and management to one of cohabitation and resonance (Rosa, 2021), and in doing so, move from merely "probable" futures to genuinely transformative "possible" ones.The limits of technocratic green urbanism typesIn response to climate change, cities worldwide have adopted the language of 'Nature-based Solutions' (NbS) and 'Green Infrastructure' (GI) (Kabisch et al., 2016). I do not dismiss these efforts entirely; they represent a necessary first step. Yet, while these frameworks have successfully mainstreamed environmental concerns into planning, they remain largely technocratic. They tend to operationalise nature as a service provider -filtering air, reducing heat islands, or managing stormwater -essentially rendering the non-human world into a subset of municipal infrastructure (Heynen et al., 2006). This instrumental view has significant limitations. Firstly, it obscures the agency of non-human life, treating trees, waterways, and soils as passive objects to be arranged for human utility. Secondly, by quantifying nature primarily through metrics of efficiency and ecosystem services, it fails to account for the qualitative, affective, and relational dimensions of human-nature interactions.Most critically, these technocratic solutions represent what I call "probable futures"-futures derived from mathematical models and statistical projections of the present. They are safe bets. They fit into existing economic spreadsheets. But because they do not challenge the underlying power dynamics, they often lead to 'green gentrification' (Anguelovski et al., 2018). When green spaces are designed as amenities to increase property value rather than as essential commons, they displace vulnerable communities, effectively creating green enclaves for the wealthy while pushing the poor into grey, dense margins. A dense and green city achieved through technocratic means may be "probable" in our current economic model, but it is profoundly unjust.It has become a truism in recent years to say that we, in late capitalism, lack the imagination to solve these crises. The aphorism "It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism," often attributed to Fredric Jameson or Mark Fisher, is frequently cited to diagnose our paralysis. But is this truly a failure of imagination? I argue it is not. Imagination is a cognitive capacity we all use constantly: when we interpret the feelings of others ("mind-reading"), when we daydream, or when we strategize (Gosetti-Ferencei, 2023;Matherne, 2024). To say we cannot imagine is to say we cannot think. We can easily imagine a city that is a lush, vertical forest where humans and animals cohabit. Artists do it every day.The real deficit lies in plausibility and credibility. We lack the ability to generate proposals that are not just imaginative but socially and economically believable. Plausibility, derived from the Latin plausibilis, related to applause, suggests something that commands approval because it resonates with common sense. Our current "common sense," forged by decades of neoliberal urbanism, tells us that a truly dense, ecological city is "impossible" because it violates the laws of the market.We are stuck navigating between two poles: the "probable future" (more of the same, with slightly better technology) and the "impossible future" (utopian visions we dismiss as fantasy). To build a dense and green city, we must inhabit the uncomfortable middle ground of the "plausible possible." This requires us to stretch our "credibility horizons." We must construct new imaginaries, socially accepted models of reality, that make the radical integration of nature and density feel not just desirable, but viable. This is why the technocratic approach is so seductive; it requires no stretch of plausibility. It fits the model. To move beyond it, we need "epistemic pluralism", we need to validate other ways of knowing and being that make the "impossible" seem achievable.To transcend these limitations, we must approach urban re-naturing as an ontopolitical practice.Ontopolitics refers to the conflicts over 'what implies what', or fundamentally, what constitutes reality (Blaser, 2013). An ontopolitical approach recognises that the 'city' is not a singular, fixed reality but a 'pluriverse' (Escobar, 2018) composed of multiple, overlapping worlds (Descola, 2024).In this view, density is not just a measure of people per square kilometre, but a measure of relational intensity. A dense city is a site of intense entanglement between humans, animals, plants, and microbes. Re-naturing, therefore, becomes a project of acknowledging and nurturing these entanglements. It is about creating a "credible future" where non-humans are citizens, not furniture.Table 1 contrasts the prevailing technocratic approach (the "probable") with the proposed ontopolitical framework (the "plausible possible"), highlighting the shift required to genuinely integrate density and biodiversity. Introduce biodiversity-as-habitat criteria into existing Green Infrastructure (GI) frameworks; recognize ecological corridors in zoning maps.Nature as resource, infrastructure, ecosystem service, or amenity.Nature as co-inhabitant, agent, and political presence; relational entity.Expand Environmental Impact Assessments (EIA) to include habitat continuity and speciesspecific design requirements.Primacy of scientific-technical expertise; quantitative metrics dominate.Epistemic pluralism: integration of technical, local, Indigenous, experiential, and maintenance-based knowledges.Institutionalize participatory design charrettes; formalize community stewardship input in statutory planning reviews.Short-to-medium term project cycles; performance metrics tied to funding cycles.Long-term relational continuity; intergenerational and ecological time horizons.Require 20-30-year maintenance and stewardship plans attached to development approvals.Top-down management; siloed departments; commandand-control regulation.Living Efficiency, climate mitigation/adaptation, aesthetic improvement, economic value capture.Multispecies flourishing, relational wellbeing, justicecentred cohabitation.Integrate anti-displacement provisions into green redevelopment projects; attach social equity conditions to density bonuses.Green is added to density as compensation (green roofs, vertical forests).Density redefined as ecological intensity and relational complexity; city as ecosystem.Incentivize habitat-integrated façades, permeable surfaces, and soil restoration within density allowances.Distributional focus (who gets access to green space?); risk of green gentrification.Procedural, recognitional, and interspecies justice; right to the city for humans and non-humans.Embed anti-eviction covenants and community land trusts into green masterplans; require social impact assessment alongside environmental assessment.Green space increases property value; market-aligned sustainability.Commons-based stewardship; maintenance as public good; care economy orientation.Reallocate municipal budgets from capital-intensive flagship parks to distributed maintenance funds; experiment with commons-based zoning overlays.Flagship projects; iconic parks; master-planned ecodistricts.Distributed micro-ecologies; interstitial spaces; everyday maintenance practices.Fund small-scale pilot projects; adopt tactical urbanism strategies tied to biodiversity outcomes.Designer and regulator of space.Facilitator of relationships; mediator of multispecies negotiation.Introduce ecological literacy and care ethics training in planning departments.Carbon sequestration, heat reduction, cost-benefit ratios. Green is 'added' to density (e.g., green walls, roof gardens) as compensation.Density is redefined as ecological complexity; the city is a dense ecosystem itself.Distributional access (who gets the park?). Risk of green gentrification.Procedural and Recognitional Justice. Right to the city for humans and non-humans; antidisplacement focus.Standardised street trees, manicured corporate plazas, vertical forests as luxury assets.Community gardens, re-wilded commons, vernacular landscapes, spontaneous vegetation, porous boundaries.The distinction between probable, plausible, and possible futures is not merely semantic. Each corresponds to a different mode of governance rationality. They expand what governing bodies consider credible without severing ties to operational reality. If we accept the ontopolitical premise, the governance of urban space must evolve. We need to move from managing 'green infrastructure' to practicing 'living governance'. This concept draws on the work of multispecies urbanism (Wolch, 2002;Houston et al., 2018), suggesting that governance is not just a human affair but a negotiation with the more-than-human world.Living governance implies a shift from construction to maintenance and care (Tronto, 1993). In a dense city, space is scarce. Large, pristine parks may not always be feasible. Instead, the focus shifts to the 'interstices'-the cracks in the pavement, the balconies, the verges, and the shared courtyards.These are the sites of potential cohabitation. To make this vision plausible, we must stop dismissing "maintenance" as a lesser activity than "innovation." We are obsessed with the new, with the groundbreaking. Yet, a dense and green city is realised not through grand masterplans alone but through millions of micro-interactions of care. It is about the "potency" of the small scale-the potential of a seed to become a tree, or a community group to steward a street corner.This framework challenges the planner to become a facilitator of relationships rather than just a designer of spaces. It asks: How does this high-rise development facilitate bird migration? How does this density allowance respect the soil microbiome? And crucially, how do we ensure that the working-class residents who maintain these green spaces can afford to live there? Without addressing justice, our green futures remain implausible to most urban dwellers.5Can a city be dense and green? The answer is yes. But we will never reach that destination if we rely solely on the tools that built the grey city. We cannot "engineer" our way out of an ontological crisis.The conflict between density and biodiversity is a product of our own limiting ontologies and our crisis of plausibility. We have allowed our sense of the possible to be colonized by what is merely probable. By adopting a perspective rooted in ontopolitical transformation, we can see density as an opportunity for intense, rich cohabitation-a "zoöpolis" where the rights of animals and plants to the city are recognised alongside our own (Wolch, 2002).This requires a courageous departure from comfortable metrics. It demands that we embrace the messiness of biology and the complexity of social justice. We must dare to propose futures that today seem "unbearable" to the status quo-futures where GDP is irrelevant, where weeds are citizens, and where care is the primary currency. A dense and green city is not a final static product to be achieved, but a continuous, negotiated process of learning to live together. It is a pluriverse where many worlds fit. Let us have the courage to make it plausible.