Urban Animals

Crowding in zoocities

Tora Holmberg

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317564829
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Physical Sciences
• Categoría: Geography

The city includes opportunities as well as constraints for humans and other animals alike. Urban animals are often subjected to complaints; they transgress geographical, legal as and cultural ordering systems, while roaming the city in what is often perceived as uncontrolled ways. But they are also objects of care, conservation practices and bio-political interventions. What then, are the "more-than-human" experiences of living in a city? What does it mean to consider spatial formations and urban politics from the perspective of human/animal relations?This book draws on a number of case studies to explore urban controversies around human/animal relations, in particular companion animals: free ranging dogs, homeless and feral cats, urban animal hoarding and "crazy cat ladies". The book explores 'zoocities', the theoretical framework in which animal studies meet urban studies, resulting in a reframing of urban relations and space. Through the expansion of urban theories beyond the human, and the resuscitation of sociological theories through animal studies literature, the book seeks to uncover the phenomenon of 'humanimal crowding', both as threats to be policed, and as potentially subversive. In this book, a number of urban controversies and crowding technologies are analysed, finally pointing at alternative modes of trans-species urban politics through the promises of humanimal crowding - of proximity and collective agency. The exclusion of animals may be an urban ideology, aiming at social order, but close attention to the level of practice reveals a much more diverse, disordered, and perhaps disturbing experience.

1 Urban animals

DOI: 10.4324/9781315735726-1

One afternoon in the middle of May, when taking a regular walk with my dogs Ronja and Rocky in the suburban area where we live, a deer suddenly turned up on the path from the trees surrounding her. She looked at us from a distance of a few meters for what seemed like for ever, but in reality was probably no more than a second, and then in haste continued in the direction of a nearby housing area. Needless to say, the dogs—after an initial freeze—got very excited, barking and pulling at their leashes, frustrated and anxious to follow the deer. First, I marveled, caught by the unexpected multi-species meeting and the beauty of the deer. Then, I became anxious too, and held on tightly to the dogs’ leashes, fearing that they would manage to break free. Then I got irritated: what was she doing here, disturbing our precious routine? Then relieved: happy that my canine followers had not at that moment been off the leash (in which case, I am certain they would have chased the deer). These emotions followed quickly and seamlessly in a few seconds, framed and created by the interactional, spatial and temporal context. Had we met the deer in the woods outside of the city, or even early in the morning (urban deer typically belong to the night), the meeting would have been experienced differently. It also would have been regulated differently: in Sweden—the national context of the incident—dogs are not allowed to be off-leash (or at least not to run free) in the woods during the period between March 1 and August 20 (Hunting Act 1987: 259; Dog and Cat Supervision Act 2007: 1150). Even at other times and in other places, dogs must always be under voice control if ranging free. But, obviously, neither deer nor dogs care much about city limits (see Figure 1.1).

This brief moment illustrates the main question targeted in this book: namely, what are the multi-species experiences and politics of living in a city? Cities are inhabited by an array of species, all contributing to urban life and its spirit (Wolch 2002). The world is also getting more and more urbanized, with a growing proportion of people and other animals living in cities. The reasons for multi-species urbanization, while complex, “include two major constellations of causes: animals [as well as humans] are choosing to move into city spaces, and animals are finding their homes overtaken by cities” (van Dooren and Rose 2012: 1). So-called wild animals—mammals like foxes, rats, and the deer above—populate cities, as do many kinds of birds, fish, invertebrates, reptiles and insects, making up a complex urban ecology (Dion and Rockman 1996). Companion animals follow human migration, and urban cats and dogs, as well as other species, are growing in number. Some live indoors with humans and stay in different versions of human homes, while others occasionally or permanently occupy public spaces, and live in parks and streets. These animals—in particular dogs and cats—and their relationships with humans, are investigated in this book. Companion animals are however not only urbanized, but also more or less domesticated. Domestication is a historical and spatial relational process in which some animals come to co-evolve with humans, for better or for worse (Haraway 2003: 30–31). Urbanized animals, including humans, depend on the city for their livelihood; they suffer and thrive because of their urban lifestyle. But urbanization comes along with conflicts over space: who is allowed where, and under what conditions? Who is involved in processes of “politics of place” and who gets the right to define the meaning and function of a particular place (Franzén 2002)? By “politics,” I address the more-than-discursive acts involved in struggles over priority of access, interpretation and resources. In this connection, one further complication is that urban animals are difficult to discipline; they often transgress legal as well as cultural ordering systems, while roaming the city in what appear uncontrolled ways. But they are similarly turned into objects of care, conservation practices, and bio-political interventions. Thus, controversies over animal presences are to be expected when these different “frames of meaning” (Goffman 1974) implode.

Figure 1.1 Urban deer, Uppsala (Photo: Tora Holmberg 2013)

Drawing from case studies in a cultural comparative and intersectional approach, this book explores a number of controversies around urban human/animal relations, in particular cat/dog/human ones. The subtitle—Crowding in zoocities—alludes to the theoretical framework in which the multidisciplinary field of animal studies meets urban sociology, resulting in a reframing and a reinterpretation of urban relations and space. The “zoo” of the title refers to combinations of kinds and species of living animals. The term was chosen purposely, in order to emphasize the problematic division between humans and other animals—we are of course all animals and thus also in that sense zoo—and to highlight real animals, animal lives, rather than animals as metaphors or symbols. Moreover, the term “zoo” connotes “a situation characterized by confusion and disorder” (Oxford English Dictionary 2012), something that is often true of human/animal encounters. However, the zoo as a particular place also forms an ordered space for such encounters. Like other forms of exhibits of animals, e.g. the diorama of the natural history museum, the zoo tells us stories of particular histories and ideologies, reconstructing nature in particular ways. In Kay Andersson’s study of Adelaide Zoo, he demonstrates how, over time, it has shifted meanings from colonial power, to leisure, to education (1997). Today the zoo predominantly speaks of conservation of endangered species and environmental concerns. Common to these narratives, however, is that they have continually reinstated boundaries between humans and other animals, ordering the perceived disordered-ness of nature. Thus “zoo,” as a term, refers both to disorder and to an urban place that is set to organize and display it, neutralizing and normalizing the inherent wildness of the zoo animals, so that they become “in place” within human spaces (Philo and Wilbert 2000: 22). Zoo thus embodies contrasts that connote threats and categorization, knowledge and power (see Figure 2.2).

Through the expansion of sociological theories beyond the human perspective, and the resuscitation of sociological theories through animal studies literature, I seek to uncover the phenomenon of human/animal crowding in zoocities, both as a threat to be policed and as a potentially subversive element. The “crowding” in the subheading of this book’s title aims at capturing notions of the uncontrolled and spatial transformation of individuals across species, within specific contexts, thus the concept of crowding is in conversation with the notion of zoo. Throughout the book, a number of crowding phenomena and control technologies are analyzed, finally pointing at alternative modes of “multi-species urban politics.” To this end, I develop a framework for thinking about urban human/animal relations that involves the dimensions of species and spaces. In addition, I introduce the notion of senses. This is justified as the bridging between species and spaces—we experience certain spatial arrangements sensuously and spaces are formed by bodies.

Empirically, the book examines the politics of place and bodies taking shape in public spaces, as well as the boundaries of what may be considered proper living, e.g. the norms of urban living in late modern consumer society. This is done through the study of a number of controversial cases, including unleashed dogs, homeless and feral cats, animal hoarding, and crazy cat ladies. Studies of human/cat/dog relations, if approaching place at all, most often do so with regard to homes or shelters and not urban space, while studies of urban animals seldom focus on domestic animals but “wild” ones. What I do in this book is to go against this separation and place domestic animals and humans in the context of the city. Through the studies, the notions of “wild” and “domestic,” “pet” and “vermin,” “human” and “animal” are set in motion and transformed. As a theoretical undertaking, the book contributes to “more-than-human” urban theory in two ways. First, urban “sociation,” where, typically, subjectivity processes, including social interaction and group formation, are thought to take shape in the social realm of humans. What does it mean to become one in a multi-species context of many (Haraway 2008a)? Second, urban space as a process constructed through the dialectics of form and experience. Urban theorists have more or less neglected the presence of animals in the city, and have thought about processes like crowding and urbanization as purely human (Wolch et al. 1995). Challenging this notion, what does it mean to consider spatial formations and urban politics from the perspective of human/animal relations?

1.2 Berlin Zoo, Germany (Photo: Katja Aglert 2014)

The approaches to answering the theoretical questions are manifold. One important background of my study is research in the interdisciplinary field of animal studies, and the work of Donna Haraway is pivotal here. An important point is that becoming human is a multi-species process of co-evolution in all the dimensions of this concept (2003, 2008a). By this she means that human-ness as we know it is an outcome of a historical process of living together—in competition as well as in symbiosis—with other animals. Complementing this approach, I use the work in so-called hybrid geographies to understand urban space and subjectivity as something “more-than-human” (Hinchliffe and Whatmore 2006; Whatmore 2006). The hybrid approach refuses to oppose nature and culture, social and material, object and subject, and instead develops an understanding of the linkages and entanglements of these presupposed binaries (Whatmore 2002; Hinchliffe 2007). In the urban context, the construction of the civilized and ordered city rests on the continuous exclusion of nature (Kaika 2005). Urban theorists such as Matthew Gandy (2003), for example, stress that nature has always been an object of urbanization, and show how raw material becomes transformed into “metropolitan nature” by, for example, new water technologies. However, as already stated, I am not interested in urban nature or life—“bios”—in a general or abstract sense, but in human/animal relations in particular. Consequently, I use the concept “more-than-human,” which aims at de-stabilizing anthropocentrism and de-centering the category of the human itself (Hinchliffe and Whatmore 2006). The approach offers theoretical guidance, as well as an epistemological and ethical stance: responsible social scientists have an obligation to investigate the world as constituted by human and non-human actors in order to challenge the ideology of human exceptionalism (Hinchliffe and Whatmore 2006: 136). To this end, I focus on urban politics and bodies. Gandy writes:

Yet if we are to make sense of the modern city—and its post-industrial, late-modern and post-modern permutations—we need to engage with the body both as a site of corporeal interaction with the physical spaces of the city and as a symbolic field within which different aspects to the legitimation of modern societies are played out.

(Gandy 2006a: 497)

That bodies are simultaneously material and symbolic can be illustrated by the deer episode described above. There and then, human, dog and deer bodies interacted and intervened in a physical environment. Moreover, although our bodies and movements are all regulated through human laws and norms, these regulations look very different and their effects differ profoundly depending on species. For example, while my human body is legally protected from lethal violence, I am allowed to have my own dogs killed at any time. The deer on the other hand is protected from hunting during most of the year. But even when hunting is allowed, only registered hunters are permitted to hunt, and only in restricted areas—not, for example, in one’s garden. Obviously, bodies and matters of power and control go together.

The hybrid, “more-than-human” approach is excellent in showing how modern dichotomies are arbitrarily constructed. However, I am convinced that these new approaches have overlooked some essential insights from urban sociology, related to the dialectics and interconnectedness of subject and form, of interaction and context, of action and politics. Dialectics here means mutually informing, co-shaping through the tensions of concrete, everyday practice (Shields 1998). The dialectical perspective should not, however, be confused with a dualist one; to be sure, hybrid approaches have taught us that dualisms are constructed, they are arbitrary, and work to conserve existing social orders (Haraway 1991). However, the collapsing of categories into new, imploded ones is not analytically satisfactory either. Thus, if one wants to understand actors’ experiences of certain places, the interdependence of subjectivity and form gets lost if one focuses solely on hybridity.

The challenge undertaken in this book is to read these more-than-human approaches together with classical sociological traditions as well as with modern urban sociology. As already stated, I focus particularly on the relationship between body and city through the concept of crowding (more on this below), and investigate it through the joint reading of sociological theory and hybridity perspectives. Therefore my approach is to move from animal studies to urban sociology and back again. It is my conviction that animals potentially disrupt disciplinary systems, and that looking through the lens of human/animal relations can transform and improve disciplinary thinking (Wolfe 2009). Animals are in this sense “undisciplined,” and the encounters with other animals force us to creatively tweak and expand our ingrained conceptual frames (Segerdahl 2011).

The remainder of this introduction will deal wi...