Reinventing the City: A workshop on habitecture for wildlife
Sue Bunce, Assistant Professor, Geography and Planning, University of Toronto
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. This research was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
Justin Podur, Associate Professor, York University
Presentation title: “Spatial analysis of urban human-wildlife encounters”
From an ecological perspective, encounter data are different from population sample data. For an encounter to occur, both the human and the wildlife must be present. Encounters must be studied differently from sample data for this reason, but they can provide insight into the relationship between humans and wildlife in the city. Using two different encounter datasets in the GTA, we show some of the insights that can be gained into the relationship between humans and wildlife. This research was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
Tracy Timmins, PhD Candidate, York University
Presentation title: “Spatial Patterns of Human-Raccoon Encounters in Toronto”
We use data provided AAA Gates Wildlife Control (Gates), a humane animal control company, and the Toronto Wildlife Centre (TWC), a wildlife rehabilitation centre, to identify spatial patterns in the occurrence of raccoons encountered in properties and found with injuries and illnesses across Toronto. The Gates data were classified into categories based on where animals were found, e.g. “attic”. The rate of each encounter type per neighbourhood was determined. Since the use of rest sites by raccoons might be influenced by the sharing of knowledge by mothers to their young and because females remain within their mothers’ home ranges, it was expected that clusters of particular rest sites would be observed. This hypothesis was tested by using local indicators of spatial association in order to identify significant clusters of rest sites. Similarly, the TWC dataset was examined in order to assess the most frequent injuries and illnesses per neighbourhood.