Urban Animism: Cities as Living Reefs

Last week, I found myself staring at a documentary on the Great Barrier Reef, nursing my bowl of cereal and coffee. The narrator was enthusiastically explaining the “engineering marvels” of coral polyps—tiny organisms that literally build calcium carbonate cities to live in. Each polyp contributes to the structure while simultaneously inhabiting it, creating vast underwater metropolises teeming with multiple forms of life, all interdependent, all contributing to something larger than themselves.

I thought I was having a moment of downtime, albeit not the most exciting part of my weekend. But no, no I wasn’t.

Cities are reefs: built by many, inhabited by more, alive as whole ecosystems.

Coral. Cities.

The similarities, the “kind of the same,” just appeared in my head.

Sigh.

It’s easy to think of coral as a single living thing, an underwater plant. But it’s actually made of countless individual polyps living in a built environment they’ve created themselves. Much like ants in an anthill—but with a crucial difference—the coral reef becomes home to hundreds of other species who weren’t involved in the building but are essential to its health: fish that clean the coral, sea anemones that provide shelter, algae that photosynthesise nutrients. The reef isn’t just the coral structure—it’s the entire living ecosystem.

Cities work the same way. Humans build the infrastructure, but the urban ecosystem includes far more than just us and our concrete. There are ancient land spirits whose presence persists beneath the asphalt, urban spirits that emerge from the intersection of human intention and material reality, and what I think of as hybrid consciousnesses that develop where these different forms of awareness meet and collaborate. A city ecosystem can be as subtle as a century-old sandstone building that holds its breath when storms roll in, or a river culvert beneath a highway where water spirit and rusting steel frame have merged into something new, humming faintly under passing tyres. I’ve explored these in more detail in The Urban Consciousness Experiment.

The question isn’t whether cities are spiritual ecosystems—they demonstrably are. The question is: what kind of relationship do we have with these living urban communities we help create?

Beyond Stewardship: The Custodial Shift

Much environmental thinking talks about “stewardship”—the responsible management of resources for human benefit and ecosystem health. It’s several steps up from exploitation, but stewardship still positions humans as managers, the ones in control who decide what’s allowed under seemingly arbitrary rules.

Custodianship, on the other hand, is fundamentally different.

Australian Aboriginal peoples understand this distinction intimately. Traditional custodians don’t “own” country—country is part of them. As Yuwibara man Philip Kemp puts it: “I would prefer to be identified as a Traditional Custodian and not a Traditional Owner as I do not own the land but I care for the land.” This isn’t semantic hair-splitting. It’s a complete reversal of the relationship between human consciousness and place-based consciousness.

As custodians, humans have a duty of care to the landscape they live within, not above or over. We have roles and responsibilities within a larger living system, but we’re not its managers. We’re participants in an ecosystem that includes multiple forms of consciousness with their own agency, intentions, and needs.

For a long time, my personal opinion has been that we all need to shift our thinking toward custodianship if we’re to reverse environmental damage and address climate change. Over the last while, as I’ve explored urban animism, it has slowly dawned on me that—although complex—this shift also applies to urban environments.

The Urban Animism Custodial Challenge

Traditional custodianship assumes continuity with original conditions. As a non-Indigenous Australian, my understanding of Aboriginal Australians’ relationship with country is one of deep continuity: evolving alongside changes in the landscape, but never altering the land’s essential character.

Cities, by contrast, represent radical transformation, often without the consent of the local spirits of place. Yet in these altered spaces, new forms of consciousness emerge: urban spirits that communicate through traffic patterns and electrical grids; hybrid entities formed where ancient awareness meets modern structures; building spirits with personalities shaped over decades of human habitation.

If we’ve helped midwife these new forms of consciousness into existence, do we have a custodianship role to play? If so, what are our obligations?

Here, the coral reef metaphor proves useful again (I do love a good metaphor). In a healthy reef, different organisms play different roles—some build structure, others provide nutrients, still others clean and maintain. No single species manages the system, but each contributes to conditions that allow all to thrive.

Urban custodianship might work the same way. Humans are one type of consciousness contributing to building and maintaining urban ecosystems—but we’re not the ultimate authorities. We share these spaces with land spirits, urban spirits, building consciousness, and hybrid entities, each with their own roles.

Diana Rajchel, in her book Urban Magick, writes about city priests whose role is to tend their city, serve as intermediaries with its spirits, and (at times) channel protection and healing for its inhabitants. Priesthood isn’t the same as custodianship, but it hints at the kinds of human roles that can be oriented toward service rather than control.

What Urban Custodianship Looks Like in Practice

So how do we move from an abstract idea of custodianship to a practical framework for everyday life?

Custodianship isn’t abstract—it’s the small, daily tending that keeps an ecosystem alive. Empiricus knows.

Urban custodianship isn’t about asking permission from traffic lights before adjusting the timing (although honestly, it might improve flow). It’s about developing the sensitivity to recognise when urban ecosystems are thriving versus when they’re stressed, and adjusting our participation accordingly.

Some urban ecosystems are clearly struggling. Think back to the last dilapidated neighbourhood, empty house, or deserted encampment in the middle of the bush that you discovered. You just knew something wasn’t right, especially when the air was thin and stale and noises were tentative and cursory. Those are the places where the spirits left behind could be hostile, damaged, or absent. The built environment supports neither human nor more-than-human flourishing. It's the spiritual equivalent of bleached coral reefs—systems under too much stress to maintain healthy relationships between their inhabitants.

Other places buzz with awareness and vitality. Ancient consciousness and newly emerged entities find ways to work together. These are often the neighbourhoods people call “full of character” or “good energy.” In a weird way, the footpaths seem soft underfoot, like walking on rubber, and the graffiti just seems to fit in. To me, what we’re sensing here is ecosystem health.

To participate well in a healthy ecosystem, or to begin repairing a damaged one, we can:

• Notice how urban changes affect the spiritual ecosystem. When a building is demolished or a street redirected, what happens to the consciousness that inhabited those spaces? How might we support those transitions?

• Practice reciprocity with the whole ecosystem, not just individual spirits.

• Recognise our role as one participant among many—we may build much of the structure, but we’re not the reef.

I've written more about reciprocity as part of an urban animism approach in Reciprocity in the City if you're interested in some basic practices to build from.

Custodianship, then, isn’t only about noticing or acknowledging. It’s a daily practice of tending. Custodians listen for cues, respond with care, and act in ways that maintain balance. Sometimes this looks like small rituals of respect—pausing to thank a building before it’s demolished, or planting something hardy in a neglected lot. Sometimes it looks like remediation—sweeping a laneway that feels forgotten, or honouring a spirit that has been displaced. Participation is the baseline; custodianship is participation with responsibility for the whole.

The Custodial Questions We’re Not Asking

If we take custodianship seriously, uncomfortable questions follow:

• What obligations do we have toward consciousness we’ve helped create, intentionally or otherwise? If there are obligations, how might they change over time?

• How might urban planning change if spiritual as well as environmental health were part of the brief?

As a non-Indigenous Australian, the question of colonisation is always just under the surface in conversations like these. For now, though, I want to focus more narrowly on what it means to live as reciprocal co-inhabitants in a shared ecosystem.

The Revolutionary Mundane

The most radical aspect of custodianship may be how ordinary it can become. Coral reef inhabitants don’t hold committee meetings before expanding the reef. This is a blessing—can you imagine an opinionated seahorse arguing about funding with a sea anemone? It might be more inspired than some committee meetings I participate in. Anyway, coral reefs are far more organic: they respond to conditions, contribute their gifts, and adjust behaviour based on feedback from the system.

Urban ecosystems thrive when many hands—human and more-than-human—play their part.

Urban custodianship could be the same: daily city life as spiritual practice. The way you move through streets, relate to buildings, and participate in flows of energy all shape the ecosystem’s health.

The shift required is related to power and connection: from ownership to participation, from management to relationship. The difficulty is that this shift feels like a devolution of power, diffusing central authority—and that’s not an easy change. But cities aren’t just human infrastructure. They’re living ecosystems where multiple forms of consciousness collaborate to create something larger than themselves, and they would benefit immensely from power shared in connection rather than hoarded in control.

So the question remains: What would it mean to live in cities as participants rather than managers?

I’m still learning to pay attention to the reefs I inhabit. But the coral keeps offering its metaphor: complex, collaborative, conscious communities where many forms of life contribute to something magnificent.

Maybe that’s what cities have always been. Maybe we’re just now ready to participate with skill.