Reinventing the City: A workshop on habitecture for wildlife
Erin Luther, PhD candidate, York University
Presentation title: “The unintended consequences of designing for wildlife”
The biophilic city has emerged as a promising model for a rapidly urbanizing world, but some efforts to invite wildlife in also come with unintended consequences for humans and animals. I discuss some of the resulting ethical complications and ways that they might be addressed. Who benefits from design interventions, and who decides? This research was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
Nathalie Karvonen, Executive Director, Toronto Wildlife Centre
Presentation title: “An institutional perspective on human-wildlife encounters in the GTA: conflicts and opportunities”
Toronto Wildlife Centre, a large wildlife rehabilitation and education centre serving the GTA, responds to up to 30,000 calls per year on their wildlife hotline and admits approximately 5,000 sick, injured, and orphaned animals. Drawing on a decade of institutional history, this presentation outlines some of the specific challenges faced by wild animals in Toronto.
Suzanne MacDonald, Professor, York University
Presentation title: Urban raccoons in the Greater Toronto Area: Are we building a smarter raccoon?
We are inviting Professor Macdonald to present findings on her recent research on urban raccoons comparing problem-solving techniques used by urban and rural raccoons, which show a marked divergence between the two populations in behavioral flexibility, neophobia, and persistence. Her recent survey of over 1700 GTA residents’ attitudes toward urban raccoons suggests negative attitudes towards raccoons were most common in those participants that had suffered significant property damage caused by raccoons. Implications of these data for human-raccoon conflict and for wildlife management policy will be discussed.
Sheila Colla, Assistant Professor, York University
Presentation title: “Social Regulation of Wildlife in the Greater Toronto Area: Roles of Policy and Legislation”
The crafting of policy and the boundaries produced by legislation on urban wildlife often provide rigid parameters that conflict with the everyday patterns of wildlife. Legislation, in particular, can serve as a tool for controlling, maintaining, and enforcing human attitudes towards urban wildlife that reproduce anthropocentric social norms in human-wildlife interactions. We explore municipal (City of Toronto) and provincial (Province of Ontario) policies and legal statutes and codes to examine: i) how discourse about urban wildlife is produced in official documentation; ii) to what extent this discourse reinforces anthropocentric values and norms, and iii) what anomalies exist at different legislative scales. We discuss how the coding of policy and legislation provides the framework for the everyday, micro-level inter-actions that urban residents have with wildlife — from policy that offers new designs for residential compost boxes in order to deter raccoons, to legislation that allows police officers to shoot and kill coyotes in Toronto’s neighbourhoods.