Pet's Right to the City: Animaling Public Space

Abstract

With the rise of urban pet culture, new animal geographers have started to explore the subjectivity of animals in urban spaces, focussing on their lives and agencies as active participants. However, little attention has been given to how pets make their presence and needs visible in urban spaces and their rights within the city. This paper examines pets' entanglements with humans in public spaces, drawing on the concepts of public address and the right to the city. By extending these ideas beyond anthropocentric urban geographies to encompass pet agency and animal geographies in the city, this paper discusses the forms of pets' public address. It explores how the public address ‘animals’ public spaces, emphasizing the dynamic and fluid relationships between pets and humans. Additionally, it investigates what rights pets hold in different cities and how these rights are exercised. As pet populations grow and conflicts between humans and pets intensify, this paper proposes future directions for researching the public address and the right to the city of animals.