Everyday dog politics: Street-level bureaucracy and canine urban governance in China

While animal geographies have increasingly examined companion animals as co-producers of urban space, less is known about how their contested presence is governed through everyday frontline enforcement. This paper examines pet dog governance in Hangzhou, China, focusing on how street-level bureaucrats make restrictive dog policies workable in everyday urban space. Drawing on qualitative interviews with enforcement officers, this paper argues that dog governance operates as a form of improvisational spatial governance. Restrictive regulations imagine public space as orderly, controllable and human-centred, yet this imaginary is unsettled by dogs’ unstable status as companions, property, nuisances, risks and conditionally tolerated urban presences. Institutional ambiguities, detached rule-making, fragmented authority and weak interdepartmental coordination further displace unresolved contradictions onto the frontline. Officers make these contradictions provisionally workable through procedural routines, situated discretion and shifting enforcement rhythms. These practices redraw where, when and under what conditions dogs may appear in the city. The paper shows that improvisation is an ordinary mode of enforcement, enabling officers to partially enact human-centred spatial order while continually exposing the instability of that order in multispecies urban life.