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Paper Short Abstract:

By focusing on to the more-than-human encounters in two public places in Berlin where people go to see and pet farm animals, the Tierpark Neukölln and the Kinderbauernhof in Görtlizer Park, this contribution explores the dilemmas, challenges implications of animal captivity in contemporary cities.

Paper Abstract:

Conceiving cities as more-than-human assemblages (Griffiths et al., 2000; Franklin, 2016), this contribution explores a relatively uncharted urban scenario for multispecies interaction and cohabitation: the urban animal enclosures. Urban animal enclosure is a critical conceptual framework created to refer to those public places in the city where —mainly farm— animals are displayed and kept in captivity for human educational and recreational purposes. Those scenarios are known, among other names, as animal parks, children’s farms, and petting zoos. Divided into three parts, this presentation introduces the preliminary findings of an ethnographic exploration of human-animal encounters carried out in two of those scenarios: the Tierpark Neukölln and the Kinderbauernhof in Görtlizer Park. The first part of this presentation will take care of introducing both places, situating them in a local context, and presenting the different types of enclosures around Berlin. The second section will pay particular attention to the infrastructures and animal-managerial logic behind the enclosures. It will discuss the double condition behind those scenarios: as places of more-than-human domination and imprisonment, and as scenarios of multispecies interaction where urban humans have access to different animals that they do not normally seen in their daily life in cities. After that, the focus will be on the interactions between humans, particularly visitors, and the animals. It will reflect on the role of animals as entertainment and educational devices, unpack some dilemmas on captivity and propose a critical reflection on the idea(lization) of the urban as a more-than-human site for multispecies exchange and cohabitation.