Animals have always inhabited cities in many ways – either as domesticated, stray, or wild creatures. Yet, as urbanisation increasingly takes a planetary form, we may well argue that all animals are in the process of being directly or indirectly urbanised. As a result, animals are incessantly, often violently assimilated within the aesthetics, normative and securitarian expectations of urban politics. At the same time, animals prove to be endlessly excessive to such expectations, systematically upholding, contradicting, and overturning them. In this sense, rather than simply victims of urbanisation, or successful parasites – as rats, pigeons or mosquitos are often described –, animals may also be seen as veritable harbingers of urbanisation, insofar as shaping its logics, norms and structures, and contributing to the emergence of novel urban ecologies that reveal the limits of the traditional legal and moral legitimation for animal management as well as the anachronism of the modernist framework for imagining human-animal relations. Addressing this increasingly topical problematic field, the paper explores the emerging ontologies of proximity and coexistence between humans and animals in the city, through the notion of comfort. This key aesthetic-political paradigm of contemporary urbanisation has been scarcely discussed in urban geography, and never in relation to urban animals. It is however particularly cogent vis-à-vis the way in which human-animal relations in the city are represented, regulated, and experienced. Through a critical engagement with the paradigm of comfort the paper unpacks its implicit relation with key ethico-political urban concepts (e.g. civilisation, wilderness, security, fear, responsibility, justice, freedom, publicness) and the way this is reconfigured in the face of urban animals, highlighting both the problematic consequences, and the promising possibilities, that follow. The example of a (tragic) human-bear encounter in the peri-urban fringe of northern Italy will provide an illustrative complement to the presentation.

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urban animals,security,control,normativity,comfort