We plan to publish a volume of essays on the forms of animal life that take hold in cities, and how we might engage in probiotic urban practices in order to enhance such life.
The volume will explore how urban residents from varied species relate to the landscape and each other, and how human understandings of such entanglements might make us better companions to our co-inhabitants through policy, planning, design, and other practices. While the framework of the book draws on urban theory, animal studies, and political ecology, we are interested here in the details of animal life at all levels, from individuals to groups to species, as well as their myriad interactions in the urban context.
We seek contributions from established and emerging scholars, as well as artists, journalists, and essayists, that tell multiple stories from around the world--not only stories about how humans shape and are shaped by other species in the daily course of urban living, but also about urban animal life per se--that is, the ensembles, interactions, terrains, fields of action, and metabolic processes of creatures that dwell in the city.
