Soil food webs are some of the most numerous and diverse animal communities on Earth, with their integrity and vitality closely linked to the provisioning of many ecosystem services. There are still many unknowns related to the biology and ecology of these organisms, mainly because many soil taxa, especially the meso- and microfauna, are highly cryptic and notoriously difficult to study. Here, we utilize the context of urban grasslands (i.e. turfgrass lawns) as a tool to better understand their ecology. This study design allowed us to speak to how soil animals impact the functioning of these urban grasslands, and consequently, how understanding the link between soil animals and urban systems may lead to urban sustainability, especially as it relates to soils. First, we review the state of soil animal ecology and how studying them in the context of urban systems can lead to mutually beneficial outcomes in both soil animal ecology and urban ecology. Then, we describe studies which elucidate the biodiversity and functional niche of soil animals along an urbanization gradient. We show that while urbanization broadly diminishes the diversity of soil animals, even highly urban soil animal communities can be unexpectedly heterogenous. Further, we show that the influence of urbanization on soil animal functional niche is largely dependent on the taxa being studied. Next, we highlight previous methods in categorizing the interactions between soil animals and microbes, then describe a new perspective, “Soil Animal Eco-Functionality” that incorporates environmental and ecological context into the calculus of soil animal-microbe interactions to predict their ecological outcomes more precisely. We support this perspective through literature review, thought experiments, and process-based modeling exercises. Finally, we take this approach and apply it to two experiments which simulate how common lawn management practices, may alter soil animal communities, their interactions with microbes, and ultimately the ecological functions they perform. Contrary to our predictions, in both experiments we found that while increasing lawn management intensity did negatively influence soil animal community composition, the functions they performed were relatively maintained even in light of intensive management, demonstrating the functional robustness of soil food webs in urban areas.