Loved, loathed, and livestreamed: Celebrity wildlife as mediated governance objects in urban environments

Urban wildlife are increasingly encountered not only in physical space but through digital media, where individual animals are tracked, named, and narrated by publics in unpredictable ways. This paper examines how such processes produce “celebrity wildlife” and explores their implications for human-wildlife relations and urban governance. Building on work in digital ecologies, we argue that certain animals come to function as mediated governance objects : entities whose visibility and circulation reshape how they are known, valued, and managed. Drawing on a comparative analysis of high-profile cases across multiple cities – Swan Daddy in Malmö, Kataza in Cape Town, Pigzilla in Hong Kong, and Bubi in Helsinki – we show how relatively ordinary animal behaviours become amplified through media and digital infrastructures. These processes generate narrative personhood, foster affective and parasocial relations, and mobilise publics whose engagements extend beyond co-presence. As a result, routine management interventions such as culling or relocation are reframed as moral and political controversies. We identify three dynamics through which digital mediation reconfigures urban human-wildlife relations: the narrative production of animal individuality, the formation of mediated publics, and the ambivalent effects of celebrity in fostering both empathy and polarisation. We argue that urban wildlife governance today unfolds across hybrid spaces-simultaneously material and digital-where the politics of multispecies coexistence are increasingly negotiated.