- An architecture of reciprocity as the basis for institutionalized relationships between animals and human

Feral geese, like other populations of urban animals are either disdained, hunted, or at best ignored. They are not the 'wildlife' that environmentalists heroically seek to protect, and yet they are part of a urbanizing wave of migration that draws 'wild' animals into the urban context for more constant supplies of food, not dissimilar the movement of rural poor into the cities. They make small territorial claims in urban spaces that squeeze between the laws of private property and the remnants of public commons, often taking up accidental and abandoned spaces and somehow surviving in the actual environmental conditions of an urban metropolis. They survive and thrive in spite of the urban design strategies that have never accounted for them. Urban planning reproduces the same inattention to non- humans that information technologies promote. (Sim city does not even include nonhuman inhabitants, unless as a plague, despite their many vital contributions to a functioning urban infrastructure. Mickey mouse despite his wealth has done little for the creatures he represents.)

 

 

 

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