Urban Animals

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, and cultural ordering systems, while roaming the city in what are 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

meets 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 analyzed, 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.

Tora Holmberg is an Associate Professor in Sociology and Senior Lecturer at

the Department of Sociology and the Institute for Housing and Urban Research,

Uppsala University, Sweden