Weeds, Pheasants and Wild Dogs: Resituating the Ecological Paradigm in Postindustrial Detroit

Abstract

The Chicago School of urban sociology has been criticized for its over‐reliance on organic and ecological metaphors. We propose that a useful updated integration of urban sociology and ecology could be achieved with the aid of complementary concepts, such as patch dynamics and assemblage, from both fields. In this exploratory article, we draw on more than 50 qualitative interviews conducted with residents of three different Detroit neighborhoods, together with field observations, photographs and documentary evidence, to examine both actual and metaphorical references to the natural world. We consider allusions to ‘drug infestation’ as well as other references to territorialization processes and associations with plants and animals that emerged out of our interviews and interactions with neighborhood residents. In conclusion, we maintain that social science may have much to learn from contemporary ecological research, and that a resituated ecological paradigm would challenge and benefit contemporary urban research.

Animals and urban gentrification: Displacement and injustice in the trans-species city

“…The ‘NIMBY’ anxiety that incoming gentrifiers voice about rats mirrors the anxieties they can express about the other feral or stray urban inhabitants thought to pose a threat to the cleanliness of ‘their’ neighbourhood (see Baker et al, 2020; Draus and Roddy, 2018; Mayorga-Gallo, 2018). Various forms of avian life can be included here, with pigeons a particularly efficient but unwelcome transgressor of socio-spatial order (Jerolmack, 2008).…”

Lurking in the bushes: informality, illicit activity and transitional green space in Berlin and Detroit

“…Simone and Pieterse 78 offer a conception of the city as a series of interpolated folds of legitimate and illegitimate spaces connected by everyday practices that meshes well with contemporary urban ecological theorizing which sees cities as composed of diverse interconnected patches. 79 The formal and the informal cities are woven together. Informality and weediness similarly resist and work around systems of control, and in some cases they may enable them, breaking the ground or providing rationale for the state to step in.…”

Urban political ecology: a critical reconfiguration

“…There is clearly scope to extend an urban political ecology framework towards the ethical and biopolitical dimensions to the treatment of non-human others. The mass slaughter of animals, for instance, along with food processing industries, often occurs at or near the urban fringe, and poses a series of ethical as well as epidemiological questions (see, for example, Emel and Neo, 2015; Pachirat, 2011). The intersections between capitalist agriculture and the reconstruction of peri-urban food processing landscapes, along with elaborate infrastructure systems for the shipping of live animals, all form part of a natural focus for a critical political ecology of diet and nutrition (see, for example, Otter, 2020).…”