Animals in cities

The urban is bustling with life. Cattle are being embroiled in conflicts over streets.  Dogs are emerging as public health concerns.  Macaques contest what it means to be a denizen.  A body of work in geography and the wider social sciences is beginning to animate the city and is at the cusp of reworking urban theory.  These pose radical questions of urban habitus (Barua & Sinha, 2017), mobility (Lulka, 2013), economy (Hovorka, 2008), biopolitics (Howell, 2015) and planning (Metzger, 2014), not solely through the logics of modernity and design, but as co-fabrications between lively bodies and the built environment.  In an analogous vein, biologists are beginning to show how cities have become sites of evolution (Schilthuizen, 2019), ecologists signal the flourishing, even abundance, of life within built environments (Francis & Chadwick, 2012), and ethologists herald novel animal behaviours that emerge in response to anthropogenic urban regimes (Sinha & Mukhopadhyay, 2013).