While we conventionally think of cities as thoroughly humanised and cultural places, they are better understood as more-than-human assemblages. Some urban plants and animals provide benefits for human residents, including clean(er) air and water, microclimate regulation, and recreational and spiritual resources. In recent years, urban authorities worldwide have recognised this fact and invested heavily in urban greening and restoration. While these initiatives often attend to water availability, as we face increasing dry years it is worth considering how non-human urban life has fared within the human water regimes imposed under past conditions of lower than average rainfall.

Cities are (among other things) machines for moving water around, with politics, infrastructure and the environment combining to determine at a macro scale how much water - and what kind of water - goes where. The prioritisation of particular water uses (and users) over others is thrown into stark relief in conditions of drought and declining rainfall. This paper traces the tensions that have arisen between water for people and water for urban wildlife and forests in some Australian urban contexts, illuminating changing hierarchies of value in urban nature and showing how these have been contested in times of water scarcity.