Urban maintenance as compromise: Coming to terms with the multispecies city

Abstract

The paper examines the role of maintenance and repair in the multispecies city as central to understanding the relationship between non-human life and infrastructure. The focus of the paper is the black-legged kittiwake, a pelagic species of gull. Kittiwakes have long-used artificial structures for nesting, but the rapid growth of seabird colonies in UK towns and cities has seen their inhabitation of urban infrastructure pose new challenges. Drawing on ethnographic research from the eastern coast of England, the paper develops the notion of ‘maintenance as compromise’ to capture how forms of infrastructural maintenance reflect an adjustment or coming to terms with new ecological proximities. Through three cases, namely, non-human inhabitation of an iconic infrastructure, routine infrastructural work in the form of street cleaning, and transformational repairs that support the use of buildings by breeding birds, the paper argues that undertaking maintenance as a form of compromise not only allows for messy co-presence, but demonstrates an understanding of infrastructure that takes the lifeworlds of non-humans seriously. However, while such a coming to terms indicates a shift in the politics of knowledge, attending to the collective life of infrastructure reveals the simultaneous constraints and tensions that make radical propositions for alternative futures difficult to imagine. The paper thus concludes by underlining the complex motivations that shape practices of repair and maintenance in the multispecies city, the problem with taking such works as a sign of shifting ethical relations, and the expertise and unknowns that are involved in responding to non-human inhabitations of infrastructure.

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