Tora Holmberg - Urban Animals: Crowding in zoocities

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 crowdingof 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.

Routledge HumanAnimal Studies Series

Series Edited by Henry Buller, Professor of Geography,

University of Exeter, UK

The new Routledge HumanAnimal Studies Series offers a much-needed forum for original, innovative and cutting-edge research and analysis to explore humananimal relations across the social sciences and humanities. Titles within the series are empirically and/or theoretically informed, and explore a range of dynamic, captivating and highly relevant topics, drawing across the humanities and social sciences in an avowedly interdisciplinary perspective. This series will encourage new theoretical perspectives and highlight groundbreaking research that reflects the dynamism and vibrancy of current animal studies. The series is aimed at upper-level undergraduates, researchers and research students as well as academics and policy-makers across a wide range of social science and humanities disciplines.

Published

Critical Animal Geographies

Politics, intersections and hierarchies in a multispecies world

Edited by Kathryn Gillespie and Rosemary-Claire Collard

Urban Animals

Crowding in zoocities

Tora Holmberg

Forthcoming

Animal Housing and HumanAnimal Relations

Politics, practices and infrastructures

Edited by Kristian Bjrkdahl and Tone Druglitr

Taxidermy and Contemporary Art

Giovanni Aloi

Urban Animals

Crowding in zoocities

Tora Holmberg

First published 2015

by Routledge

2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

and by Routledge

711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

2015 Tora Holmberg

The right of Tora Holmberg to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Holmberg, Tora.

Urban animals : crowding in zoocities / by Tora Holmberg.

pages cm. (Routledge human-animal studies series)

Includes bibliographical references.

1. Urban animals. 2. Human-animal relationships. I. Title.

QH541.5.C6H65 2015

591.756dc23

2014038199

ISBN: 978-1-138-83288-6 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-315-73572-6 (ebk)

Typeset in Times New Roman

by Swales & Willis, Exeter, Devon, UK

To Ronja and Rocky, my guides to zoocities encounters

Contents

CO-AUTHORED WITH KATJA AGLERT

Contributors

Tora Holmberg is an Associate Professor and Senior Lecturer at the Department of Sociology and the Institute for Housing and Urban Research, Uppsala University, Sweden. Her expertise lies in the intersection of animal studies, science and technology studies, feminist theory, cultural sociology, and urban studies. She has published books including Science on the Line (in Swedish, 2005), Investigating Human/Animal Relations (ed., 2009), Dilemmas with Transgenic Animals (in Swedish, with Malin Ideland, 2010), and has been published in a wide range of journals, e.g. Space & Culture, Feminist Theory, Bio-Societies and Public Understanding of Science, on topics such as animal experimentation, feminist epistemologies, urban politics and human/animal relations. She is also a co-editor of Humanimalia.

Katja Aglert is an artist based in Stockholm, Sweden. Her practice is based in interdisciplinary research, and includes both individual and collaborative projects. Her work has been exhibited at Marabouparken (Sweden), the National Museum of Denmark, the 58th International Short Film Festival Oberhausen (Germany), and elsewhere. She is a senior lecturer at the Department of Fine Art at Konstfack University College of Arts, Crafts and Design, Sweden. Publications including her work include Shaped by Time (2012) and Winter Eventantifreeze, Winter Eventantifreeze, Winter Eventantifreeze, Winter Eventantifreeze (2014).

Acknowledgments

The work with Urban Animals, which has now come to an end, goes back several years and has been made possible through the generous contributions of numerous people and institutions. While it is difficult to recall and rehearse everyone, I still want to try, knowing that I will no doubt fail. Please, bear with me

This book would not have been the same without the generous and trusting contributions of interviewees and other informants in the field of urban animal welfare. Moreover, people from near and far have shared their histories of animal hoarding: their own, their neighbors, or relatives. Many thanks for sharing these invaluable narratives, for providing me with insights to human/animal worlds that few of us know much about. I also want to thank the artists who have generously contributed their photos for the book: Christer Barregren, Joao Bento, Michael Heath, and Andrew Horton.