Spaces & Flows: Ninth International Conference on Urban and ExtraUrban Studies

Abstract

Every year, Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality (IMM) forcibly displaces more than 20,000 street dogs from inner-urban districts; confines more than half of them to two animal detention and rehabilitation centers located on the margins of the city. While animal detention and rehabilitation centers form the fixed centers of mass dog incarceration in Istanbul; spatial logics, design, and practices of carcerality prevail also beyond them; permeate to, and turn the surrounding communities into “transcarceral spaces” by means of regulation of bodies, intense surveillance, police, and use of violence. What sustains the spatial porosity and permeability of transcarceral spaces are dogs- their isolated, surveilled, often tortured; and yet undisciplined, transgressive, and unruly bodies. The research makes street dogs in Istanbul central informants in ethnography of carcerality, space, and animality. It tracks forcibly displaced street dogs’ movements between those transcarceral spaces of urban marginality in Istanbul as living, symbolic and material agents that move through different states of urban change and decay, care and violence, order, and disorder.