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Paper short abstract

Tracing how urban theory and planning polarise animal life, the city of Delhi is explored as a contested multispecies commons, it shows how animals disrupt the imagination of the anthropocentric planning, revealing commoning as fraught, negotiated, and unfinished.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines the city as a contested multispecies commons by foregrounding the polarisation between urban planning and theory and how animals are imagined, governed, and lived with in contemporary cities. Drawing on a critical genealogy of urban thought, from nineteenth-century planning and modernist urbanism to posthuman urbanisation and sustainability frameworks, the paper shows how dominant imaginaries of the urban have persistently produced an anthropocentric city, defined by the exclusion, regulation, or instrumentalisation of nonhuman life. Animals appear as economic inputs, sanitary threats, ecological indicators, or abstract metabolic flows, but rarely as co-inhabitants or political subjects.

Against this theoretical backdrop, the paper situates contemporary urban animal discourses in Delhi, such as the regulation of stray dogs or the labouring horse at the informal construction sites, within the panel’s concern with multispecies commoning under conditions of intensifying polarisation. Here, commoning emerges not as a harmonious coexistence but as a deeply fraught practice, shaped by tensions between state-managed expertise and lived urban knowledge, legality and care, public order and multispecies responsibility. These examples reveal a sharp divide between urban theory’s growing posthuman sensibilities and planning praxis that continues to reproduce human-exclusive norms of order, safety, and productivity.

By reading urban animals as both products and disruptors of planning rationalities, the paper contributes to multispecies urbanism by reframing the city itself as an unfinished commons, continuously becoming through uneven practices of care, exclusion, and shared life.