Dogopolis: How Dogs and Humans Made Modern New York, London, and Paris (Animal Lives)

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Dogopolis presents a surprising source for urban innovation in the history of three major cities: human-canine relationships.\nStroll through any American or European city today and you probably won’t get far before seeing a dog being taken for a walk. It’s expected that these domesticated animals can easily navigate sidewalks, streets, and other foundational elements of our built environment. But what if our cities were actually shaped in response to dogs more than we ever realized?\nChris Pearson’s
Dogopolis boldly and convincingly asserts that human-canine relations were a crucial factor in the formation of modern urban living. Focusing on New York, London, and Paris from the early nineteenth century into the 1930s, Pearson shows that human reactions to dogs significantly remolded them and other contemporary western cities. It’s an unalterable fact that dogs—often filthy, bellicose, and sometimes off-putting—run away, spread rabies, defecate, and breed wherever they like, so as dogs became a more and more common in nineteenth-century middle-class life, cities had to respond to people’s fear of them and revulsion at their least desirable traits. The gradual integration of dogs into city life centered on disgust at dirt, fear of crime and vagrancy, and the promotion of humanitarian sentiments. On the other hand, dogs are some people’s most beloved animal companions, and human compassion and affection for pets and strays were equally powerful forces in shaping urban modernity.
Dogopolis details the complex interrelations among emotions, sentiment, and the ways we manifest our feelings toward what we love—showing that together they can actually reshape society.\nReview \n"Pearson’s study of the modernization of three major metropoles makes a thrilling and sometimes chilling case that dogs played active roles in the story of how we together became predominantly urban species. . . . In the Covid era, the lessons of
Dogopolis help us think about where the human race is going. . . . Pearson’s in-depth study of the modernization of this dynamic in three Western capitals adds resounding confirmation that dogs prove faithful mirrors of humans’ ever-failing aspirations to humanity."
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Times Higher Education\n“
Dogopolis is a beautifully presented book with an evocative historical voice and great confidence and flair. It is also a lot of fun to read. Pearson offers a treasure trove of details about the shared lives of humans and dogs across three rapidly urbanizing cities that epitomized urban modernity and deals with themes at the heart of urban history in his examination of the public and private spaces; class, gender, and race relationships; and public health and disease.”
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Neil Pemberton, coauthor of The Invention of the Modern Dog: Breed and Blood in Victorian Britain\n“Pearson’s dazzling and elegantly written
Dogopolis proves irrefutably that dogs are good to think with. Pearson takes us on a journey encompassing everything from coddling to muzzling, mad dogs to doting owners, dog pounds to pet cemeteries. The result is a finely-textured history of the warp and indeed the woof of urban modernity that is like no other.”
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Colin Jones, author of Paris: The Biography of a City\n“Straying, biting, suffering, thinking, defecating, the dogs of Paris, London, and New York were central actors in the making of the modern urban experience.
Dogopolis is their story, one shared with the middle-class human animals whose ambivalent emotions come alive in this wonderful book.”
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Peter Sahlins, author of 1668: The Year of the Animal in France\n“
Dogopolis provides a vividly detailed comparison of canine experience in London, Paris, and New York. Ranging from the scientific to the political to the (un)hygienic, it traces the development of the profoundly entangled relationship between humans and dogs in modern cities.”
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Harriet Ritvo, author of The Animal Estate: The English and Other Cre