Animating the urban: between infrastructure and encounter

Abstract

Cities play an increasingly crucial role in addressing the accelerating planetary biodiversity crisis. In this special issue, the authors offer generative tools grounded in an other-than-human standpoint inviting us to “think cities” differently. They re-examine the right to the city and a more-than-human commons; evaluate why and when species become “killable”; and rethink territoriality, attending to the ways other-than humans make and remake cities. They reconceptualize the urban as an ecological formation, entangling cultivated, feral and wild systems of governance. They explore policies that fix our views of other-than-humans, and enlist them in human conflicts, disavowing the fluidity of animal lives. They expose the ways other-than-humans suffer disastrous consequences of urban greening policies when not taken into account. Together they demonstrate why urban theorists, must take as starting point Levi-Strauss’ ([1971]. Totenism. Beacon Press, p. 89) admonition that “animals are good to think [with].”.