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Short abstract:

Animal enclosures is a generic term gathering a series of urban public locations where people go to see and possibly pet farm animals. This presentation unpacks a particular type of human-animal interaction, labeled as partial encounters, within two of those locations in Berlin, Germany.

Long abstract:

Understating cities as more-than-human assemblages (Griffiths et al., 2000; Franklin, 2016), this 20-minute talk delves into an almost unexplored urban scenario for multispecies interaction and cohabitation: the 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. Structured under a traditional format, and divided into three parts, this presentation introduces the preliminary findings of an ethnographic examination 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 talk will take care of introducing both places, situating them in a local context, and presenting the different types of enclosures around Berlin. This part will pay particular attention to the infrastructures and animal-managerial logic behind the enclosures. After that, the focus will be on the interactions between humans, particularly visitors, and animals. Through a brief state of the art on encountering, the idea of partial encounters will be discussed as a critical device to analyze the inequality in multispecies relationships in urban spaces. The last part of this presentation will offer a bunch of ethical considerations and extend some dilemmas on captivity hoping to provoke a collective reflection on the urban as a more-than-human construction.