Reclaiming the city: more-than-human solidarities between women and street dogs in Eskişehir

This article explores how women’s everyday care for street dogs in Eskişehir generates more-than-human solidarities through which urban space is reclaimed and produced. In this context, solidarity is conceptualized as an embodied and situated process of becoming-with, shaped by questions of legitimacy, vulnerability, and spatial belonging. Drawing on qualitative interviews, the study shows that under patriarchal and human-centred socio-spatial orders, relations of care between women and street dogs can take on solidaristic forms that intervene in the social production of space. Here, more-than-human solidarity emerges as a reciprocal process in which women struggle to render street dogs legitimate co-habitants of the city, while street dogs transform women’s experiences of urban space, enabling them to reclaim spaces and temporalities they would otherwise avoid. Contributing to feminist geography and more-than-human urbanism, the article relies on a relational understanding of the social production of urban space, foregrounding everyday multispecies solidarities through which fragile yet meaningful claims to the city are enacted.