Zoöpolis
The view of nature from Los Angeles
Jennifer Wolch

Urbanization in the west was based historically on a notion of progress rooted in the conquest and exploitation of nature by culture. The moral compass of city-builders pointed toward the virtues of reason, progress, and profit, leaving wild lands and wild things -as well as people deemed to be wild or "savage" -beyond the scope of their reckoning. Today, the logic of capitalist urbanization still proceeds without regard to nonhuman animal life, except as cash-on-the-hoof headed for slaughter on the "disassembly" line or commodities used to further the cycle of accumulation. Development may be slowed by laws protecting endangered species but you will rarely see the bulldozers stopping to gently place rabbits or reptiles out of harm's way. Paralleling this disregard for nonhuman life, you will find no mention of animals in contemporary urban theory -whether mainstream or Marxist, neoclassical or feminist. The lexicon of mainstream theory, for example, reveals a deep-seated anthropocentrism. Urbanization transforms "empty" land through a process called "development," to produce "improved land" whose developers are exhorted (at least in neoclassical theory) to dedicate it to the "highest and best use." Such language reflects a peculiar perversion of our thinking: wildlands are not "empty" but teeming with nonhuman life; "development" involves a through denaturalization of the environment; “improved land” is invariably impoverished in terms of soil quality, drainage, and vegetation; and judgments of “highest and best use” reflect profit-centered values and interests of humans alone, ignoring not only wild or feral animals but captives such as pets, lab animals, and livestock who live and die in urban space shared with people. Marxian varieties of urban theory are also anthropocentric, setting the “urban” as a human stage for capitalist production, social reproduction of labor, and capital circulation and accumulation. Similarly feminist urban theory, when grounded primarily in socialist and liberal feminism~ (rather than ecofeminism), avoids questions of how patriarchy and gendered social practices shape the fate of animals in the city.

Our theories and practices of urbanization have contributed to disastrous eco- logical effects. Wildlife habitat is being destroyed at record rates as the urban front advances worldwide, driven in the First World by suburbanization and edge-city development, and in the Second and Third Worlds by pursuit of a "catching-up" development model which produces vast rural to urban migration flows and sprawling squatter landscapes. Entire ecosystems and species are threatened, while individual animals crowded out of their homes (or dumped) must risk entry into urban areas in search of food or water, where they encounter people, vehicles and other dangers. The substitution of pets for wild nature in the city has driven an explosion of the urban pet population, polluting urban waterways as well as leading to mass killings of dogs and cats. Isolation of urban people from the domestic animals they eat has distanced them from the horrors and ecological harms of factory farming, and the escalating destruction of rangelands and forests driven by the market's efforts to create/satisfy a lust for meat. For most free creatures, as well as staggering numbers of captives such as pets and livestock, cities imply suffering, death, or extinction.

The aim of this paper is to foreground an urban theory that takes nonhumans seriously. In the first part, I clarify what I mean by "humans" and "animals," and provide a series of arguments suggesting that a transspecies urban theory is necessary to the development of an eco-socialist, feminist, anti-racist urban praxis. Then, in the second Dart, I argue that current considerations of animals and people in the capitalist city (based-on U.S. experience) are strictly limited, and suggest that a transspecies urban theory must be grounded in contemporary theoretical debates regarding urbanization, nature and culture, ecology, and urban environmental action.

Why Animals Matter (Even in Cities)

The rationale for considering animals in the context of urban environmentalism is not transparent. Urban environmental issues traditionally center around the pollution of the city conceived as human habitat, not animal habitat. Thus the various wings of the urban progressive environmental movement have avoided thinking about nonhumans, and have left the ethical as well as pragmatic ecological, political and economic questions regarding animals to be dealt with by those involved in the defense of endangered species or animal welfare. Such a division of labor privileges the rare and the tame, and ignores the lives and living spaces of the large number and variety of animals who dwell in cities. In this section, I argue that even common, everyday animals should matter.

The human-animal divide: a definition

At the outset, it is imperative to clarify what we mean when we talk about "animals" or "nonhumans" on the one hand, and "people" or "humans" on the other. Where does one draw the line between the two, and upon what criteria? This is probably humankind's Ur-question, since the biological, social and psychological construction of what is human depends unequivocally on what is animal. At various times and places particular answers to this Ur-question have gained hegemony. In many parts of the world beliefs in transmogrification or transmigration of souls provide a basis for beliefs in human-animal continuity (or even coincidence). But in the western world animals have for many centuries been defined as fundamentally different and ontologically separate from humans. This is despite the fact that the explicit criteria for establishing the human-animal difference have changed over time (have they souls? can they reason? talk? suffer?). All such criteria have routinely used humans as the standard for judgment. The concern is, can animals do what humans do? rather than can humans do what animals do (breathe in water, simultaneously distinguish 30 different odors, etc.)? Thus judged, animals are inferior beings. Such convictions were widely popularized by Thomas Aquinas and Rene Descartes among others. And although-the Darwinian revolution declared a fundamental continuity among species, humans (or rather white men) still stood firmly astride the apex of the evolutionary chain. Lacking souls or reason, and below humans on the evolutionary scale, animals could still be readily separated from people, objectified and used instrumentally for food, clothes, transportation, company or spare body parts.

Agreement about the human/animal divide has recently collapsed. Critiques of post-Enlightenment science have undermined claims of human-animal discontinuity, and exposed the deeply anthropocentric and androcentric roots of modernist science. Greater understanding of animal thinking and capabilities now reveals the astonishing range and complexity of animal behavior and social life, while studies of human biology and behavior emphasize the similarity of humans to other animals. Claims about human uniqueness have thus been rendered deeply suspicious. Debates about the human-animal divide have also raged as a result of sociobiological discourses about the biological bases for human social organization and behavior, and feminist and anti-racist arguments about the social bases for human differences claimed to be biological. Long held beliefs in the human as social subject and the animal as biological object have thus been destabilized.

My position on the human/animal divide is similar to that of Noske, who like Haraway, Plumwood, and others, argues that "animals do indeed resemble us a great deal" but that their "otherness" must also be recognized by people. This otherness is not simply the result of obvious morphological differences as emphasized by the life sciences; such an emphasis essentializes animals by reducing them to their biological traits alone. This is an unforgivable tactic when directed toward specific categories of people (e.g., women) but somehow deemed perfectly acceptable for animals, despite the misleading conclusions that result. Those who minimize human-animal discontinuity also obliterate animal otherness through the denial of difference. Both extremes are anthropocentric, and deny the possibility that animals as well as people socially construct their worlds and influence each other's worlds; the resulting "animal constructs are likely to be markedly different from ours but may be no less real." Animals have their own realities, their own worldviews - in short, they are subjects not objects.

This position is rarely reflected in eco-socialist, feminist and antiracist practices which have conceptualized "the environment" in one of three ways: (i) as set of scientifically defined biological, geophysical and geochemical assemblages or systems, e.g., biosphere, lithosphere, ecosystem, etc.; (ii) as a stock of "natural resources," the essential medium for human life and source of economic well-being whose quality must therefore (and only therefore) be protected; or (iii) as an active but somehow unitary subject that responds in both predictable and unpredictable (often uncooperative) ways to human interference and exploitation and which must be respected as an independent force with inherent value. The first scientific approach, which denies any subjectivity to nature, is covertly anthropocentric; it predominates in mainstream, managerial environmentalism but also lies at the base of many progressive analyses of urban environmental problems. The second resourcist line of thinking, often embedded in the first approach as a rationale for looking at the urban environment in the first place, is blatantly anthropocentric; it is common not only among reform environmentalists but also in more radical elements of environmentalism including the environmental justice movement. The third approach, often framed in explicitly ecocentric terms, seems an improvement (and in many ways is). But in emphasizing ecological holism it backgrounds interspecific differences among animals (human and nonhuman), as well as the differences between animate and inanimate nature, the latter having subjectivity only in the metaphoric sense or perhaps at the level of atomic particles and other diverse quanta. This view prevails in many strands of green thought offered by deep ecologists scientific Gaians, and environmental historians (reacting to the perceived postmodern relegation of landscape to socially-constructed text). Thus, in most forms of progressive environmentalism, animals have been either objectified and/or backgrounded.

Thinking like a bat: the question of animal standpoints

The recovery of animal subjectivity implies an ethical and political obligation to redefine the urban problematic and to consider strategies for urban praxis from the standpoints of animals. Granting animals subjectivity at a conceptual level is a first step. Even this is apt to be hotly contested by human social groups who have been marginalized and devalued by claims that they are "closer to animals" and hence less intelligent, worthy, or evolved than, say, white males. It may also run counter to those who interpret the granting of subjectivity as synonymous with a granting of rights, and object either to rights-type arguments in general or to animal rights specifically. (A recovery of the animal subject does not imply that animals have rights although the rights argument does hinge on the conviction that animals are subjects of a life.) A more difficult step must be taken if the revalorization of animal subjectivity is to be meaningful in terms of day-to-day practice. We not only have to "think like a mountain" but also to "think like a bat" -somehow overcoming Nagel's classic objection that because bat sonar is not similar to any human sense, it is humanly impossible to answer a question such as "what it is like to be a bat?" Is it impossible to think like a bat? There is a parallel here with the problems raised by standpoint (or multipositionality) theories of knowledge that assert that a variety of individual human differences (such as race, class or gender) so strongly shape experience and thus interpretations of the world, that any suggestion of a single position marginalizes others. For example, the essentialist category "woman" silences differences of race, and in so doing allows the dominant group to create its own master narrative, define a political agenda, and maintain power. Such polyvocality may lead to a nihilistic relativism and a paralysis of political action. But the response cannot be to return to practices of radical exclusion and denial of difference. Instead, we must recognize that individual humans are embedded in social relations and networks with people similar or different, and upon whom their welfare depends. This realization allows for a recognition of kinship but also of difference, since identities are defined not only through seeing that we are similar to others, but that we are also different from them. Using what Haraway terms a "cyborg vision" that allows “partial, locatable, critical knowledge sustaining the possibility of webs of connection called solidarity," we can embrace kinship as well as difference and encourage the emergence of an ethic of respect and mutuality, caring and friendship.

The webs of kinships and differences that shape individual identity involve both humans and animals. It is easy to accept in the abstract that humans depend upon a rich ecology of animal organisms. But there is also a large volume of archeological, paleoanthropological, and psychological evidence suggesting that concrete interactions and interdependence with animal others are indispensable to the development of human cognition, identity and consciousness, and to a maturity which accepts ambiguity, difference and lack of control. In short, animals are not only "good to think" (to borrow a phrase from Levi-Strauss) but indispensable to learning how to think in the first place, and how to relate to other people.

Who are the relevant animal others? Unlike Shepard, who maintains that only wild animals play a role in human ontology, I argue that many sorts of animals matter, including domesticated animals. Domestication has profoundly altered the intelligence, senses, and life ways of creatures such as dogs, cows, sheep and horses, so as to drastically diminish their otherness. So denaturalized, they have come to be seen as part of human culture. But wild animals have been appropriated and denaturalized by people too. This is evidenced by the myriad ways wildlife is commercialized and incorporated into human culture. And like domestic animals, wild animals can be profoundly impacted by human actions, often leading significant behavioral adaptations. Ultimately, the division between wild and domestic must he seen as a permeable social construct; it may be better to conceive of a matrix of animals who vary with respect to the extent of physical or behavioral modification due to human intervention, and types of interaction with people. In such a matrix, animals range from those whose bodies and lifeways remain unaffected by humans and who have no contact with people (a dwindling number of species), to those who are “built-to-suit” and sleep with us under the bedclothes at night. In other cells of the matrix are a host of more ambiguous and complex cases - livestock, feral animals, lab animals, the genetically engineered, “pet” lizards, turtles or tarantulas, and trout from the fish farm.

Our ontological dependency on animals seems to have characterized us as a species since the Pleistocene. Human needs for dietary protein, desires for spiritual inspiration and companionship, and the ever-present possibility of ending up as somebody’s dinner required thinking like an animal. This role of animals in human development can be used as an (anthropomorphic) argument in defense of wildlife conservation or pet-keeping. But my concern is how human dependency on was played out in terms of the patterns of human-animal interactions it precipitated. Did ontological dependency on animals create an interspecies ethic of caring and webs of friendship? Without resurrecting a 1990s version of the Noble Savage - an essentialized indigenous person living in spiritual and material harmony with nature - it is clear that for most of (pre)history, people ate wild animals, tamed them, and kept them captive, but also respected them as kin, friends, teachers, spirits, or gods. Their value lay both in their similarities with and differences from humans. Not coincidentally, most wild animal habitats were also sustained.

Re-enchanting the city: an agenda to bring the animals back in

How can animals play their integral role in human ontology today? How can ethical responses and political practices engendered by the recognition of human-animal kinship and difference be fostered? How can this develop in urban settings where everyday interaction with so many kinds of animals has been eliminated? In the west, many of us interact with or experience animals only by keeping captives of a restricted variety or eating "food" animals sliced into steak, chop and roast. We get a sense of wild animals only by watching Wild Kingdom re-runs or going to Sea World to see the latest in a long string of short-lived "Shamus." In our apparent mastery of urban nature, we are seemingly protected from all nature's dangers but chance losing any sense of wonder and awe for the non-human world. The loss of both humility and the dignity of risk results in a widespread belief in the banality of day-to-day survival.

To allow for the emergence of an ethic, practice and politics of caring for animals and nature, we need to renaturalize cities and invite the animals back in - and in the process re-enchant the city.

I call this renaturalized, re-enchanted city zoöpolis. The reintegration of people with animals and nature in zoöpolis can provide urban dwellers with the local, situated everyday knowledge of animal life required to grasp animal standpoints or ways of being in the world, interact with them accordingly in particular contexts, and motivate political action necessary to protect their autonomy as subjects and their life spaces. Such knowledge would stimulate a thorough rethinking of a wide range of urban daily life practices: not only animal regulation and control practices, but landscaping, development rates and design, roadway and transportation decisions, use of energy, industrial toxics and bioengineering -in short, all practices that impact animals and nature in its diverse forms (e.g., climate, plant life, landforms, etc.). And, at the most personal level, we might rethink eating habits, since factory farms are so environmentally destructive in situ, and the western meat: habit radically increases the rate at which wild habitat is converted to agricultural land worldwide (to say nothing of how one feels about eating cows, pigs, chickens or fishes once they are embraced as kin).

While based in everyday practice like the bioregional paradigm, the zoopolis model differs in including animals and nature in the metropolis rather than relying on an anti-urban spatial fix like small-scale communalism. It also accepts the reality of global interdependence rather than opting for autarky. Moreover, unlike deep ecological visions epistemically tied to a psychologized individualism and lacking in political-economic critique, urban renaturalization is motivated not only by a conviction that animals are central to human ontology in ways that enable the development of webs of kinship and caring with animal subjects, but that our alienation from animals results from specific political-economic structures, social relations, and institutions operative at several spatial scales. Such structures, relations and institutions will not magically change once individuals recognize animal subjectivity, but will only be altered through political engagement and struggle against oppression based on class, race, gender and species.

Beyond the city, the zoopolis model serves as a powerful curb on the contradictory and colonizing environmental politics of the west as practiced both in the west itself and as inflicted on other parts of the world. For example, wildlife reserves are vital to prevent species extinction. But because they are "out there," remote from urban life, reserves can do nothing to alter entrenched modes of economic organization and associated consumption practices that hinge on continual growth and make reserves necessary In the first place. The only modes of life that the reserves change of subsistence peoples who suddenly find themselves alienated from their traditional economic base and further immiserated. But an interspecific ethic of caring replaces dominionism to create urban regions where animals are neither incarcerated, killed, nor sent off to live in wildlife prisons but instead are valued neighbors and partners in survival. This ethic links urban residents with peoples elsewhere in the world who have evolved ways of both surviving and sustaining the forests, streams, and diversity of animal Iives, and enjoins their struggles.

Figure 1. A trans-species urban theory.

The western myth of a pristine arcadian wilderness, imposed with imperial impunity on those places held hostage to the International Monetary Fund and World Bank in league with powerful international environmental organizations, is trumped by a post-colonial politics and practice that begins at home with animals in the city.

Ways of Thinking Animals in the City

An agenda for renaturalizing the city and bringing animals back in should be  developed with an awareness of the impacts of urbanization on animals in the capitalist city, how urban residents think about and behave toward animal life, the ecological adaptations made by animals to urban conditions, and current practices and politics arising around urban animals. The goal is to understand capitalist urbanization in a globalizing economy and what it means for animal life; how and why patterns of human-animal interactions change over time and space; urban animal ecology as science, social discourse, and political economy; and transspecies urban practice shaped by managerial plans and grassroots activism. Figure 1 lays out a metatheoretical heuristic device that links together the disparate discourses of the transpecies urban problematic.