Green Letters

Conflictual entanglements: negotiating the more-than-human in Chinese urban spaces

This special issue seeks to investigate the different ways in which the relationship between the human and the more-than-human have been negotiated and imagined in Chinese urban spaces from the middle of the nineteenth century until the present.

Throughout history, urban spaces have been characterized by a conflictual, contradictory, and uneven relationship between the human and the more-than-human inhabitants of the urban ecosystem (soils, vegetation, water bodies, microbes as well as nonhuman animals; cf. Grimm 2020, 5), what Karen Thornber (2011) refers to as “ecoambiguity.” Informed by modern concepts of planning and public health, cities around the world tried to eradicate undesired nonhuman species from cityscapes or marginalize them within strictly controlled boundaries, a process that picked up steam during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century (Biehler 2013) and contributed to the perception that cities were essentially anthropogenic or nature-less spaces (Brantz 2020). Yet, recent scholarship has questioned the characterization of urban spaces as the purview of human civilization and instead emphasized cities as spaces of multispecies interactions. Nonhuman animals remained crucial for the sustenance of many cities beyond the nineteenth century (Owens/Wolch 2017; McShane/Tarr 2007), while many species that were subject to marginalization campaigns continue to carve out their own “beastly spaces” beyond human control or have newly migrated to cities in recent decades to occupy new niches in the cityscape, often leading liminal existences in tension with humanly defined roles and perceptions (Philo/Wilbert 2005; Wischermann/Howell 2019; Gandy 2022). As such, nonhuman species are not only stakeholders in urban environments, they are co-producers of urban space, shaping the form and evolution of cities around the globe. To come to terms with the complexities of urban life, non-human beings therefore need to be reconsidered in their agential roles within multifaceted, tension-loaded dynamics of entanglements and “intra-actions” (Barad 2007) with human agencies and architectural environments (Bayes 2023). Moreover, distinct boundaries have come under scrutiny not only within urban spaces themselves. The borders and transitions between the perceived “strange other” (Schliephake 2015) of the man-made city versus its “natural” countryside surroundings likewise appear porous in the light of the flows of resources, mobilities of human and nonhuman species, and the following socioeconomic and ecological entanglements (Rademacher 2015).

Rapid processes of urbanization coupled with the effects of climate change, which are particularly felt in urban spaces, have put the role of the more-than-human within cities into even sharper relief. Recent approaches to city planning are aiming to reintegrate more-than-human species in the form of greenspaces or urban agriculture to improve resilience, biodiversity, and quality of life (Granzow/Lorenzen/Schumann 2025). Yet, while such approaches question the nature of cities as the purview of humans, paradoxes and challenges persist. Even though certain plant or animal species are reintroduced, others continue to be marginalized, usually based on narrow perceptions of human value (Wang 2023). Access to green spaces and the more-than-human, moreover, intersects with social, racial, and economic marginalization, wherefore ecologically diverse environments are often limited to those with the necessary means and standing (Gioielli 2025; Hartog 2025). These challenges have prompted a reconsideration of imaginations of urban spaces, which has been particularly forceful in literature and the arts. While earlier approaches of ecocriticism have long focused mainly on non-urban spaces, recent years have seen a shift towards depictions and imaginations of living spaces within cities and their surroundings (Buell/Heise/Thornber 2011). Fictional and non-fictional works try to give expression to the tension-loaded multispecies interactions in urban spaces, questioning and critiquing human dominance. So-called “ruderal literature,” for instance, imagines multispecies experiences in the remnants of overused spaces or at the margins of human-controlled spaces, such as old factory buildings or abandoned building projects (Kubin 2020; Reents 2020). At the same time, the experientiality and agency of non-human species often unsettles and redefines not only the spatiality of a story, but also its temporality; literary texts explore such tensions in clashes of the static and dynamic and in the confrontation of different temporalities (Bayes 2023, Møller-Olsen 2022) thereby becoming repositories of alternative cultural and historical memory (Schliephake 2016, Møller-Olsen 2022).

Turning its focus on China, this special issue wants to take up some of these more recent shifts of research interests in order to shed new light on discourses, developments, and imaginations of Chinese urban spaces from the middle of the nineteenth century until the present. The history of important urban centers—such as Shanghai or Beijing—has so far been largely studied from an anthroprocentric perspective; nonhuman actors have usually been ignored. This special issue seeks to correct this oversight and learn more about how multispecies interactions in Chinese urban spaces have shaped cities in the Sinophone world during a time period that saw complex historical, social, political, and cultural transformations.

Existing research seems to suggest that many Chinese cities experienced similarly conflicting developments during this period. Often spurred by the influence of newly introduced concepts of hygiene, public health, and urban planning, undesired species such as mosquitoes, rats, flies, or dogs were targeted in hygiene campaigns that were promoted by both foreign and Chinese authorities during the nineteenth and early twentieth century (Rogaski 2004; Nakajima 2018; Ying 2024). At the same time, selected animal and plant species were newly introduced into Chinese urban spaces in the context of new leisure activities (dog racing, gardening), the rise of pet keeping, the attempt to improve living conditions, or the introduction of highly curated spaces of multispecies interactions (such as zoos and public parks) (Zhang 2018; Zhang 2023; Zhu 2022). Shaped by their distinct colonial and semi-colonial conditions, recent research suggests that many Chinese cities served as “contact zones” in which different understandings of the nonhuman and its role in urban society could be negotiated (Poon 2019). Such processes remain little studied and this special issue wants to better understand how the specific social, political, and cultural setting of Chinese cities shaped multispecies interactions since the nineteenth century. This period saw rapid processes of economic development and urbanization that were accompanied by modernist discourses of a domination over nature (Shapiro 2001), but also more recent projects of eco-development (Xie et al. 2019) or architectural attempts to integrate existing lifeworlds with building projects (for example, by Chinese urban architects such as Pritzker laureate Liu Jiakun; Rolla 2025). How did these complex socio-political developments impact cities and their environment? What can we learn from approaches that trace the entangled experiences of humans and nonhumans in a rapidly changing world (Yin/Gao 2025)?

Taking yet another angle, the special issue wants to unravel how cities as experiential spaces have fed into literary and artistic works—and how these imaginations of urban spaces may have offered alternative “readings” of cities, contradicted ongoing developments or tried to prompt a reconsideration of the entanglements and agencies of the living beings in urban spaces. Recent research on Sinophone cities such as Taipeh or Hong Kong has shown how the more-than-human environments have compelled authors to re-reading the histories of space-shaping, of migration and of war and violence that took place in urban spaces. In these narratives, non-human species appear as agents, witnesses, and objects of historical change, rather than as substitutable surroundings (Gaffric 2022; Kao 2024; Møller-Olsen 2023), illustrating the more-than-human dimension or urban space. Likewise, art forms such as cinema can create ecospaces in which the entanglement of human bodies, architecture and more-than-human environments visually takes new shapes, thereby inciting new modes of seeing (Tong 2009).

Taking an interdisciplinary perspective that includes diverse disciplines, such as history, literature, art, sociology, political science, urban ecology, etc., our special issue wants to tease out the diverse and paradoxical storylines that are being written by the various actors within Chinese cities—both human and nonhuman—and that might contribute to a fuller understanding of the potentials and limitations of urban spaces that are often shaped by modernist, technocratic and anthropocentric assumptions (Wang 2023). 

Chinese will be defined broadly as encompassing all urban spaces or urban communities and the discourses surrounding them that are part of the Sinophone world in the sense of David Wang’s approach   that covers the heterogeneity of voices and perspectives encompassing the PRC, Taiwan, Hongkong, but also Chinese-speaking communities in Southeast Asia or overseas (Wang 2017). 

Possible topics (always with a focus on urban spaces) should include but are not limited to:

-       Multispecies interactions in colonial/semi-colonial settings

-       Modernist discourses and practices and the marginalization of the more-than-human in urban environments

-       The changing social and economic roles of nonhuman animals in urban spaces (e.g., as pets, in zoos, in transport, as guards, etc.)

-       Wildlife in urban spaces

-       The changing places and spaces of the nonhuman

-       Hygiene, health, and the more-than-human

-       Nutrition and food practices

-       Religion and environmental ethics

-       City-planning and architecture in a more-than-human environment

-       Climate change and the more-than-human

-       Novel theoretical approaches (animal geography, multispecies ethnography, etc.)

-       Urban governance and the more-than-human

-       Practices of urban agriculture and farming

-       Social and ecological activism (ecological justice and social equity)

-       Questioning the boundaries between the rural and the urban

-       Shifting aesthetics of the urban in literature and the arts

-       Urban art as a space for experimentation and rethinking

-       Cities as lieus de memoire from a more-than-human perspective 

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