While animals have been and are part of the urban environment, they have been largely absent from modernist urban planning visions and discourses. However, any effort to apply the One Health framework in urban planning will need to consider the human-animal interface and the role played by the built environment in mediating and shaping human-animal relationships. Taking a long-term historical view on the issue, the chapter argues that human perceptions of animals as a health threat have impacted the way that urban space has been thought about and organised, and that these perceptions and practices have undergone significant changes during the past 150 years. New medical and zoological research has generated new interpretative frameworks, each of which has highlighted different health issues associated with urban fauna. More specifically, five successive frameworks can be distinguished. Within these frameworks, urban animals were conceptualised and tackled as (1) a public nuisance, (2) a bacteriological health hazard, (3) disease vectors, (4) disease reservoirs and (5) incubators for emerging (viral) infections, a perspective that has been prominent in discussions on the zoonotic origins of Covid-19. The primary-source-based historical examples derive from the Finnish towns of Helsinki, Oulu, and Rovaniemi.