ancient cities

inquiry and were increasingly available in urban
centers and port cities. Exotic animals brought
from trading and military expeditions in the classical
period had stimulated similar curiosity, filling
menageries and the gladiatorial ring after the rise
of urbanization in antiquity rendered encounters
with wild animals a novelty.
In the nineteenth century, the urban public in
Europe and New World societies such as Australia
began to encounter wild and exotic animals in
zoological gardens. The modern urban zoo, evolved
from rationalist Enlightenment era ideals of scientific
understandings of nature, facilitated the study
of animals and expanded access beyond a purely
scientific audience. The institution has been subjected
to critical inquiry over the ideas about and
relations with animals that it has communicated to
its legions of urban visitors. The representation of
zoo animals is implicated in informing incomplete
or inaccurate understandings about animal behaviors,
biological needs, and emotional lives, and
scholars have read the act of displaying animals as
communicating human difference from and power
over the displayed animals and their wild counterparts
as well.
In increasingly multicultural, multiethnic urban
regions, human relations with both wild and
domestic animals are defined by diverse and sometimes
controversial cultural animal attitudes and
practices. Recent studies of immigrant and minority
ethnic groups have concluded that culture and
immigrant experiences inform attitudes about animals;
that ideas about appropriate uses of particular
animals as food, in sport, in ritual, and as pets
differ across culture groups; and that particular
animals act as ties to countries and cultures of origin
for some immigrant groups. Some ethnic
groups experience racialization through their animal
practices, as controversial practices are used to
“other” and denigrate that group.
Urbanization practices have effected sweeping
changes in animal geographies, and conversely,
movements to exclude or incorporate certain
groups of animals into cities sometimes precipitate
significant changes in urban form and society. The
encircling of classical and medieval cities with
walls offered protection from invading armies, but
it also assuaged the fear of wild animals and wilderness
that dominated medieval mentalities. As towns
(re)fortified—and as land cultivation, hunting, and
Zoöpolis
979
the persecution of predators decimated wildlife in
Europe—urban animal encounters became characterized
by domestic animals. Centuries later, with
movements to exclude productive animals from
Western cities, urban functions and environments
again changed. The nineteenth-century urban landscape
was sterilized of animal bodies and beastly
encounters, as livestock and animal product industries
were displaced to the countryside.
Contemporary urban industrial–agricultural sectors
and the move toward keeping productive
animals in urban households throughout the world
represent another animal-based reconstitution of
urban spaces and economies. Land rezoning, the
appearance of structures for animal keeping, and
changes in the numbers of workers or households
sustained by the production of animal bodies and
products comprise some of the palpable changes to
urban form and life. Urban conservation practices
intended to rectify the effects of capitalist urbanization
on wildlife species and ecosystem processes—
such as maintaining wildlife corridors and restoring
native vegetation—represent other urban landscape
changes that demonstrate the role of human–
animal relations in changing urban form and
function.
The rethinking of human–animal–environment
relations within the academy has stimulated the
development of new methodological approaches
to the study of urban wildlife ecology. A conservation
biology paradigm has characterized most
urban wildlife research since the recognition of
human-dominated landscapes as important sites
for conservation. Recently, the development of
novel and nonpositivist methodologies to improve
understandings of urban wildlife ecologies has
been the goal of some research on both common
urban animals and species of conservation concern.
Perspectives on the co-constitution of avian
foraging ecology by avian and human actants
reveal how bird–bird and human–bird interactions
create urban opportunities for single birds and
entire species, suggesting that human–animal relational
geographies are an important component of
wildlife ecologies in urban landscapes. Other
research includes experimental forays into different
ways of sensing and knowing urban wildlife, to
inform a politics for urban wilds that is more true
to wild inhabitants than current conservation
practices and laws, which do not contemplate the