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Paper short abstract

Dogs enact power in Poznań's urban space. This multispecies ethnography examines human-dog dyads as sites where power is enacted through sensory, affective entanglements. Dogs are co-agents reshaping contested territories, challenging anthropocentric orderings and enabling more-than-human futures.

Paper long abstract

Dogs occupy a paradoxical position in contemporary urban space, both privileged and subversive. In a country where roughly eight million dogs live in every second household, rapid, west-oriented, urbanization has intensified contestations over who (human and non-human alike) belongs to the city and how space should be inhabited. This paper treats dogs not as passive objects of human design but as co-producers of polarized urban worlds.

By focusing on human–dog dyads walking through Poznań, the research examines how urban space is negotiated and reimagined through embodied multispecies encounters that unsettle anthropocentric orderings of the city. Drawing on multispecies ethnography and mixed methods (including a survey of 315 respondents, focus groups, ethnographic observation and eight walk-along interviews) the study traces how walking emerges as the primary practice through which human–dog dyads encounter and co-create the city.

Conceptualizing the dyad as a hybrid unit of analysis, the paper mobilizes posthumanist approaches to show how humans, dogs and urban materialities are mutually constituted through different entanglements – sensory, affective as well as regulatory. It identifies distinct spatial formations (leashed zones, off-leash areas, transition spaces) that enable different modes of canine–human interaction and sociality, shaped by weather, equipment, norms and affective atmospheres.

By centring dogs as co-agents in urban life, the paper challenges anthropocentric visions of the city and rethinks urban polarizations between nature and culture, humans and non-humans, public and private as productive sites for imagining more-than-human urban futures.