The Posthuman City: San Diego'S Dead Animal Removal Program

Abstract

Nonhuman animals are part of the dynamism that typifies cities, yet prior research has obscured this condition by focusing upon a limited subset of animals and the privatized spaces that contain them. Consequently, previous research provides little guidance in developing a post-human conception of cities. This paper redresses this deficiency by redefining conceptions of “the public” and analyzing data from San Diego's Dead Animal Removal Program (DARP). Commensurate with modern political conceptions, “the public” is defined simultaneously as a spatial formation and (akin to democracies) a quantitative body of bodies. The DARP data indicate the pervasive presence of nonhuman animals in urban environments and the difficulties they face. As a nexus, the DARP illustrates how urban practices and bureaucratic systems reinstantiate “the public” in humanized form through the death and disposal of nonhumans. These hybrid relations challenge geographic methods.

Keywords:

• nonhuman animals
• posthumanism
• urbanism
• roadkill
• San Diego

Acknowledgements

I gratefully thank I. J. Dawes for his work on the figures contained in this paper. I also thank the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.

Notes

¹CalTrans is the state agency responsible for highway collections. Their records are not nearly as precise, as they indicate locations by highway number—not city—and these highways often run through multiple cities. Furthermore, a staff member indicated that the CalTrans statistics might only reflect half the total, because record keeping for these data was highly inexact. From July of 2008–2009, CalTrans documented 616 animal collections on the highways that run through San Diego or on the peripheral boundary of San Diego. From July of 2009–2010, CalTrans documented 542 animals on these same highways.

²“Species” is not used because birds tended to be homogenized into a general category.

³A total of 367 animals (11%) could not be mapped exactly because of missing street numbers. Zip codes were deducible for 111 of these events, however. The top domestic and wild species, respectively, remained the same as for all animals documented. Of the top 12 species, only one species rose more than one ranking among the unmapped (coyote—2 ranks) and only one species dropped more than one rank (raccoon—2 ranks).