Seminar (CareNet): "The street is their home; and, these homes, their food"

Program

Many cities are seeking to bring ‘nature back in’, yet the place of urban natures already present remains contested. In India, free-living animals such as street dogs live alongside humans in cities and towns, with food provision and sharing forming a key part of these relationships. Leftovers offered to dogs are often understood as a way of preventing food waste while sustaining human-dog relations.

Drawing on urban political ecology, critical animal studies, and semi-structured interviews in Patna, Mumbai, Delhi, and Gurgaon, this paper examines these practices as urban multispecies commons. It argues that leftover food-sharing involves more-than-human negotiation and fulfils multiple social roles, including human safety, kinship, and dog nutrition.

The paper shows how these relationships are often excluded from ‘clean’ visions of the green city, and increasingly framed as obstacles to urban sustainability. Such contestations reflect broader processes of enclosure, where food leftovers and the animals associated with it are displaced into controlled and exclusionary urban models. The paper concludes by considering the implications of this multispecies enclosure for humans, animals, and urban health.

Guillem Rubio

More-than-human geographer at the University of Edinburgh. His research brings together critical animal studies and political ecology to examine how animal, human, and environmental harms converge within uneven socio-ecological systems. He is currently working as a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the project Remaking One Health – Indies, which studies everyday interactions between people and street dogs in India to advance multispecies health paradigms. His doctoral research analysed the nature politics of farmed pigs in Catalonia and farmed salmon in Scotland.