ABSTRACT
That the modern city should be a purified space of human habitation, a humanist citadel, constructed for, and by humanity alone, was an implicit assumption in urban studies until recently. Not surprisingly, Ray Pahl’s Whose City? paid little attention to the non-human world but since then the politics of the ecologically minded and technical city has been populated by more and more instances of our dealings with what Latour calls the ‘extended democracy’ of other species and things. This chapter shows how many natural forces, species, technologies and materialities became entangled in the social, cultural and political lives of contemporary cities; how animals have become important companions to urbanites whose social bonds have fragmented; how animals and objects have been used to signify contested spaces; how they, together with other material objects and forces, enter into dialectical ‘more-than-human’ politics; how they form and embody the values and interests of particular city groups and how they become the focus and voice of otherwise difficult political, moral and ethical values. It shows, in other words, how they have disturbed the politics of the city creating new, more-than-human political interests and movements around their ‘residency’, lines of flight and alliances with humans.
