Session: 6e
Day: Friday 17 April
Time: 9.15–11.00
Room: JK2–3 1.18
Chair: Carlo Salzani
Panel description: As a political practice, hope plays a fundamental role in motivating change and imagining alternative futures. However, in order to carry out its work, it requires a kind of conceptual and material “scaffolding” to which it can anchor itself. This panel discusses the necessity and function of material and conceptual infrastructures in creating a more just multispecies city. Such infrastructures facilitate, support and orient cohabitation and “development,” as recognized in Goal 9 of the 2015 UN Sustainable Development Goals, for example. However, these goals rarely mention nonhuman animals or non-anthropocentric objectives. A more-than-human city requires infrastructures that reflect urban animals’ “right to the city,” and that go far beyond these unambitious proposals. In this panel we explore the intersection of infrastructure and hope to shed light on the lives of urban animals. Both hope and infrastructure share a common thread: possibility. They are both concerned with what is possible and with finding ways to cultivate those possibilities. While hope is more often associated with psychological states and political imaginaries, infrastructure is more often associated with material interventions. Hope considers what might be possible, whereas infrastructure creates possibilities, not all of which are intended. For example, roads are regularly built to enhance human mobility and create connections between existing infrastructure, but they also disrupt the habitats and movements of other animals. In this panel, we argue that engging with the relationship between hope and infrastructure is a vital step toward envisioning and realizing more just urban futures for animals, taking seriously into account the interplay between political, social, and physical infrastructure.
Claudia Hirtenfelder (Vienna University), “Animals as Urban Problems and Solutions”
Abstract: Infrastructure can loosely be understood as something that creates possibilities. A road allows for the possibility to move in a different direction, and a lamppost the possibility for light. But not all infrastructure is physical, a great deal of what makes life in cities possible is centered on political and social infrastructure. While laws, policies, and social norms are often thought of as limiting, they can also be understood as creating possibilities. These possibilities not only create opportunities, foreclosures, and frustrations for humans, but they shape urban animal lives too. Whether urban infrastructure is made available to aid or frustrate urban animals is greatly shaped by how they are defined in policy and positioned in imaginaries. For example, animals have become intelligible differently as problems and solutions in urban policy related to sustainable development and health. In some cities, animals like bats and stray dogs are understood as vectors of disease that need to be policed to maintain public health, and in other cities, animals like mussels and bees are being framed as nature-based solutions that can help to mitigate the effects of climate change. This presentation broadly considers what opportunities and foreclosures are created for animals as subjects when they are constituted as solutions and problems in urban policy and design. It further ponders how the positioning of animals as urban subjects and the practice of animal-aided design might foster more inclusive multispecies imaginaries than can contribute toward the development of conceptual and material infrastructure that might be necessary to create more just and hopeful futures.
Bio: Claudia Towne Hirtenfelder is an animal studies scholar and podcaster. She has a PhD in geography from Queen’s University Canada and is interested in the urban animal histories and futures. Claudia is also the founder and host of The Animal Turn and Animal Highlight podcasts and a member and co-founder of the Vienna Animal Studies Group. She is currently an external lecturer in Change Management at the Vienna University of Economics and Business.
Carlo Salzani (University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna), “Legal Infrastructures and Ideological Dismantling: The Case of Street Dogs in southern Italy, Turkey, and India”
Abstract: New, hopeful urban ecologies require adequate legal infrastructures that allow a more-than-human city to flourish by granting all its members, both human and non-human, the “right to the city.” Currently, this right is typically denied to non-human residents (as well as certain “undesirable” human groups), but the situation of street dogs provides an example of an alternative approach. Although street dogs have been “eliminated,” both legally and physically, from Western cities since the late nineteenth century, they persist in many different forms in most other parts of the world. In fact, they constitute the majority of the world’s dog population, accounting for 75–85% according to some estimates. This paper examines three cases in which street dogs’ right to inhabit city streets has been accepted and sanctioned by law, opening up new possibilities for coexistence: southern Italy, Turkey and India. Even on the periphery of the Western paradigm, as in southern Italy, some local legal concessions have granted street dogs a special status as “neighborhood dogs.” This status differentiates them from “homed” dogs, which are the property of their owners, and allows them to live without an owner. The cases in Turkey and India are even more interesting. Important legal reforms in 2004 and 2001, respectively, granted street dogs important and inviolable rights. These “rights, “like the ancient city walls, are what constitutes the necessary infrastructure and framework that enable multispecies cohabitation. However, these rights, as well as the dogs’ presence, are frequently attacked and highly contested issues. In Italy, legal protection is local, fragile and arbitrary. In Turkey, a new law in 2024 and in India, a new order by the Delhi Supreme Court in 2025 attempted to overturn the protections of earlier legislation. This paper will discuss the limitations and potential of these legal infrastructures.
Bio: Carlo Salzani is a research fellow at the Messerli Research Institute in Vienna, where he leads the project “Animal Suffering and the Politics of Shame,” funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF). He is also a member and co-founder of the Vienna Animal Studies Group. His latest book, Animals, Empathy, and Anthropomorphism: The Limits of Imagination, was published in open access by Palgrave Macmillan in 2025.
Konstantin Deininger (University of Veterinary Medicine, Vienna), “No Future? Hope and Practical Utopias for Urban Animals”
Abstract: Climate change and biodiversity loss undermine the very conditions of life for humans and animals alike, including those who share our cities. In this light, hopelessness about animals’ future seems natural, exacerbated by a gap between scientific knowledge and its uptake in practice. However, hopelessness may lead to inaction and apathy. The question, then, is how to foster moral motivation and political engagement that recognize animals as beings with their own futures. This paper argues that these responses call for utopian thinking. It develops Mary Midgley’s idea of practical utopia and applies it to urban animals, framing it as a mode of moral imagination grounded in material conditions and oriented toward better multispecies futures. Here, hope functions as an affective stance that combines a desire for a good outcome with the belief in its possibility. Rather than passive or naïve, hope is a stance of trust, even when the outcome is uncertain. Importantly, hope is directed to another’s futurity: it recognizes them as beings with their own futures and commits us to building environments in which their possibilities of flourishing can be realized. Although cities have historically been designed as human spaces, they have also become environments where many species adapt and thrive. These multispecies realities provide the ground for reimagining cities through practical utopias. The paper illustrates this through the Austrian Bat Station in Vienna, a volunteer-run rehabilitation center that cares for hundreds of injured or orphaned bats each year. Through emergency care, rehabilitation, and the long-term care of disabled bats, the station exemplifies how material and social infrastructures can embody hope: they render wild urban animals perceptible as co-habitants and invite a future-oriented perspective on their flourishing. The paper argues that infrastructures of hope are indispensable for reimagining cities as multispecies spaces and for motivating political engagement.
Bio: Konstantin Deininger studied ethics and philosophy in Munich and Vienna and is a member and co-founder of the Vienna Animal Studies Group. He taught at the University of Vienna, the University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna, and Munich University of Applied Sciences. In his PhD, he developed a practice-oriented approach to animal ethics, drawing inspiration from Cora Diamond and Wittgenstein’s later philosophy. His research focuses primarily on animal ethics and animal philosophy but also extends to applied ethics, including topics such as biomedical innovations such as organoids and veterinary ethics.