‘They’re not dog friendly because they’re not anyone friendly’: living with dogs in two densifying London neighbourhoods

Abstract

Since the late 1990s, policy makers in the UK have promoted building higher density housing. Notably absent from this policy are the companion animals with whom we share our homes and public spaces. Their absence is all the more surprising given that dog companionship is often associated with the same outcomes as championed by the density and compact city agendas—social cohesion, community well-being, and active lifestyles. Based on research conducted in two London neighbourhoods, this paper explores how people experience urban density when with a dog, the challenges and opportunities they encounter, and how they negotiate their way through an often confusing and unspoken web of rules, laws and norms. The research builds on work which examines human-dog relations, arguing that the lack of clarity around where dogs are and are not welcome is reflective of the ways dogs are ambiguously positioned in relation to discourses of density and urban living. The ways urbanism is promoted in the UK is not politically neutral, nor are the ways some dogs are included or excluded from this imagining. We argue that the absence of clarity about dogs is constitutive of shifting and often confusing discourses about animals, urbanism, and densification.