The city as multispecies space: Dog walking in downtown Belgrade during the COVID-19 lockdown

Abstract

This paper represents an autoethnographic account of dog walking in a residential area of downtown Belgrade during the COVID-19 lockdown of early 2020. It is also an attempt at, or rather, the result, of the largely experimental practice of canine-assisted ethnography, as my dogs Dita and Ripley were instrumental during fieldwork. The lockdown, with its ill-thought-out and constantly changing rules about dog walking underlined three basic issues: 1) in a city with a huge dog owning population, public policy with regard to this issue is virtually non-existent; 2) the city lacks public green spaces, and 3) the movement patterns of dog walkers tend to converge due to the fact that the needs of the canines (both biological and social) are embedded into the architecture and planning of local neighborhoods. In this sense, the city emerges as a multispecies space, and the social patterns and walking routes of its residents who keep dogs are influenced, if not completely determined by the human-animal bond at play. This became especially visible during lockdown at times when dog walkers were the only people allowed outside. Thus, this paper analyzes how interspecies (in this case human-dog) relationships shape the functions of urban space in Belgrade.

Keywords

• human-animal relations
• companion dogs
• belgrade
• autoethnography
• canine-assisted ethnography
• covid-19
• lockdown