Urban Animals Crowding in Zoocities

About this book

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?

Urban Animals 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". Urban Animals 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 Urban Animals, 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.

Contents

Chapter 1: Urban Animals

Part I: Animals in the City
Chapter 2: Bodies on the Beach. Allowability and the Politics of Place
Chapter 3: Stranger Cats. Homelessness and Ferality in the City

Part II: HumAnimal Transgressions
Chapter 4: Verminizing. Making Sense of Urban Animal Hoarding
Chapter 5: Feline Femininity. Emplacing Cat Ladies

Part III: The Promises of Crowding in ZooCities
Chapter 6: Beyond Crowd Control
Chapter 7: Open Endings (with Katja Aglert)

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Biography

Tora Holmberg is an Associate Professor in sociology and Senior Lecturer as at the Department of Sociology and the Institute for Housing and Urban Research, Uppsala University, Sweden.