The term “feral city” is understood to have first come into use in late 2003, following 9-11 and the turning of attention to the interstitial zones of the global economy, those places perceived as potential breeding grounds for anti-western, terrorist ideology. Writing in the Naval War College Journal, former White House Advisor Richard Norton classified “Feral Cities” according to functioning levels of government, services, economy and security. Norton, however is no Mike Davis, lest one forget the subtitle of the paper; “The New Strategic Environment”. The ultimate impetus for the paper was to alert US Military authorities to the danger not of simply hostile (‘wild’) ideologies, but the coalescence of those ideological movements with the informal and/or black market’s access to global flows of capital and information associated the infrastructure networks of the 21st century city. Essentially, the problem from Norton’s perspective was neither the existence of ideologies hostile to US interest, nor the sprawling slums and environmental degradation associated with urban conditions in the developing world (he notes that much of the US and western Europe of experienced these conditions in the recent past). Rather, the “Feral City” emerged out of the inability of the post-colonial global capitalist interests, or in other words the hands-off market-oriented political strategy of “pax americana”, to wholly tame, assimilate, or eliminate those hostile ideologies as they morph and adapt themselves to habitats created by the logistics infrastructure of global capitalist urbanism. In this sense, the “feral” begins to describe less a state of being or (un)domestication, than a relationship between subject, object and a shared habitat. Despite Norton’s controversial (if not problematic) dehumanizing description of populations based on their potential to provide resistance to US military and economic hegemony, this polemic world-view provides a way to begin to understand the future of the non-human animal in the anthropocene.In contrast to Mogagishu, Norton's Feral City par excelence, a more familiar use of ‘feral’ might be a description of the some 30,000 wild dogs of Moscow, who, despite efforts of a downsized municipal government to destroy or assimilate them, continue to thrive in the ‘drossscape’ of post-Soviet Moscow.
Just as Mogadishu underwent a shift from top-down colonial rule to an eventual situation in which discipline could only be exerted at sporadically or at limited nodes such as multinational headquarters or military bases, the landscape of Soviet Moscow could also be understood as a landscape of discipline. Emerging cracks in that landscape corresponding to integration into the free market, left only the infrastructural skeleton subject to control, thus allowing for a foothold for the development of feral relationships.
As has been shown by researchers in Moscow, the packs of strays plateaued in carrying capacity with the glut of edible post-consumer waste associated with the liberalizing economy of Moscow and disinvestment of municipal maintenance and services (garbage collection, animal services, etc). In general the stay dogs preferred to live not in the “most natural” habitats, those frequented the least by humans and the areas classified by Poyarkov and Vereshchagin as “City Forest – but rather in the industrial zones. These industrial areas provided enough contact with humans, particularly the waste-energy cycles of the metropolis, yet also enough separation to maintain autonomy and avoid conflict or capture.
As has been shown by researchers in Moscow, the packs of strays plateaued in carrying capacity with the glut of edible post-consumer waste associated with the liberalizing economy of Moscow and disinvestment of municipal maintenance and services (garbage collection, animal services, etc). In general the stay dogs preferred to live not in the “most natural” habitats, those frequented the least by humans and the areas classified by Poyarkov and Vereshchagin as “City Forest – but rather in the industrial zones. These industrial areas provided enough contact with humans, particularly the waste-energy cycles of the metropolis, yet also enough separation to maintain autonomy and avoid conflict or capture.
From this point, it was observed that four gene to the human and the landscape. The ‘hanger-on’ has established relationships with individual humans who regularly give food, perhaps in exchange for services such as guard duty. The beggar has “a great arsenal of special...behavior” with-which to solicit food, but relationships are not developed with specific humans. Following there is the ‘gatherer’ who, as the name suggest, collects food through waste scavenging. Finally, there is the predator, who avoids contact with humans and primarily subsist off of animals they have killed themselves. However, these categories are relative and not absolute. An individual dog may be more capable of certain tasks than others and may have diverse relationships with humans. Nevertheless, the dog will rely on a primary foraging strategy. It is this polymorphism in dog typology that allows for the resilience of the general dog population and the density in population in general. Comparing the results of the 1996 and 2006 census, researchers discovered that even as industrial areas are relocated to outskirts of the city and the center becomes increasingly branded and developed, the dogs did not move but rather changed their behavior to find a new eco-social niche with humans.
