The Multispecies Metropolis: Anthropological Ruminations on Bestial Urbanism

Human-animal co-habitation is a fact of urban existence, yet animals are illegible in the contemporary American city. As climate change, development, and other planetary forces disturb the more-than-human dynamics of cities, often gravely, anthropological pedagogy must go beyond rehearsing urbanicity as a strictly human quality. This article ruminates on an interdisciplinary experiment in teaching the animal city through a local project in design anthropology that coupled ethnographic fieldwork and speculative design. By empirically studying how the built environment unevenly mediates human and animal livelihoods and relations, students uncovered the possibilities of alternative architectures for nonhumans and curated them in a public design exhibition. Through research-based action, this course cultivated a body of dispositions in students that did not just expose the city's animals but oriented them to the pursuit of multispecies justice—an ethico-aesthetic praxis that I style as "bestial urbanism."