The more-than-human right to the city: Urban belonging and the governance of street dogs in Türkiye

The right to the city has long served as a central framework for thinking about urban justice, democratic participation, and collective claims to urban space. Yet, despite its critical ambitions, it has remained implicitly anthropocentric, treating human beings as the sole subjects of urban rights while relegating nonhuman animals to the status of objects of management or care. Building on recent multispecies interventions in urban theory, and particularly Marie Carmen Shingne's reformulation of the more-than-human right to the city, this commentary argues that extending the right to the city requires more than incorporating animals into an existing framework of rights. It requires rethinking the political production of urban belonging itself. Drawing on Lefebvre's right to the city, urban political ecology, critical animal geography, and animal political theory, the article develops a situated account of multispecies urban justice through the governance of free-living street dogs in Türkiye. Instead of treating the Turkish case as a local controversy over animal management, it approaches it as a particularly revealing site through which the political boundaries of urban belonging are produced, negotiated, and contested. The analysis argues that access, self-determination, participation, and interspecies care are best understood as interrelated dimensions through which urban belonging is politically constituted rather than as separate normative claims. By relocating the more-than-human right to the city from the extension of rights to the governance of urban belonging, the commentary contributes to contemporary debates on multispecies urbanism and urban justice. It argues that recognizing animals as urban inhabitants requires not simply expanding existing political communities but reconsidering the governance practices through which cities determine who belongs within them.