Governing feral cats through platform: The StreetCat project, digital environmental governance, and multispecies urbanism

Abstract

Urban feral cats in China have recently emerged as a focal point for complex governance challenges and societal debates. In response, digital technology interventions, exemplified by the StreetCat project, have emerged. Existing scholarship on feral cats, however, inadequately addresses the operational logic of such digital interventions. Employing online/offline ethnography and multi-source web data analysis, this study investigates how digital technology reshapes spatial practices in urban feral cat governance and reconfigures human-place-nonhuman relationships. The research reveals that technology deployment centred on Smart Cat Houses, AI recognition, and data platforms establishes a novel digital governance, transforming feral cats into data subjects amenable to monitoring, quantification, and remote intervention. Such intervention, in turn, enacts a profoundly ambivalent politics of care. While it fosters new forms of digital intimacy and cross-regional care networks, it simultaneously introduces cognitive biases and risks of commodification. Spatially, this politics of care manifests in the deployment of Smart Cat Houses as contested sites of public space, while the meaning of ’beastly places’ is revealed to be co-produced through the entanglement of technological failure, human conflict, and crucial, non-human agency. Integrating animal geography and trans-species urban theory, this paper advances digital governance scholarship by revealing how its application to feral cats in urban China creates a contested entanglement of datafication, material dependency, and politics of care, which co-produces ’beastly places’ while highlighting non-human agency and urban socio-ecological complexities.