Animals in the City

The conference Animals in the City borrows its title from the concept developed by Andrea Branzi and Stefano Boeri: an urban plan that envisioned the simultaneous release of 50,000 sacred cows and 30,000 monkeys into the parks and boulevards of Paris.

This conference questions the theoretical scope of this concept and examines the distinction between city and nature at the intersection of arts, design, technology, and ecology.

A visit of Animals in the City exhibition, presented in the Galerie Valois, is offered after the conference by Léanne Sacramone, Senior Curator at the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain. Free visit without prior registration.

Through two of his most recent projects, Building Biospheres in Venice and LUMA Parc des Ateliers in Arles, Bas Smets explores a new relationship between architecture and nature, in which built environment and living systems co-produce atmospheres capable of welcoming, sustaining, and generating plant, animal and human life, transforming architecture into a habitable milieu. 

A radical vision: the introduction of free-roaming animals as a tool to decelerate and de-anthropocentrize the metropolis. Gabriel Alonso’s talk reads Branzi and Boeri’s proposal for Grand Paris not as provocation, but as a form of postnatural infrastructure. Animals are not anomalies. They are not external to the city. They are agents that reveal the city’s latent conditions, its exclusions, and its ethical and infrastructural assumptions. Think about it. After all, we are animals too. Animals observing animals, animals interrupted by animals, performing their animality through technologies, glitches, slippages, and formless crashing; agents that fracture linear circulation, destabilize urban time, and reveal the structural violence embedded in modern planning.

In dialogue with contemporary posthuman theory and the research of the Institute for Postnatural Studies, Gabriel Alonso intervention examines how animality, flesh, data, and ritual converge to produce new forms of coexistence. Architecture is reframed as a cosmopolitical practice: a discipline capable of hosting vulnerability, death, and non-human agency within the urban field, where unpredictability is not a flaw but a generative principle.