Ayten Alkan

The ideal and discourse of the “rights-based thinking”, reinvented by the philosophers of the Enlightenment by revitalizing the antique “natural rights”, had created a convenient epistemological terrain to introduce also the non-human animals to this progressive and expansionist debate in the course of time. Since H.S. Salt’s Animals' Rights: Considered in Relation to Social Progress (1894), the literature on the issue, albeit from different epistemological stand-points, has expanded and enriched. Academic and philosophical debate particularly revived by and after the 1970s, following certain avant-garde works on speciesism.

Simultaneously, specific rights allocated to urbanity, which were finally categorized under third generation (solidarity-based) rights, would be a consequence of the embodiment and particularization of the “rights-based thinking” as per the city and urban life. They now are widely known as “urban rights” within a rather liberal context, and the “right to the city” from a critical and/or neo-Marxist approach.

However, until now, there has not been a theoretical effort to intertwine these two progressive debates of “animal rights” and the “right to the city”. This study is an attempt to bridge this gap from an interdisciplinary perspective. The specific focus of the research is ‘stray animals’, who tell silently the oldest story of co-habitation and co-adaptation between two species, yet in the end who have been structurally disregarded.