Can wild geese remake a zoo? The promise of more-than-human heterotopia for a politics of living with urban wildlife

Abstract

With biodiversity in crisis globally, there is an urgent need to include wildlife in urban planning and governance – not merely as passive elements but as political actors with their own interests and needs. We propose addressing this challenge by rethinking the role of urban zoos in shaping human-animal relations. Drawing on a case-study of a colony of wild geese nesting in Korkeasaari zoo, Finland, we tap into the productive ambivalence of Foucauldian heterotopias. This lens reveals how a zoo simultaneously functions as a socially ordered and tightly controlled institution of captivity, shaping and being shaped by human discourses on wildlife, but also as a real place, dynamically made and re-made through more-than-human agencies, relations, and materialities. This tension results in discourses and practices that stage a mode of open-ended interspecies exchange, politicising the shared use of space between human and non-human animals. In the context of intensive management policies and restrictive measures applied to non-human animals in urban contexts, Korkeasaari zoo stands out as an interspecies experiment where wildlife has been allowed to settle −at least in part- on their own terms. The paper concludes by exploring the potential of such more-than-human heterotopias to offer models for co-existing with non-human animals on mutually negotiated political terms. We advocate for a research focus on similar ‘other’ places where non-human creatures catalyse a reimagining of anthropocentric spaces, offering pathways to rethink urban living and human-animal relations that constitute it.