A delightful way to enter my comps, this read was recommended by a companion as we walked passed Victoria Park. Since moving to Vancouver in 2021, I've developed meaningful relations with city parks nearby where I've lived. First it was Chaldecott Park and West Memorial Park, where I'd go and read or take a phonecall or meeting and sit in the dugout or beneath the huge trees. When it snowed, my roommate and I tried to sled down the slight slope in West Memorial. Then it was Jonathan Rogers Park. Then Granville Park, a sunken park where the fog would collect in winter, where my friend and I would meet halfway between our apartments to catch up. She's moved away now but I still walk there to call her. There are many other parks across the city I frequent less often but are still very dear. Among them, Victoria park for me is a place to paint little canvases with friends in summer, a shady spot to read a book after walking there on a whim, a place to pee and walk in circles while I kill time before an appointment, a manifested encounter, and the destination of the trans march and dyke march (on different years) where I connected with friends and missed connections. Although I know Vancouver is unceded territory and that city parks occupy stolen indigenous land, I hadn't dug deeper into the history or political ecology of the specific parks I use & frequent. I was therefore excited by this recommendation, and figured it would make a good introduction to my comps reading given that I read around the city (often in parks) and specifically have been attempting to apply the ethic of urban political ecology to my urban practice(s) (see up my alley).

Four main chapters, written by four members of a family who's long lived at the corner of Victoria aka Bocce Ball Park, explore the tensions and joys of city parks on occupied land. A photo essay and set of poignant interviews with the longtime park goers are folded between a critical introduction and overview of "the city park" as a colonial architecture, and an archival tracing of the land title of what is now the City of Vancouver's Victoria Park. Written by four white settlers who have lived in Vancouver for quite some time, On this patch of grass approaches parks from four entwined threads (3) which I summarize as use, regulation, parks as instruments of settler colonialism, and parks' open-ended nature which affords the possibility of their being remade. The book illustrates a serious and head-on working through of what it means to hold dear and meaningful those attachments to "public" lands that not only on stolen but mark the continued cultural, ecological, and territorial dispossession of occupation where park users are unequally policed, both by cops and members of the neighborhood community. "We want to tell part of the park's story here, to interrogate it as a place, a particular kind of urban subjectivity. But more than that, we want to use it as a vehicle for thinking about occupations, the uses of urban parks, the quasi-spiritual claims for the natural world and the history of this city" (9).

Throughout particularly the introduction (Chapter 1) and first (Chapter 2), but also the last chapter (Chapter 5), I appreciated the presence of urban political ecology deployed to denaturalize, historicize, and politicize city parks. "No park is innocent...Parks, urban or not, are exactly as 'natural' as the roads or buildings around them, and they are just as political. Every park in North America is performing modernity and settler colonialism on an everyday basis" (2, see also 39). Tuning in not only to the collaborations and easy multiplication of use in Victoria Park but also the frictions between park users/uses, Matt calls out the biopolitics of park theory as well as (or instantiated by) The City of Vancouver Parks and Recreation, which laud 'diversity' and 'accessibility' and, in the latter's case, reconciliation and Indigenous sovereignty, while determining acceptable uses and quelling more rambunctious users. "The history of urban parks is one of landscaping and scenery, of utility and improvement, regulation and discipline" he writes, "Parks claim to uplift people...they are the city-but-not-the-city..." (41). When I asked what it means to generate knowledge from within and as part of the city, these spaces of respite are not exempt (this becomes more obvious the moment they turn from uplifting to potentially unsafe milieus as I'm hollered at late at night). In other words, the VPL or the bus or "downtown" are no more "the city" than the scrap of park at the intersection of McLean and Charles where I sat reading this chapter on the "third bench", as two construction workers who called it in their surprise that their were more benches than they had noted on a previous lunch break. With all its harmonies but especially frictions, Victoria Park, Matt and his family contends, is an exemplary (though not exceptional), lens to address the book's aims: "what I admire so much is the visibility in Bocce Ball Park. The politicization of the park and all its refusals are right there, unmistakable, irreverent. Rather than pacifying the city, this park highlights and amplifies it" (38).

In the last chapter, Selena traces the land title's changing hands using archival evidence from the Vancouver Public Library. However, what I found remarkable was how she began the chapter by describing her bikeride home from VPL Central. Including the surrounding visual and affective detail, Selena itinerates her journey along Seymour Street, Dunsmuir, the Viaduct, Keefer Street, Keefer Place, Keefer Ave, Main Street, Hastings, Keefer again, Campbell, across Hastings, then onto Powell Street, Across Clark Drive, on to Odlum Drive, then up Grant Street, across Commercial Drive, and finally to the southwest corner of Bocce Ball Park where she dismounts at home. I can vividly imagine her route from downtown to east van. On the next page, we learn she's taken this route intentionally so as to ride along the streets named after the figures whose hand in the urbanization of Vancouver and the titling of Victoria Park she's about to elaborate. She denaturalizes the names naming streets which too easily become "the background to our daily lives and are repeated in such everyday and mundane ways that they have little meaning attached to them anymore — other than as a way to mark an address" (115).

Reflections on Reading Questions
As a whole, I think this book directly attends to my question What of the structural can be seen in the everyday? in terms of taking an everyday site composed of/by everyday activities and denaturalizes, historicizes, and politicizes it to reveal how "that one square block articulates so many of the aporias of occupied urban land" (6). The authors take two simultaneously abstract and immensely, necessarily, concrete things—decolonization and city parks—and tackle their relation. I'm still thinking this last analysis through but: The everyday reappears throughout the book. Of course, "We encounter parks in everyday and bodily senses" (2), but I picked up a on there being a larger sense 'the everyday' was both an affordance—how parks could be made through low-intensity refiguring of relations—and an obscurance to the very ordinary, micropolitical (relating to affect, not small as Barua reiterates) ways in which (racial and) colonial logics may work under the radar for white settlers in a settler-colonial city. Parks are places where the "everyday work of biopolitics" plays out (29). Yet also, "everyday activities give us clues as to how we can share land in a decolonial sense" (5). Maybe the better question is after what else, or what more exists in the everyday. Asking questions like What of the experiential is inflected, composed, or informed by processes not immediately perceptible? keeps these tensions in mind so as to not take Vancouver parks, for instance, for granted as a universal public good or accessible commons (33-34). It's a way to, like I asked, tune perception to the non-phenomenological and sustain attention in practice (or in use) to what is not immediately perceptible for me but which composes parks as urban assemblages. I'm reminded of a paper "Can political ecology be decolonised? A dialogue with Paul Robbins" read last year for class. I believe the conclusion was no, not unless it's land back, but that doesn't mean you can't work in ways that are anti-colonial. But with On This Patch of Grass, it feels more like a maybe—they are saying yes, what if city parks were offered back to the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh Nations (44). While I (and I imagine they) don't have the power to offer Bocce Ball Park to the Nations whose land it is in a land-title sense, taking up urban political ecology as an ethic (rather than analytic) is a way to think seriously through settler-colonial architecture and the anti-colonial possibilities for remaking parks, even toward a decolonial future. And, to think these reworkings in practice - like Selena on her bikeride - refiguring relations in and through everyday activities (5) where before these tensions and potentialities may have gone unrecognized/unconsidered. Thus, this book also responded to my question What are the colonial implications of my urban practices as a settler in Vancouver?

More than halfway through reading Lively Cities, I went without the book for a day and read this article on "Racial Feralization" because I thought it could elaborate the figure of ferality also employed used by Barua, as well as bring it into discussions of race and the deployment of racial logics to govern populations in terms more specific to the human. Though not an animal geographer myself, I have so much added appreciation and respect for Barua's insistence on the importance of attending to other than human lifeworlds in the city when I return to literature discussing similar figures but devoid of the nuance present in accounts that feature the more-than-human as at minimum present, active agents in co-constituting the urban fabric.

In this paper, Valayden suggests contemporary governance strategies wield/leverage potential risk of disaster, whose increased frequency and intensity results from planetary urbanization, as legitimation to deploy racial logics to order cities. "Racial feralization is racial governance in the age of planetary urbanization" (11). Unquestioningly taking planetary urbanization as the current state of affairs, he "argue[s] that racial feralization, as a conception of race, has reappeared as a problematic of government in the context of a risk-society..." (Valayden 2016, 3, emphasis in original). Furthermore, the stakes of the risk are existential. Valayden, along with "the majority of race scholars", contends that "the critique of race must take place through a critique of philosophical humanism" (2). Closely reading Foucault, he points to a pitfall of many interpretations that take 'Western episteme' "as an empirical reality" (2) rather than an analytic to understand how 'Man' is cohered and maintained (3). Valayden suggests "racial feralization" as a parallel discourse to modernity/coloniality, one which "refers to the ever present potential that humanity will slip back into and blend with nature" (3). "racial feralization is the future posited by the discourse of government where a catastrophic engulfment threatens the human form, and where decomposition and decay will reduce the planet to a volatile landscape of random violence. Racial ferality inaugurates a form of governance at the threshold of the future survival of the human race" (14) Racial feralization thus provides a counternarrative to the dominant discourse which assumes infinite progress and the one-day obsolescence of 'Man' (rather than seeing the overrepresentation of the former mentality tied to the impossibility of the latter (2)). Taken as "an analytic and not an empirical fact" (18), racial feralization is a way to understand how racial logics persist in (biopolitics operating on) fears of loosing the human/'Man' - and, therefore reveals philosophical humanism as never all that "self-assured" (3).

To note another particularly vivid passage: "Racial feralization represents the threat that the human will be engulfed by nature, and that human life will be reduced to formlessness and random violence, devoid of any ability to create meaning in the world. That is, the symbolics of race, so central to modernity's self-understanding, would be undone by the impossibility of symbolization...racial feralization has been revived as a problematic of government ot extend the matrix of race ot populations surplused by neoliberal capitalism. Racial ferality acts as a principle of legitimation to govern the perceived exponential increase of catastrophic dangers in a risk society whose context is planetary urbanization" (18) Valayden's unquestioning deployment of planetary urbanization as the organizer of our current world to me read ironically similarly to taking "Western episteme" as empirical fact. He also doesn't seem interested in delving into the construction of "disaster" or "natural disasters" for that matter. There was no specific populations described even though an array of examples come to mind. And, of course, no mention of how the "matrix of race" has been extended to nonhuman populations "surplused by neoliberal capitalism" (18) and those already in beastly positions. Racial feralization is repeatedly posed as a "problematic of government", but I would have liked further elaboration of the "problematic" at hand. Indeed, I felt the same language was used repetitively to re-state the original claim. I was left confused as to how racial feralization was at once a "threat" and "analytic" - to me it seemed like Valayden was deploying it in one way, and governments were deploying it an other. Moreover, and maybe it's because I don't have a background knowledge of critical race scholarship, but it seemed "race" as a constructed category and "human race" as species slipped into one another.
(The feared dissolution of the human race as a species, not necessarily through dying out but through loosing coherence as an ontological category, reminded me of Simone's description of what he meant by "from extinction to abolition". Unfortunately and strangely Valayden, to my recollection, didn't so much attend to the nuance in extinction, not only as proffered by other scholarship but in the difference, within his own argument, between the dissolution of the human as a category distinct from nature and the dying out of the human species, conceivably similar or identical though those two feared fates may be. Again, this reiterates an absence of attention to those already in beastly positions.)

In Lively Cities, Barua explicitly attends to how racial logics been extended to nonhuman populations through anticipatory fears of the stranger. In chapters 3 & 4 of Lively Cities, where ferality features most prominent, Barua takes his analytic developed in the context of (trans-species Macaques ethologies in) Delhi to another postcolonial city, London, where he uses the figure of ferality to explore (and this, like any attempt to summarize this book, is an oversimplification) how the movement of more-than-humans in and out of the frame of lively capital and affective relations across species divides offers another way to meaningfully understand the material politics and practices of urban inhabitation and urbanization itself.

True to his mode of argumentation throughout the book, Barua articulates the feral in both major and minor terms. (Major ≈ canon, arborescence, human-centered, god's eye, top-down, etc.) Major connotations of the feral include breakdown, imageries/realities of predation by the rich, and apprehension of forms that exist as neither domesticated nor wild—those once domesticated that escaped and now live in-between,likened to loose animals or criminals ranging the otherwise ordered/orderly city. However, "as a theoretical category constituting the outside to capital, ferality becomes a productive entry point for a minor articulation of cities composed It is the major figure of ferality that Valayden pursues.

In the chapters on ferality, Barua is particularly interested in feral Parakeets—those that escaped or were released and which now proliferate London. Parakeets began being brought to Britain from South Asia and West Africa in the early 1900s as part of the exotic bird trade, though the current feral population of 8,600 breeding pairs (106) stem from escapes around 1969 (109). Feral parakeets have created an urban niche for themselves that, contra invasion biology and biotic nativism stoked sentiments, there is no evidence is negatively impacting "native" species. Actually, some species have changed their habits in relation to Parakeets. Though London's verdant and gregarious population of feral parakeets draws mixed sentiments from individuals, many enjoy feeding the birds, both at home at a bird feeder or outside. The affective relations Parakeets have developed with humans contribute to their infrastructural niche. Other contributors to their proliferation and thriving include the staggered bloom-times of urban flora, also introduced via imperial importation. Over generations, Parakeet's genetic and behavioral changes in relation to London's urban environment and flora and fauna mark a novel form of evolution and index Barua compellingly calls "recombinant urbanisms".

In Valayden's account, racism morphs, no longer legitimated through establishing people in hierarchies but forstalling catastrophe (12); "The symbolics of race - the categories that define fixity - are allowed to decompose through individualization and hybridization up to the point where this degeneration signals the threat of racial feralization" (Valayden 12) This - immediate connection to how xyz barua multiculturalism and diversity - more the norm... what becomes object-targe? One Londoner Barua talked to about the Parakeets said "I want to see bright people, in muted landscapes" (153).

Barua would therefore agree with Valayden on the bioplitical deployment of racial logics:
"Feralization enters discourse and practice as a problematic of government and allows various agencies to identify, name and govern a population in racial terms. In turn, it legitimizes the application of a number of techniques of sorting and technologies of control and care to those identified as feral" (Valayden 2016, 18)
though Barua would likely not agree with Valayden that planetary urbanization is responsible. Indeed, in the next chapters which I read after finishing this paper, Barua makes the case for viewing the pastoral as immanent to cities, and the urban question being just as much an agrarian one.