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

Catherine Oliver

Urban Studies, 2023, vol. 60, issue 3, 519-536

Abstract: 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; 环境/å ¯æŒ ç»­æ€§; ä¸ å¹³ç­‰; è¶…è¶Šäººç±»çš„åŸŽå¸‚ç †è®º; 公共空间; å† å¼€å ‘/æ›´æ–°; 社会正义; åŸŽå¸‚ç”Ÿæ€ (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:urbstu:v:60:y:2023:i:3:p:519-536

DOI: 10.1177/00420980221104975

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