Political Animals: A More-than-Human Approach to Urban Inequalities

Description du projet

Les chiens et les rats compromettent la sécurité et la santé publique

Les animaux jouent un rôle dans la production et la transformation des inégalités urbaines. Par exemple, les chiens de garde ont été dressés pour identifier les individus menaçants sur la base de marqueurs de classe et de race. Les rats prospèrent dans les zones à faibles revenus caractérisés par des infrastructures sanitaires en déliquescence. Dans ce contexte, le projet ANIMAPOLIS, financé par l’UE, répondra à la question suivante: comment les interactions entre les animaux et les humains et les infrastructures contribuent-elles à la répartition inégale des risques et des ressources au sein des espaces urbains et des populations? De manière plus concrète, par le biais de quels mécanismes les chiens de garde peuvent-ils coproduire des pratiques de profilage racial, ou la répartition géographique des rats et des rodenticides peut-elle influencer la situation de santé publique? Le projet procèdera à une comparaison qualitative bidirectionnelle entre différents contextes urbains et entre différents animaux, en tirant parti des ethnographies multi-espèces à Amsterdam et Rio de Janeiro.

Objectif

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 often characterized by stark inequalities, and takes the role of key animals within these domains – dogs and rats, respectively – as a unique analytical entry-point.

Urban inequalities are not only produced and transformed by people. Security dogs have been socialized to identify threatening individuals on the basis of classed and raced markers. Rats pose a public health risk, and thrive in low-income areas with decaying sanitation infrastructure. Urban scholars have recently begun to highlight the importance of infrastructures and technologies in configuring access to essential goods and services. While this research has provided key insights into how non-human entities mediate social relations, it has largely overlooked how animals, too, may co-produce inequalities.

While dogs and rats clearly play a role within security and public health, we know little about how they mediate urban inequalities related to these societal challenges. This project investigates such mechanisms by focusing first, on dogs’ and rats’ distinct biological specificities and cultural imaginations, and second, on the spatial, material and affective dimensions of their interactions with humans and infrastructure. The research design develops a two-way qualitative comparison, between different urban contexts and between different animals, through multispecies ethnographies of animal-human-infrastructure dynamics in Amsterdam and Philadelphia.

The project’s more-than-human approach extends theoretical and methodological innovations within urban anthropology, geography and human-animal studies in order to open new horizons on the study of urban inequalities.