Justice without feeling? The case for Wildlife-Affective Urban Design

Urban design and planning increasingly engage biodiversity, habitat restoration, and green infrastructure, yet they still pay limited attention to how human–wildlife relations are felt, contested, and governed in everyday urban life. This paper develops Wildlife-Affective Urban Design (WAUD) as a conceptual framework for examining how urban form shapes multispecies encounter not only through ecological performance, but also through fear, curiosity, attachment, irritation, avoidance, and unequal exposure to harm. Bringing wildlife-inclusive design, affective urbanism, emotional urbanism, multispecies ethics, and spatial justice into dialog, the paper argues that coexistence should not be understood as a linear progression from contact to empathy. Instead, encounters with wildlife may generate care, discomfort, nuisance, anxiety, or demands for control at the same time. In this way, the paper contributes to emotional urbanism by extending it beyond predominantly human-centered accounts of urban feeling toward the unequal politics through which multispecies emotions become institutionally legible and governable. Across landscape, neighborhood, and building/interface scales, WAUD shows how design can organize differentiated proximities, thresholds, and responsibilities rather than simply encourage closeness. Methodologically, it calls for combining quantitative indicators, situated accounts of encounter, and ecological proxies without presuming transparent access to nonhuman subjectivity. The paper concludes by redefining emotional equity not as the equal distribution of positive feeling, but as the reduction of systematic harms, exclusions, and unrecognized burdens in multispecies urban life.