You step out your front door and navigate a familiar world: turn left at the postbox, cross at the traffic lights, grab a coffee from the corner shop. Your mental map is clear and human-centric. But what if you could see the city through the nose of a fox, the ears of a squirrel, or the instincts of a stray cat? A groundbreaking collection of essays, Animal Places: Lively Cartographies of Human-Animal Relations, invites us to do just that. This book isn't about wilderness; it's about the zoo without cages that is our everyday environment. It argues that to understand the modern world, we must learn to read the hidden, lively cartographies that animals create all around us. It's a fascinating look at how every park, alleyway, and backyard is a site of negotiation, conflict, and cohabitation between species.
What is a "Lively Cartography"?
Traditional maps show static things. Lively cartographies show life, movement, and relationships.
Co-production of Space
Humans and animals together create the meaning and use of a space. A garden is leisure for a human, a hunting ground for a cat, and a potential buffet for a bird.
Multispecies Ethnography
A research approach that studies the interplay between human and non-human lives, taking animals seriously as actors who influence culture and society.
More-than-Human City
This concept challenges the idea that cities are purely human inventions. They are complex ecosystems teeming with other intelligent, adaptive lifeforms.
The Urban Fox Scat Survey
Decoding the secret messages foxes leave in our cities.
The Objective
To understand how urban red foxes (Vulpes vulpes) map and claim territory within a city from their perspective by analyzing the placement of their scat (droppings).
Methodology
Researchers conducted a multi-year field study in a medium-sized European city:
- Transect Walking: Systematic surveys along predetermined paths covering various urban zones
- Scat Identification: GPS tagging and collection of every fox scat discovered
- Contextual Data: Recording substrate, prominence, and proximity to human features
- Dietary Analysis: Lab analysis to determine diet composition and link territory to food sources
Results and Analysis
The results revealed a sophisticated territorial map layered over the human one:
Scats as Signposts
Foxes preferentially placed scat in highly visible locations on human pathways, using our infrastructure as a bulletin board system.
Negotiating Boundaries
High density of scats found along edges where territories meet, constantly being negotiated and re-marked.
Human-Fox Interface
Diet analysis showed high proportion of human-sourced food, proving fox territory is shaped by human activity.
Scientific Importance
Shows that animal cartography is deeply entangled with ours—foxes are intelligent agents who co-author the urban landscape.
The Fox's Urban Blueprint
Data visualizations from the urban fox scat survey
Fox Scat Placement by Urban Zone
Dietary Composition Analysis
Substrate Choice for Scat Placement
The Scientist's Toolkit
Essential tools for decoding animal cartographies
GPS Logger & GIS Software
Precisely plots animal signs onto digital maps, visualizing animal movements alongside human infrastructure.
Motion-Sensor Camera Trap
Captures images and video of animals without disturbance, providing behavioral context to mapped data.
Ethnographic Field Notes
Detailed written accounts of observations and interactions, capturing the qualitative story behind data.
Dietary Analysis Lab Kit
Microscopes and DNA analysis tools for identifying stomach or scat contents, linking movement to resources.
Multispecies Theory
The philosophical framework guiding research questions and interpretation of animal agency.
A Call for Multispecies Mindfulness
Animal Places successfully argues that the world is a shared project. The lively cartographies of animals are not hidden in distant wilderness; they are etched into the sidewalks we walk on every day.
By learning to see these maps, we become more mindful and ethical neighbors to the other species that call our human-dominated world home. This research pushes us beyond simple questions of "conservation" or "pest control" and toward a more profound question: How do we design our cities, not just for us, but for the complex, multisociety we are inevitably a part of? The first step is to look down and read the messages that have been left for us.