From the earliest civilizations, livestock animals have held an integral place in cities. In the United States, productive animals were an important part of the urban landscape until the first half of the twentieth century, when social and economic influences redefined cities to exclude livestock. This study examines the recent re-emergence of small-scale urban livestock agriculture (ULA) in American cities through two qualitative case studies. The first case focused on "New Urban Chicken Keepers," primarily college educated, white residents in Seattle, Washington, and Portland, Oregon. The other case study features a diversified farm at a public high school for teenage mothers in Detroit, Michigan. This research asked what beliefs and imaginaries motivate participants' desire to keep livestock, how participants actually enact or perform these imaginaries through their animal practices, and what difficulties participants face in enacting these imaginaries. In-depth interviews were conducted with chicken-keeping households in Seattle and Portland; participant-observation was a key research method at the school farm in addition to interviews with students, teachers, volunteers, and parents. Interviews were transcribed, coded inductively, and analyzed for common themes and outlying perspectives. At the center of the findings are various alternative imaginaries—that is, sets of beliefs, understandings, values and desires of ULA practitioners about human animal relations, food systems, urban ecology and urban-rural dualisms that often stand in contrast to dominant discourses. One of the key findings of this study is that while participants' pre-existing notions about animals motivate their actions, these imaginaries are also further shaped and redefined by the affective experiences of human-animal interaction and the agency of the animals themselves. The study also considers whether urban residents' proximity to individual productive animals influences their perceptions of or moral relationships with livestock animals more broadly. In addition, this research documents the deliberate efforts of urban livestock-keepers to create backyard agro-ecosystems and local exchange networks that challenge the negative environmental and social 'externalities' of the industrial capitalist agri-food system. This research suggests that further scholarly work on urban livestock agriculture will contribute significantly to urban political ecology and critical animal geographies.