Greening cities and the expansion of urban areas into biodiversity-rich landscapes induce unplanned effects: urban wildlife. Entirely new human-wildlife encounters and cross-species learning are taking place at rapid evolutionary scales, making the multispecies cities of the future an important arena for potentially establishing new forms of coexistence. Coexisting with urban wildlife is not without challenges. Wildlife in cities has typically been given triage treatment of immediate problems rather than targeting underlying drivers. Urban wildlife increasingly gives rise to social polarisation, with some residents wanting to ‘save everything’ and others to ‘kill everything’.
There is a need to consider human-wildlife coexistence in cities beyond previous categories of either a mere wildlife problem to be resolved through short-term deterrence of animal behaviour, or a human problem that can go away by fostering pro-environmental attitudes. Instead, multispecies cities will require the development of an interspecies etiquette that recognises that problems and solutions are distributed across humans and wildlife and in their interplay.
