Event Description
Christian Hunold, PhD, Associate Professor, Deptartment of Politics, Drexel University
Urban Greening: Implications for Human-Wildlife Relations in Philadelphia
Dr. Hunold’s research examines the politics and culture of urban wildlife,
both as means to foster urban wildlife spaces “after nature” and to understand
how the blurring of human and nonhuman worlds is generating new forms of
environmental political engagement. In this paper, he approaches these
questions through the lens of the City of Philadelphia's green stormwater
infrastructure program, Green City, Clean Waters. Installed at city scale and
over several decades, green stormwater infrastructure will add up to an
unprecedented expansion of urban wildlife habitat. Ecologically, cities like
Philadelphia are moving toward a multispecies future. Politically, however, the
nexus between urban greening and wildlife is less straightforward. Are cities teeming with
wildlife also cities for wildlife? How do the professionals
responsible for designing and implementing urban greening initiatives envision
human-wildlife relations? This study investigates how green infrastructure
professionals in Philadelphia make sense of urban wildlife. To what extent do
these experts actively imagine the city as a multispecies space that considers the needs of animal communities alongside
those of the city’s human communities?
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