Walk any city block and count what is not human: pigeons rerouting around scaffolding, street trees splitting pavement from below, fungal networks running under lawns that were designed as though they were inert green carpet. Cities present themselves as human plans, but they function, in practice, as ongoing multispecies negotiations that happen to be zoned and permitted by people. A sewer is also a habitat corridor. A median strip is also a pollinator's decision about where to stop. Reading the city only through its human planning documents means missing most of what actually determines how it behaves over time — die-offs, invasions, adaptations that no urban planning department authorised. DistinctionHabitat returns here from a different angle: the built environment is a selective filter for which non-human forms of life persist alongside human ones, whether or not that selection was ever named as policy. Multispecies urbanism does not add nature to the city; it insists the city was never separable from it.
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