[ABGESAGT] More-than-protected species: Animals, urban authorities and emerging spatial practices

Abstract

Animals become increasingly urban – due to urban sprawl and because animals nowadays often find better living conditions in cities than in increasingly agro-industrialised rural areas. Beyond these spatial changes, changes in nature conservation laws and policies over the last thirty years have impacted formal urban planning practice toward animals, at least if animals are categorized as protected species. In light of these changes, we aim to find out in how far planning practices, that traditionally relied on a dichotomy between humans and animals are changing toward evolving multispecies entanglements in the sense of granting animals agency in planning and city-making more broadly, and in how far this may concern also animals that fall outside the categorisation as protected species. Our empirical research in the German federal state of North Rhine-Westphalia reveals the ways in which urban planners see, and engage with, animals. We examine 1) in how far planners perceive animals as subjects with own agency and how they differentiate in this regard between different animals in light of changes in planning related legislation. 2) our aim is to reveal how the various concepts of planners and city administrations concerning animals leads to the emergence of distinct spatial practices, and in how far these may reflect cosmopolitical engagements with animals. We find that some spatial practices do indeed reflect new ways of seeing animals as agentic in city-making. However, these mostly remain limited to those animals categorised as protected species. We show that particularly a broader perspective onto spatial practices beyond those enacted with officials explicitly dealing with spatial planning shows how certain species remain excluded from these progressive changes – contradicting the idea of cosmopolitics itself. Finally, we argue that our findings show how a) legislation is effective in influencing everyday planners’ practices and also, partly, the ways they see animals, and b) that instead of differentiating between protected species and others, legislation needs to consider all animals as being with dignity and worth of protection.