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Abstract

Chinese

In Birmingham, a badger visits me each evening outside my front door. Five years later, a fox meets me on a city street at 5 am. Two years after that, walking along the city’s canals, my eyes lock with a heron’s. A year later, a eucalyptus tree becomes my shade and respite in a disturbed city. Months later, as I get ready to leave the city, I encounter a group of parakeets. In this paper, I ask how these seemingly disparate encounters and relationships are intimately connected as part of Birmingham’s urban ecologies and larger stories of urban regeneration – and its consequences for thriving and precarious life in the city. I argue that the tension between thriving and precarity in Birmingham (and cities like it) results from new exertions of control whilst urban dwellers establish new forms of more-than-human urban cohabitation. The stories in this paper, relating to different non-human lives caught up in Birmingham’s transformation into a neoliberal city, demonstrate that serious consideration of more-than-human theory and experience is essential to the future of urban studies scholarship.

Keywords

environment/sustainability inequality more-than-human urban theory public space redevelopment/regeneration social justice urban ecologies

Introduction

On the 31st January 2015, mourners gather to pay their respects to Birmingham’s central library, the demolition of which was believed to be imminent. Here was a building that provoked both love and hatred. To the council, it was a bleak relic of darker times, the epitome of everything the city had to leave behind. But to others, it was a treasure trove, a civic triumph, testament to a post war promise of a better world. (Howlett, 2020)

So opens Paradise Lost, a film about the final days of the brutalist landmark that stood over Birmingham from 1974 to 2016. The director, Andy Howlett, contends that ‘in a world where neoliberalism has taken over and the people have forgotten the promises of their Modernist forebearers, [this] one building stood as a testament to the promise of Paradise’ (Howlett, 2020: np). The film follows the loss of the library amidst the wider civic area – Paradise – being sold off to private investors. Towards the end of the film, the audience are taken on an ethereal descent into the ruins of the Central Library, ending in a hidden nook sprung with bright flowers and bees. In the eaves of this condemned building, a secret urban ecology had flourished.

Paradise has since been regenerated into a place ‘where commerce and culture come together in harmony’ (Paradise, nd: np), with shiny buildings home to professional services firm Price water house Coopers and outposts of London’s famous restaurants. The developers claim Paradise is an ‘innovative modern landmark for Birmingham’ (Beavan, 2021: np), on the ruins of its brutalist predecessor. In June 2021, Paradise ‘welcomed 80,000 new inhabitants’ (Beavan, 2021: np) when bees were installed in two colonies in private areas of the development. The hives were ‘installed as part of an ecology-led initiative to bring more wildlife to the development and encourage a greater diversity of insects in this part of the city centre’ (Beavan, 2021: np). The hard-working bees are being employed in the regeneration of the city, intended to symbolise community (Wilson, 2001), producing ecological value for the city’s investors (Kallis and Swyngedouw, 2018).

The new Paradise aids flows of capital through the city (Atkinson, 2020). The bees, brought in as commodified urban nature (Strohmayer, 2006), may seem inconsequential to Birmingham’s story but the Paradise bees represent concurrent and contradictory states of more-than-human thriving and precarity in the city’s neoliberal regeneration. They are emblematic of a changing relationship between urban regeneration and non-human life from antagonistic to friendlier neoliberal expressions (Han, 2017).

As urban studies scholars embrace multispecies flourishing (Connolly, 2020) and the more-than-human city (Gandy and Jasper, 2020), this paper contends that the governance of non-human life in Birmingham is at once thriving and precarious, shaped by and entangled with neoliberal forces of regeneration. Specifically, I use story-methods to eke out the complexity of urban cohabitation: from bees being brought in to boost ‘eco’ credentials to unusual interlopers like the urban badger and the role of trees in small ecologies of the city (Quastel, 2009). This paper argues that the tension between thriving and precarity in Birmingham (and cities like it) results from new exertions of control whilst urban dwellers establish new forms of more-than-human urban cohabitation (Srinivasan, 2019).

This paper looks at how – and why – non-human life has been caught up in the city’s recent transformations, beginning with a history of Birmingham’s regeneration, making a case for its specific contemporary neoliberal nature. This is followed by a methods section. Five empirical sections follow, focusing on a badger, a fox, two herons, a eucalyptus tree and a flock of urban parakeets, and their connection with changing urban life. In the conclusion, these stories are weaved into a discussion of the extension and transformation of neoliberal power and its thriving and precarious impacts in the more-than-human city.

Birmingham: A brief history of the ‘neoliberal’ city

Birmingham is sprawling under the 20-year Big City Plan, introduced in 2010, which has plans to expand the city to five times its current size (Birmingham City Council, 2010). The current regime of regeneration falls under this plan. But this is far from the first time that Birmingham has been regenerated. In this section, I offer a brief history of Birmingham’s regeneration since the 1970s through a lens of green gentrification (Gould and Lewis, 2016) that encourages (some) non-human urban life to thrive.

Ongoing regenerations of Birmingham have re-invented Birmingham as an ‘entrepreneurial landscape’ in the 1990s (Hubbard, 1996); a 2000s ‘information city’ (Webster, 2001); a 2010s ‘innovative’ city (Lorne, 2020); and most recently a ‘creative’ city (Perry et al., 2015). This continual reinvention offers opportunities for neoliberal capital expansion through embedding competition, deregulation and privatisation. The revitalisation of Birmingham has relied on place-marketing, ‘centred on the development of flagship projects intended to (re)position the city and promote its potential for investment’ (Hubbard, 2004: 667). ‘Entrepreneurial governance’ (Hall and Hubbard, 1996) relies on partnerships between public governance and private investment, something Birmingham has seen repeatedly. The neoliberal city is protective of these new flows of capital (Kaika, 2004), introducing new forms of social control and surveillance (Coleman, 2004). In Birmingham, this surveillance has a distinctly racial aim with punitive effects (Isakjee and Allen, 2013). The ‘neoliberal city’ is defined by its flows of capital, but also the effects and forms of those flows – which are not confined to humans.

Birmingham has long been a city of consumption, from Chamberlain’s Victorian city plans, to the modernist motor city of the mid-20th century, to today’s ‘gentrified public urbanity’ (Parsons, 2004: 28). But the neoliberal era marks a distinct turn. Birmingham ‘swallowed the entrepreneurial pill’ (Ward, 2003: 205) in the 1970s, as the city was hit by post-industrial decline, and the council restructured the city centre to attract ‘private sector investments’ (Hatcher, 2015: np), successfully attracting office-based investment in the city centre (although they declined elsewhere). The council worked with private companies to build and manage the National Exhibition Centre and the International Convention Centre that now sit at one end of the Paradise development. In the early 1990s, the council stated that they had spent seven years ‘pursu[ing] a strategy for regenerating Birmingham, which has involved attracting private investment into the city, which has led to a change in image from a provincial manufacturing centre to that of a major European city’ (Ward, 2003: 205).

So how did Birmingham become a neoliberal city? Birmingham’s ‘environs provide a rich case study for such concerns as this once major industrial city strives to build a new city image amidst an uncertain post-industrial future’ (Kennedy, 2004: 2). In the mid-20th century Birmingham was ‘the city that embraced utopian visions of modernist urban planning’ (Kennedy, 2004: 1) but it is now burying that vision. Today, Birmingham is ‘experiencing an unprecedented urban renaissance; the city of roads is racing to realize its potential as city of culture–city of learning–city of diversity’ (Balshaw, 2004: 143). The city’s contemporary imagineers are creating a ‘palimpsest of competing modes, which represent different points of global/local connection, different points of historical time … made very actively by its distinctive communities [who] grow, make and remake themselves very quickly’ (Balshaw, 2004: 147).

Birmingham’s ‘chaotic development’ has centred around big city-centre projects (Hanley, 2021). The main train station, New Street and shopping mall – originally built in 1971 and known from the 1990s as the Pallasades – were regenerated in the early 2010s, opening as Grand Central in 2015. It housed 60 stores, a huge concourse and an atrium topped with a ‘bubble’ roof. The construction company’s tagline was: ‘transforming one of Britain’s worst stations into one of its best by building a stunning, cathedral-like atrium that floods passengers with daylight’ (Mace Group, 2015: np). This most recent iteration of regeneration also involved bulldozing the Central Library, replacing it with a ‘three-tiered postmodern cake [that] turned an anchor of city life into a gimmick, costing the council £188.8 million it couldn’t afford’ (Hanley, 2021: np).

In a city plagued by inequality (Dorling, 2018), pollution (Mustafa and Martin, 2020), disjointed governance and economic deterioration (Leach et al., 2019), successive forms of regeneration have fundamentally changed human and non-human life in the city. In the remainder of this paper, I argue that the current mode of neoliberal regeneration uses changing expressions of power that is tipping the balance between thriving and precarity in Birmingham.

Story-methods

The stories in this paper took place over 10 years in Birmingham (from 2011 to 2021) through a patchwork of ethnographic encounters (Günel et al., 2020) producing notes, pictures and sketches of Birmingham’s urban animal individuals. Using ethnography, policy and scientific literature, I use a storying method to understand Birmingham’s more-than-human landscapes.

The story has long been used in urban research. As Childs (2008: 173) argues, ‘built form is a medium for telling the stories of a culture’. Storytelling is also a burgeoning method in more-than-human scholarship (McHugh, 2011), where animals are central characters and agents in urban life (Bodden, 2021). Van Dooren and Rose (2012: 1) have argued for an urban ‘ethics of conviviality … co-constituted in processes of overlapping and entangled “storying”’ to ask how the city can be shared between species. Approaching these questions through storytelling takes on a new salience where cities ‘play an instrumental role in promoting human societies that are socially and ecologically responsible’ (Jon, 2021: 3).

Di Chiro (2018: 526) has argued that urban sustainability storytelling of/in the Anthropocene sees ‘environmental justice critics … insist the goal should be to “change the story” to imagine and create alternative pathways toward more just, interdependent, and sustainable futures’. They show how cautionary tales, like the miner’s canary, are used as metaphors for imminent environmental collapse. Telling stories is not depoliticised nor descriptive but can be used as a method for analytical and transformative discussion, being used ‘as a central motif and organising device to refresh public and political conversations’ (Smith et al., 2017: 284).

Post-human storytelling often centres a Haraway-ian ethic where ‘it matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with … It matters what stories make worlds, what worlds make stories’ (Haraway, 2016: 12). The (literature, science and policy informed) stories here are used to evocatively speak about Birmingham, thriving and precarity. Houston et al. (2018: 196) develop urban storytelling by calling to ‘make kin, not cities’, using animal stories to ‘raise the significance of understanding expanded knots of biological and social connectivity in urban planning’. These practices of storytelling are often nonlinear, opening them to more-than-human ethics, exemplified in the Indigenous methodologies of Smith et al. (2020: 942), where stories are ‘part of re-creating, rebinding, remaking protocols as we honour Elders and custodians, human and non-human, past, present and future’. This storytelling is a memorial and a transformation, ‘always emerging … always alive’ (Smith et al., 2020: 944), recognising that non-humans also have and tell stories (Yandaarra with Gumbaynggirr Country, 2021).

Looking at urban animals and ecologies in Birmingham – who survive, thrive and die in different ways – the mode of the story shifts the mode of analysis from the species to the individual (Bear, 2011). However, the scale of analysis is beyond the individual: it is also of the city itself (Jon, 2021). Traversing the individual and the city, these stories foreground nuance and specificity in more-than-human scholarship that can tend to be depoliticised (Åsberg et al., 2015). In so doing, the changing nature of neoliberal power in cities and its impacts are embroiled in more-than-human urban processes, as exemplified over the following five analytical sections of this paper.

Badger

In 2011, I lived about two miles south-west of Birmingham’s city centre. The Vale is built around a lake and consists of multiple large student accommodation blocks and a disused tower block, which has since been converted into flats. To the north-west is the Worcester and Birmingham Canal, to the south, Edgbaston Park Road and to the east the B4217 Priory Road. My flat was in a small block, up a hill, bordering a thick patch of trees and shrubbery. It was from this thicket that a badger would emerge.

Badgers are incredibly secretive. Relatively thinly studied, urban badger populations have been largely considered threatened by urban expansion (Cresswell et al., 1989), and as ‘relics that had survived urban encroachment’ (Harris, 1984: 349). Badgers are adaptable and can thrive in urban areas, but they cultivate their habitats differently in cities, using fewer setts than their rural counterparts. There is also ‘evidence that range, territory and social behaviour differs between urban and rural badgers. Urban badger setts have significantly fewer entrance holes, and the main sett is much smaller’ (Williams, 2017: nd). In 2015, a GPS tracker study mapped the movements of urban badgers in Brighton and Hove, finding that they stuck to tiny areas (Scott et al., 2018) of around five hectares, compared with the rural badger’s 50. One badger’s range spanned just 25 neighbouring gardens.

Back in the badger days, I expected my visitor at about 8 pm. They would slouch around the corner of my building, towards the doorway where I stood smoking. In front of the flat was a cluster of trees and, down some steps, the bins. The badger would sometimes pause and sit by me for a short while, before snuffling off into the trees and, presumably, down to the bins. The badger’s reputation is as an easily irritable loner. Yet, their underground worlds are compelling and mysterious (Justice, 2017). A recent study has contested the notion of badgers as hostile, arguing that they appear to at least tolerate their neighbours (Ellwood et al., 2017). In these urban edgelands, the badger is thrown into a transient community, one that is not always hospitable to its own hosts. In 2014, a badger was killed and burned by a group of drunk students living in these same flats in Birmingham (Birmingham Mail, 2014). The badger’s solitary cohabitation was suddenly and violently stopped in a city that was quickly changing.

A few weeks before I met the badger, there had been riots in Birmingham, following the killing of Mark Duggan by officers of the Metropolitan Police Service. The riots were a space where ‘only those who had no business and no invitation to use the spaces around the city’s consumer hubs … [were] marching to the beat of the rioters’ drum’ (Spalek et al., 2012: 15). It was an outpouring of resistance in the wake of regenerative displacement in favour of consumption.

Ten years later, private security guards hired by the new shopping mall sprawled into the city, moving on teenagers from the city’s ‘Pigeon Park’, bothering loiterers, and policing dis-belonging urban subjects. Even the anti-terrorism barriers erected on the High Street in 2017 are now emblazoned with the Retail Bid logo. This context may seem removed from the badger, but the city does not act and is not acted upon in isolation; it enacts spatial dissonance unequally across communities (Isakjee, 2016). As Ince et al. (2021: 1) argue, urban riots are not ephemeral outbursts with only immediate consequences. They influence ‘state and private sector interventions; reshaping of civil society; and how residents variously resist, adapt to, and promote change’. Urban riots have diverse legacies, leading towards other disruptive events, reshaping urban policy and lives. While the badger is an interloper on the city’s edgelands, the echo of riots in the city’s infrastructures persists, affecting human and non-human lives.

But what connects the badger, as well as animals directly displaced by hostile architectures, with urban precarity in Birmingham? Certain kinds of life are holding out against the transformation: riots resisting the dispossession of local people, and the badger’s persistence in existing in the city, are both outposts of precarious resistance to neoliberal regeneration. The badger is not simply a victim in this tale of two Birminghams. Rather, these stories operate on two different, but connected, urban registers to show how transformation is both creeping and sudden in producing changed urban natures, something familiar also to the urban fox.

Fox

In Britain, many large mammals have been displaced by human urban settlements (Hubbard and Brooks, 2021). While urban badgers’ habitats have been encroached by urban sprawl, foxes have found easier, yet still complicated, opportunity in the city. In 2017, I lived in a flat on the main high street of Birmingham city centre. I was in the midst of PhD fieldwork, so I spent most of my time on a train or in an archive, but at home, my flat faced a row of bars, restaurants and an electronics shop. Directly opposite the front door was a short, dark alley.

This road was never quiet. During the day, streams of people flowed from trains to their offices; evenings brought people drinking and eating; and at weekends, streams of shoppers. It was a busy road, in the very centre of the city. At around 3 am, the quiet settled in for a few hours until dawn, announced when the bars’ bottle bins were emptied with an apocalyptic crash, and the day began again. Sometimes, I would be outside in these early hours, smoking on the street. The city is not designed for me to feel safe (Kern, 2019), and often I did not. I would stand in the deep doorway of my block, propping the door slightly open with my foot in case I needed to dart in.

One of these early mornings, I met a fox. The street was quiet, but bright with the light of the station’s beaming external eye-shaped screen. Over the road, I heard a scuffling. From the alley came a fox. Clearly not expecting to encounter a human, they stop, and we stare at one another. A minute or so passed before the fox broke the moment and slinked off up the road and away. I never saw them again, but this encounter opened the gateway to another city, thriving in the shadows of Birmingham’s regeneration transformation.

Urban animals have been categorised by Van Dooren and Rose (2012) into two groups: those who choose to move into city spaces, and animals who find themselves overtaken or displaced by cities. Cities have been built on the exploitation of non-human life (Thrift, 2021), but they are also offering increasingly viable new ecologies for animals like the fox. As (human) urban spaces have expanded, they have overtaken vast non-human habitats. Most of the animals and plants encroached on by the city limits are, however, categorised as ‘pests’ (Taylor and Signal, 2009) or ‘trash’ animals who are invasive and unwanted (Nagy and Johnson, 2013). With a projection of around 70% of humans living in cities by 2050 (Dijst et al., 2018), consuming more and generating more waste, animals like foxes thrive in these expanded urban metabolisms.

Geographers have been paying attention to urban animal life for some time. Wolch (2002) has written about the ‘anima urbis– the breath, life, soul and spirit of the city – [being] embodied in its animal as well as human life forms’ (p. 721). However, more recently, Amin and Thrift (2017) have contended that cities ‘rely on organized forms of cruelty to nonhumans to maintain their human momentum: cities are hungry predators on other forms of life … cities have nearly always been built on the cries and screams and howls of dying animals’ (p. 86). The reality for Birmingham’s animals caught up in the city’s transformation is somewhere in-between: both thriving and precarious, encapsulated by the case of the fox.

Birmingham regenerated in the 1950s around cars, making the city more dangerous for roaming animals. However, Kolb (1984) has found that foxes are tolerant of cars and Baker et al. (2004) have monitored population growth in urban foxes and other mammals in Bristol through road-traffic casualties. As part of Birmingham’s contemporary regeneration, cars are being removed from the city centre and replaced with pedestrian and public transport routes to ‘reduce transport’s damaging impact on the environment’ (Birmingham Transport Plan 2031, nd: np). The survival of the fox in Birmingham’s concrete centre is testament to their thriving in and even because of precarity. But as the sleek and shiny new, new Birmingham is terraformed, it is unlikely that the kinds of environmental protection that urban planning promotes will include animals like the fox who offer little in the way of economic enhancement.

Despite the urban fox being a distasteful and disliked creature for many human city dwellers in Britain (Harris, 2013), they face less intentional harm than their rural counterparts who have long been co-opted into economic and class debates (Ward, 1999). However, this has not always been the case. Foxes have been common in cities since the 1930s, with an abundance of food in the interwar period (Osterloff, 2019). From the late 1940s to the 1980s, there was a nationwide cull of urban foxes beginning in south-east London (Harris, 2013); decades later, not only had numbers increased, but foxes had spread further across cities. Nonetheless, in 2015, Hackney Council in London approved the first cull in 30 years, citing urban foxes as a danger to their captive deer populations.

While foxes are largely harmless to urban infrastructures, they signal an unclean urban space associated with outbreaks of mange (Mackenstedt et al., 2015); they are at the whim of public perception of their danger (Atkins, 2012). Much like their North American counterpart, the urban coyote, foxes’‘ability to thrive in cities testifies not only to the blurring of human–wildlife boundaries in an urbanizing world; it also undermines the idea that cities and suburbs are places where people do not have to contend with wild predators’ (Hunold and Lloro, 2022: 156). These interactions are complex and multiple. Although unlikely to affect urban foxes at a species level – in fact, the evidence points towards the species thriving through danger – it affects individual non-human lives (as per Bear, 2011) engaged in shared and co-constitutive practices creating the more-than-human city (Shingne and Reese, 2022).

As Birmingham’s regeneration seeks a new, new kind of relationship with urban nature, these canid urbanities are becoming pertinent in new ways of surviving. Indeed, some middle-class residents welcome foxes through commensal feeding habits (Baker and Harris, 2007) and still more unintentionally feed foxes through bird feeders, compost heaps and bins (Doncaster et al., 1990). In Birmingham, these kinds of relationships tend to be more suburban, since gardens are few and far between in the city. Foxes instead are attracted to the commercial waste of the city’s booming centre. Birmingham’s urban foxes are an exemplar of the complex experiences and relations of thriving and precarious urban life across not just the present, but many decades of urban transformation. Not far away, on Birmingham’s canals, the meeting of neoliberal regeneration and non-human value is also being realised as contingent.

Heron

Between Birmingham’s city centre and the university, there is a stretch of canal which has a path on one side and trees, shrubs, grasses and flowers on the other. Walking along the canal in Autumn 2019, I saw a heron. I could see the water slide off their waxy feathers; crouched down, their neck low to the ground. I walked these canals every day for four years, but this was the first time I encountered them.

A few weeks later, I meet a different heron, almost blue-grey and much smaller. I stop and crouch on the opposite bank of the canal. The heron is partially hidden by reeds, standing just in front of what I know is a fox den. The canal cuts between us. There is something clumsy about these herons, even though everything about them should be elegant: their stretched legs, long necks and beautiful shades of white, blue and grey offer camouflage and splendour. The way they rustle in the bushes on the opposite bank of the canal is as if their attempt to hide has been betrayed by their own stature.

As I walked the canal paths that trace the Cross-City trainline, although only a few feet away, my world felt a million miles from the overcrowded commuter trains that rush people to work. These herons had been living in, yet were so separate from, the human city. While animals like herons do not face destruction in cities, they do live in the wake and pre-emption of displacement in the city. Meeting the heron cut the city differently, their awkward stature somehow complementing the shiny city.

Today, Birmingham’s waterfront developments are manicured centres for business and leisure, home to entrepreneurial landscapes, but their ‘long-term economic success is by no means guaranteed’ (Hubbard, 1996: 35). Through private–public partnerships (Barber and Hall, 2008), the canal has gone from wasteland to desirable real estate, not least because it is a site where nature appears to flourish in the city. English canalscapes are natural/historical landscapes, a harnessing of nature to aid capitalist expansion (Wallace and Wright, 2022). But, ‘with the advent of the “green” infrastructure, sustainability and wellbeing agendas … urban canals then became normatively inflected as spaces or landscapes we should use to reproduce our lives in responsible ways’ (Wallace and Wright, 2022: 198).

Fifty years ago, Birmingham’s canals were abandoned, polluted and disused, although some land was reclaimed for parks in the industrial past (Salmon, 1992). By the 1990s ‘the construction and promotion of “spectacular” new urban landscapes, typically in derelict or waterfront areas [was] an almost universal response to deindustrialisation in British and US cities, following the success of the rejuvenation of Baltimore’s waterfront in the 1970s’ (Hubbard, 1995: 244). During the 1990s regeneration, local people were ‘not disposed to believe that their quality of life will be improved by canalside developments’ (Salmon, 1992: 35). This legacy of displacement of human and non-human communities persists today.

The regeneration of Birmingham has transformed urban life and, in its neoliberal form, attracted council-backed private funders and an influx of wealthy professionals, displacing other – human and non-human – communities. Encroachment is not contained to architectures and infrastructures: it is also changing the relationship between human and non-human lives in the city, eliminating spontaneous ecologies (Jasper, 2020). Herons are not in contention with human or capital desires; instead, they enhance the city’s canalscapes, not least because they are rare. The canal’s flourishing of non-human life adds value to Birmingham’s green infrastructural promise, troubling the city as killing machine: a more-than-human geopolitics in a minor key.

Tree

Other entanglements in the city are more explicit than the heron’s watery urban paradise. In the garden of the house I rented in 2020, there was a beautiful eucalyptus tree. In the year when the buildings we lived in became our worlds, this tree offered shelter through its healing shade. From my room, I would watch squirrels chase one another, a pigeon slipping off the end of a branch, while tits, starlings and robins ate at the bird feeders. Two cats would visit, sitting with me while I planted potatoes, cultivating this urban garden ecology. At the foot of the eucalyptus was a quince plant, and at the end of the garden, a blackberry bush.

In November, the man who owned the house next door knocked on the front door to tell us he had decided to cut down the tree. My heart dropped. After weeks of fighting, it was eventually agreed that the tree would be trimmed. The story, sadly, did not end that way. The man turned up at the door unexpectedly and said ‘we’re coming in now to cut this tree down, your landlord said I could’. Explaining I could not allow access, I closed the door.

Thirty minutes later, I looked out the window to see workmen in the garden, hacking down the eucalyptus tree. The neighbour had taken down the fence separating our gardens, walked through, opened the gate and instructed the tree be destroyed. After this, when I looked out over the garden, all I could see was a severing of more-than-human urban community and ecology; the birds, squirrels and cats rarely visited anymore, and the quince began to die.

The effect of COVID-19 policies on renters in Britain has been violent:

… when the pandemic struck, the state acted swiftly to protect the interests of property owners. Policies regarding housing finance and property tax were swiftly altered to maintain real estate values. But rent relief was left up to the discretion of landlords … work has become inconsistent and uncertain, yet the rent continues to steadily accrue. (Madden, 2020: 678)

Precarity and inequality dictate not only where and how people can afford to live, but what kinds of connections with non-human life we can have, often severing bonds to the natural world.

Precarity is a state of mental, physical and social burden and is:

… a vicious cycle: being kept in such a state of flux and lacking any cohesive group identity means precarious workers cannot focus outwards on social or political concerns. Their attention is instead constantly forced inwards, onto their own survival and prospects of escape. (Southwood, 2019: 38)

Capitalist and state imperatives to individualise the effects of precarity, which ‘is not an unintended consequence of neoliberal policies of marketisation, privatisation and outsourcing; [but] a central aim’ (Southwood, 2019: 39).

Precarity produces a perpetual state of anxiety, which ‘manifests as a kind of ambient dread, constantly playing on the nerves … thinking about the future becomes difficult’ (Frayne, 2019: 9). This precarious life is not human alone: animals, humans and nature are bound together in a ‘creative, generative, and multi-layered relation of species and environment-making’ (Moore, 2015: 4). As shown when the eucalyptus tree fell, urban belonging – and ecologies – are a fragile, not top-down systems dictated by perceived value. Not only did the tree fall, but the garden’s ecology was disturbed.

Thriving more-than-human life is complicated in regenerating cities; they engulf human and non-human life through dispossession, negotiation, transformation and resistance. Despite this, more-than-human relationships and communities continue to be established, which are not always inequitable (Palmer, 2003). In urban multispecies communities (Michelfelder, 2003), this shared precarity between some humans and animals continues in geographical work challenging dichotomies of urbanity, nature and animality (Acampora, 2004). As Hall (2011) points out, ‘we need the construction and the practice of ecologically anarchic relationships to connect with the physical world of plants, animals, rocks, fungi, beetles and water’ (p. 387). From the badger to the fox to the eucalyptus tree, the experience of more-than-human precarity in the neoliberal city was one of disruption and severance, but also one of continual reconnection.

In Birmingham, the lives of non-humans have often been seconded to human settlement and expansion against a partial more-than-human ethics (Ginn, 2014). However, as planners and investors aim to regenerate Birmingham once again, ‘unintentional nature’ (Gandy, 2013) is obliterated, while productive nature is welcomed. Where unintentional nature has sprung forth in crevices and shadows, curated nature in the neoliberal city does not signal a biophilic city (Luther, 2020) but rather one which is extending modes of enacting power over non-human life.

Parakeets

In late 2020, knowing that I would soon leave Birmingham, I was determined to meet a group of animals in Birmingham who I had heard of, but never seen: parakeets (Bufton et al., 2019). I knew that the parakeets could be spotted in Highbury Park in South Birmingham, so I trekked there on long lunch breaks and evenings. I did not see them once. In January 2021, I had just six weeks left in the city.

One grey and drizzly weekday morning, I forced myself out for another lockdown walk. Walking towards Highbury Park, something pulled me in another direction, towards Cannon Hill, a large urban park in Edgbaston, South Birmingham. I decided to turn right into Holders Lane Woods, a strip of woodland thick with mud that runs south of the park. It was then that I heard them: the unmistakable chattering and ‘cheep-cheep-cheep’ song, an avian ‘republic of noise’ (Gordon, 2022). I stop, ankle deep in mud, and look up at the bare trees. The branches are filled with beautiful green parakeets, their long-tailed silhouette vibrant against a pale grey sky. I stand there for a long time, listening, watching, mourning.

Urban nature relationships are highly situated cohabitations (Acampora, 2004), but they are also subsumed under a capitalist and increasingly neoliberal dominion, obscuring humanity’s location in nature (Moore, 2015). That urban nature becomes marginal to anthropocentric cities (Hinchliffe and Whatmore, 2006), always contingent on their use or beauty, is far from a novel argument. However, the parakeet troubles this contingency, where the scales are continually unbalanced in favour of their beauty or disruption, not least because their presence in Britain is at once exotic and alien (Eatherley, 2019)

Parakeets are ‘invasive aliens’ in Britain; they were introduced over a century ago and in the last few decades have seen dramatic population increases (Williamson, 1996), contained largely in urban and semiurban areas (Pithon and Dytham, 2002). The rate of arrival of new species in Britain is ‘breathtaking, and the results often heartbreaking’ (Martin, 2020: 140). The parakeet is one of the fastest-growing ‘alien’ species, who have been accused of ‘beating woodpeckers and nuthatches [native species] to the choicest nesting sites’ (Eatherley, 2019: 11). In 2011, there was a cull of monk parakeets who caused economic damage to power lines. In 2021, the British government began considering a cull of ring-necked parakeets, specifically of a flock on the Isle of Dogs, London – the financial centre of the city. The parakeets’ thriving is undeniable, as is their precarity, but Birmingham’s parakeet populations are not yet posing a threat to the regenerative churn of the city, being confined mostly to areas on the outskirts.

Birmingham – the neoliberal city – is a case study in the complexities of balance between thriving and precarity for more-than-human urban life and communities. The parakeets – in equal parts hated and adored (Crowley et al., 2019) – epitomise the complexity of cohabitation in Birmingham. Delon (2020: 123) has recently argued that ‘urban animals can benefit from living in cities, but this also makes them vulnerable as they increasingly depend on the advantages of urban life’. Birmingham’s non-human animals’ vulnerability is also about whether they are valued in the forward pulse of the city. Different species, flocks and individuals in Birmingham are negotiating thriving, precarity, encroachment and flourishing in particular – but connected – ways, offering a different story of thriving and precarity in the Second City.

Conclusion: Thriving and precarity in the neoliberal city

Cities are agents and landscapes of gentrification and the ‘trans-species’ city (Wolch et al., 1995) is a space of displacement and injustice for human and non-human beings. Hubbard and Brooks (2021) recently furthered trans-species theory and urban narratives by troubling animals as ‘victims’ or ‘villains’ in gentrification processes, and taking seriously the animal right to the city as connected with urban human populations. As the poor are driven from their homes in the super-rich’s pursuit of capital (Atkinson, 2020), non-human life is also caught up in urban regeneration. The stories in this paper are speak to different non-human lives caught up in Birmingham’s transformation into a neoliberal city. In the conclusion, I contend that taking seriously more-than-human theory and experience is essential to the future of urban studies scholarship.

For its non-human residents, the city has always been a site of danger, contestation and violence, both interpersonal and structural, as much as it has been an enticing or necessary prospect for survival. Through gentrification, commercialisation and sanitisation, a neoliberal urbanism has taken hold of cities (Jones and Ward, 2002; Theodore, 2020). In the neoliberal city, urban subjects do not just live, but are speculated upon (Harvey, 2012), and life is important to the project. While some kinds of life are welcomed, the unruly and the precarious face processes of taming (Atkins, 2012). The governance of a city is as much an ‘anthropological activity’ as a systemic one (Amin and Thrift, 2002: 129), serving as ‘a repository for all kinds of projects on and of the self’ (Amin and Thrift, 2002: 117).

Han (2017) argues that power morphs into permissive, friendly, forms in its neoliberal mode: we must improve ourselves, for ourselves. The city as a project is deployed readily in regeneration projects, where the city is determinedly becoming something else. Working at the analytical scale of the city is increasingly pressing in an urbanising Anthropocene world (Jon, 2021), which raises new questions of individual and species rights. Shingne (2022) argues that a more-than-human right to the city requires access to space and resources; self-identification of needs; and active consideration in political decisions. This complements other recent work grappling with the status of non-human animals in the city (Cochrane, 2019; Donaldson and Kymlicka, 2011; Meijer, 2019).

Birmingham has seen huge private investments over the last two decades, not only transforming the city skyline, but also disturbing its more-than-human urban milieux, not least through a determination to ‘connect’ Birmingham. Birmingham, whilst too far from the capital to be directly incorporated, is seeing private funders capitalise on London’s wealth (Atkinson, 2020) and Birmingham’s cheap land – realised in projects like high-speed rail, which benefits wealthy commuters at the expense and opposition of local people (Phillips, 2017) and unpredictable biodiversity impacts (Cornet et al., 2018).

The city is built on the killing and transforming of the natural world (Heynen et al., 2006) and human urban lives rely on the labour and suffering of non-human life (Thrift, 2021). As urban ecologies flourish in ruderal (Stoetzer, 2018) and shadow spaces, these stories from Birmingham point towards a more complex relationship between thriving and precarity. There is a wealth of research emerging on urban flourishing, and on the decimation of non-human diversity in the Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene (Davis et al., 2019). The tensions at the heart of these debates are playing out in Birmingham, but not here alone.

Birmingham has become a project onto which neoliberal ideals and failures are writ large, into which speculative capital flows, and life empties. It has also featured as a cosmopolitical experiment (Hinchliffe et al., 2005) that has transformed repeatedly, but its relationship with nature and animals as a case study in neoliberal regeneration’s effects on more-than-human urbanism has yet to be fully appreciated. Non-human life carves out space in shadows, borders and at the heart of the city, even as it is invisibilised by larger urban narratives (Arcari et al., 2021). Nature is brought into the city to supplement human wellbeing and productivity (Dobson et al., 2021), whilst contingently allowing other life to precariously thrive, but no narrative or neoliberal project can be totalising. The neoliberal regeneration of Birmingham’s development has, both architecturally and spiritually, entrenched the ideology of atomised and idealised citizens both human and non-human, binding its residents in a more-than-human precarity – even as the city appears to thrive.

Footnotes

I would like to thank Liam Bates for his careful reading of and comments on drafts of this paper. I would also like to thank the organisers and participants of the British Animal Studies Network Conference on ‘Loss’ at the University of Birmingham in 2020 for their generous engagements with a presented version of this paper. Thank you,as always,to my non-human friends and neighbours.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research,authorship,and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research,authorship,and/or publication of this article: This paper was written with funding by ERC Horizon 2020 Grant Number 759239.

ORCID iD

Catherine Oliver

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Transforming paradise: Neoliberal regeneration and more-than-human urbanism in Birmingham

Abstract

Keywords

Introduction

Birmingham: A brief history of the ‘neoliberal’ city

Story-methods

Badger

Fox

Heron

Tree

Parakeets

Conclusion: Thriving and precarity in the neoliberal city

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

Funding

ORCID iD

References