‘This place cannot be tidied up!’ Stigmatisation, rats, and place-making in a multispecies city

Abstract

This paper presents a multidisciplinary research project which invited young people to critically re-estimate what is environment and nature, and for whom, in the urbanising world. We describe a series of ethnographic walks aimed at enhancing multispecies arts of attentiveness within the neighbourhood surrounding the participating young people’s school, which had a reputation of being disadvantaged. The ethnographic walks focused specifically on mapping human–rat cohabitation in the city. The analysis follows rats, folding empirical accounts from the walks with eclectic disciplinary perspectives. It highlights multispecies childhoods across historical times; environmental educational discourses on purity of nature; waste ontologies; spatial stigma and marginalisation; rats’ bodily capacities; and transcorporeal flows of nutrients and dirt. Rather than detecting or visibilising rats’ presence in the neighbourhood, we take the hidden presence of rat bodies in the city as provocations to think beyond simple absence or presence in relation to more than human citizenship and spatial stigmatisation. Urban stigmatisation and marginalisation are multispecies processes that emerge with place-making and have consequences for all the multispecies cohabitants of the city. We conclude by offering hesitations concerning the arts of attentiveness, especially when applied in heavily human-dominated circumstances, such as cities, or research.