municipal infrastructure is being expanded to include living creatures. In many ways, of course, this is simply the contemporary urbanization of a practice that goes back millennia. However, the ensuing juxtapositions – of 21st-century landscapes and cities being maintained not by high-tech machines or by specialty equipment but by neo-medieval groups of trained animals – can be quite jarring. Animal labour is once more becoming an explicit component of the modern metropolis — newscientist.com
The absolute premise, and conclusion, here is that human urbanism is ineluctably woven within all animal ecologies, and that harnessing inter-species relationships within urban systems can be advantageous for every bit of the food web. A few instances from the piece are:
Using natural animal processes to the urban-human's advantage is all well and good, but as the article points out, it's not one that can be easily "scaled". When urban needs outpace the natural rhythms of a supportive ecological system, when we just can't scale nature big enough, humans will simply create their own animal helpers – New Scientist alludes to a future in which animals are modified to better serve human needs.
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