About
ANIMAPOLIS aims to understand the role of animals in the formation of urban inequalities, asking: How do animals’ interactions with humans and infrastructures co-produce the unequal distribution of risks and resources across urban spaces and populations? It focuses on two critical urban domains, security and public health, that are commonly marked by significant inequalities, and takes the role of dogs and rats as a novel analytical entry-point.
Urban inequalities are not only produced by people. Security dogs may be socialized to identify threatening individuals on the basis of classed and raced markers. Rats pose a public health risk, and may thrive in particular in low-income areas with decaying sanitation infrastructure. Urban scholars have begun to highlight the importance of infrastructures and technologies in configuring access to essential goods and services. While this research provides key insights into how non-human entities mediate unequal relations, it has largely overlooked how certain animals – here, “political animals”– also co-produce inequalities.
Dogs and rats clearly play a role within security and public health, but we know little about how they mediate related inequalities. Through what mechanisms might distributions of rats and rodenticides affect public health outcomes, or might security dogs co-produce practices of criminal profiling? This project studies such mechanisms by focusing first, on dogs’ and rats’ biological specificities and cultural imaginaries and second, on the spatial, material and affective dimensions of their interactions with humans and infrastructure. The project develops a two-way qualitative comparison, between different urban contexts and between different animals, through multispecies ethnographies in Amsterdam and Rio de Janeiro.
The project’s more-than-human approach extends theoretical and methodological innovations in urban anthropology and geography to open new horizons on the study of urban inequalities.