Agential Distance and More-than-human Urban Mobility

Rapid urbanization and habitat fragmentation and loss have led to increased human encounters with animals. At the same time, the growing incorporation of green features to build certain kind of sustainable city has further brought the tension of cohabitation to a new scale. In the Asian metropolises of Singapore and Hong Kong and beyond, contact zones become “conflict zones” (Wadiwel 2018), promoting new debates about the politics and ethics of mobility and coexistence in urban landscapes.

While traditional conservation and wildlife management have relied on biopolitical infrastructures of containment, preservation, and culling, such boundary work tends to reveal a humancentric fixation on stasis that overlooks (ignores) the movement of nonhuman nature. Recent mobility studies emphasize not only how movements are shaped by embodied and lived encounters, but also that mobilities and spaces are co-produced and gain meaning by humans and other-than-humans (Hodgetts and Lorimer 2020). Bring a more-than-human mobility inquiry into human interactions and tensions with animals including macaques, cows, and buffalos in Singapore and Hong Kong, we propose that multispecies cohabitation does not mean the dissolving of boundaries, or cannot be rooted in an imagined dichotomy of isolation and harmony. Instead, more-than-human livability demands a rethinking of boundaries through “agential distance,” a relational form of being together/apart that enables us to negotiate human-animal movements oriented towards differential umwelten, mutual respect, and affective atmospheres. Drawing on interviews, observations, personal experiences, we show how conservationists, residents, artists, and infrastructures (roads, bins, dung cleaning) participate in modes of agential distance to respond to specific contact and conflict in closeness with animal kin. In doing so, we examine the power relations shaping/hierarchising various mobilities and their social-ecological consequences, and demonstrate the complexity of urban multispecies mobility where living together requires cultivating a situated ethos that engages obligations of both collaboration and separation.