Anthropology, Environmental Studies, Asian Studies, Experimental Humanities, and CESH Presents

Conditional Companions: Urban Planning and the Limits of Canine Belonging from Singapore

This paper examines how urban planning, animal governance, and racial politics converge in the production of interspecies belonging in Singapore. Focusing on the category of the “Singapore Special”—a term used to describe local mongrel dogs—it traces how public housing policy, colonial legacies of environmental control, and racialized ideas of order shape the conditions under which dogs can become companions, citizens, a distinct breed, or threats.
 
Drawing on ethnographic research with animal welfare groups, fosterers, and state-run facilities, alongside a personal account of attempting to recover a lost foster dog during the COVID-19 lockdowns, the paper explores how unruly animal lives are governed through bureaucratic classification, behavioral training, and spatial regulation. Recent shifts away from mass culling toward sterilization and rehoming programs appear to signal a more humane approach to animal care. Yet these interventions hinge on the transformation of “feral” dogs into governable subjects—requiring them to demonstrate proper conduct, emotional regulation, and adaptability within the tightly regulated spaces of public housing.
 
The paper argues that these forms of canine governance mirror racialized modes of human belonging in Singapore, where access to housing, mobility, and security is mediated through administrative categories and ideals of civility. The production of the “Singapore Special” operates as a species analogue to bureaucratic citizenship, rendering care conditional and unevenly distributed. The paper shows how anxieties about urban unruliness are managed through the biopolitical regulation of animal bodies. It wrestles with the conditions under which significant otherness remains structurally excluded and the limits of companionship and care that do not accommodate refusal, flight, and ferality.

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