Ruddick, Sue “Wildcity: birds, buildings and a struggle over value”

Abstract: This is a story about a bird, a building and a lawsuit. But it is also a story about affect, about what it means to care for something as priceless and worthless as a bird. In this paper, I focus on a lawsuit against Cadillac Fairview and the Yonge Corporation, whose green LEED certified building caused the death of hundreds of migrating birds, among thousands, killed or injured on a major migration route through the city of Toronto, one of North America’s fastest growing cities. Situating this lawsuit as one of many expressions of a growing ‘bird consciousness’ in the city, I explore its unfolding as the expression of a different vision of what it means to green a city, one which extends hospitality to its wild cohabitants, and what happens when radically different concepts of value (encounter value, use and exchange value) meet on a literal and figurative collision course.