Pet-as-platform: Domestic infrastructures and the digital governance of companion animals

Across contemporary cities, digitally mediated infrastructures increasingly organise everyday life through systems of sensing, automation, and platform integration. Debates on platform urbanism have examined how these processes reshape mobility, logistics, and governance. Yet the home has remained comparatively under-theorised as an infrastructural node within distributed urban systems. At the same time, multispecies urbanism has paid limited attention to how companion animals are becoming integrated into digitally mediated environments. This paper addresses these gaps by analysing emerging pet technologies, including cameras, wearable trackers, biometric sensors, automated feeders, and app-based care platforms. The paper develops the concept of pet-as-platform to examine how companion animals are enrolled within infrastructures that capture behavioural data, automate intervention, and connect domestic environments to wider platform ecosystems. Drawing on an interpretive analysis of contemporary pet technology systems, interfaces, and associated infrastructures, the paper develops a framework organised around three dimensions: sensing and data extraction, automated care and intervention, and platform integration and infrastructural linkage. The analysis demonstrates how pet technologies reconfigure the home as a multispecies infrastructural node embedded within broader urban systems, including veterinary services, insurance platforms, and smart-home environments. In doing so, the paper extends debates on platform urbanism into domestic and multispecies domains, reconceptualises pet care as an infrastructural process, and highlights the emergence of new forms of data-driven multispecies governance. More broadly, the paper argues that understanding contemporary urbanisation requires greater attention to how digital infrastructures are reshaping intimate human–animal relations within the home and across distributed urban environments.