Multispecies ecologies of migrant homemaking in the United Arabic Emirates: cats, care, and the politics of urban belonging
In June, Dr. Neha Vora, Professor of Anthropology in the Department of International Studies at the American University of Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates, gave the last talk of VAS’s summer lecture series 2026. In her fascinating talk, she explored the interconnections between multispecies communities, migration, and homemaking using an unusual and inspiring methodology: observing and analysing “cat walks".
The starting point for her work was the idea that states in general and gulf states specifically are not only shaped by humans but also a variety of other species. In previous works, she had explored how migrant humans shaped the gulf states and then decided to explore a more-than-human urbanism. Cats have played an important role in her own journey. For example, they had helped her to settle in Dubai during her PhD already in 2004 and also made her connect to different people on a personal level after starting conversations about the cats they were observing. The problem of loneliness, in particular for migrant workers, became especially evident during the COVID-19 pandemic. This led her to explore the interconnections between migrant humans and “migrant” non-humans more systematically by observing “cat walks” and interviewing cat caretakers. Walking, she suggests, is political: a way to claim space for pedestrians, women and more-than-human residents in car-, men-, and human-dominated environments, and to make visible the “small forces” through which cities are actually inhabited and made liveable.
By giving examples of how mainly cats but also dogs and other urban nonhumans shape routes, relations, and senses of belonging for migrants navigating precarious lives in the Gulf, she opened several key insights and provocations.
Cats as urban shapers: routes, relations, and the everyday making of the city
Vora’s entry point, the cat walk, is deceptively simple. Across neighbourhoods, people take daily routes to feed, water, and shelter cats. These routes carve an alternative map of the city, one attuned to multispecies encounters, hidden corners, and the rhythms of nonhuman life. The urban is not just planned from above, it is assembled at eye level, in practices that are social, spatial, and multispecies at once.
A striking example is Mona Lisa, a Filipina resident in Dubai for 25 years who has fed, arranged water and shelter and cared for more than 150 cats for a decade. While being shy towards humans in general, the cats got to know and trust Lisa over time. Her labour also fostered shifts in local human attitudes: for example, other people began to look out for the cats, at times even sleeping near them to protect them from returning dogs. Moreover, walking emerges as a civic practice: claiming the right to the neighbourhood, slowing down and mindfully taking in spaces of vulnerability deserving attention. Spaces, that are often overlooked in a fast, mechanised, rather impersonalised world. Yet, her care can also be strenuous and financially and emotionally draining.
Cats and the feeling of home for migrants
If urban life is co-produced across species, the affective texture of “home” is as well. Neha’s interlocutors describe how walking with and caring for cats created friendships, a sense of community, and relief from loneliness, especially acute for migrants navigating insecure residency and employment conditions. Thus, cat care networks, but also simply observing cats can foster human–human and human-nonhuman bonds. At the same time, however, they can reflect and reproduce racialised hierarchies e.g. by expected divisions of who distributes resources and who is expected to mediate care.
These observed relations complicate the image of the Gulf as uniquely “temporary.” For many migrants, “home” cannot be reduced to a passport, property, or the legal right to remain. One can feel more at home in a place that withholds citizenship than in a passport country. Moreover, returning “home” may be dangerous for many people, e.g. for reasons of gender or sexuality. Home, Neha suggests, is not fixed: it is an ongoing, situated practice of making life liveable with others, human and nonhuman. The interviewees explicitly linked their immigration experiences to the cats’ lives, sharing marginalisation, mobility, and the need for care in an urban environment that often renders both as expendable.
Micro-architectures of care
Neha invited us to attend to the “micro-architectures” that materialise the care provided for cats. These are e.g. visible by feeding stations, improvised shelters such as bird cubes, shaded water points, and other informal infrastructures that improve the cats’ (and other non-humans’) lives. These small, distributed architectures reconfigure the city at a granular level: they are a form of urban design at eye level, often built and maintained by those already living under precarious circumstances. Traces of this care can be seen across neighbourhoods, including in elite enclaves such as the Dubai International Financial Centre and the Emirates Towers area. However, such care is fragile: in Dubai, feeding street animals can be fineable, making micro-architectures acts of quiet resistance as well as compassion and of spiritual obligation.
Beyond “native”: rethinking management, harm, and obligation
In the discussion, we had the chance to dive deeper into questions of conservation, “invasiveness,” and management frameworks like TNR (trap–neuter–return). Neha articulates an ambivalent stance toward TNR. While recognising its ethical contestations and the sometimes occurring violence of trapping, she also acknowledges an obligation to reduce suffering, perhaps making TNR the best available option in specific contexts. Importantly, she cautions that all “management” of species participates in colonial logics, and that we as humans rarely recognise our own invasiveness when deciding over other animals’ lives.
This critique extends to the notion of the “native.” Who counts as native, and to what end?
Cats have moved with humans across the Indian Ocean world, making origin claims murky. Falcons, on the other hand, who are cherished in the region, are not “native” to the Arabian Peninsula. Thus, dialogues should centre less around taxonomic provenance but move more towards relations of care, vulnerability, and situated effects. Neha’s account also challenges common distinctions between “stray,” “pet,” and “wild” cats. Cats move across (human-made) categories: they have their own socialities, kin relations, and trajectories in the city. Thinking with cats reveals how nonhumans refuse the rules, borders, and binaries that planners and managers impose. The question is not simply whether cats are “native,” but how harms and obligations arise from specific relations and practices.
Moreover, Neha proposes “reparative ecology” as a more generative language, i.e., one that foregrounds cross-species obligations now that we are here together. That means not slotting cats as “strays to be managed, pests to be removed, or pets to be owned”, but seeing relations including ongoing practices that make life liveable between and across species.
However, the discussion not only covered cats’ precarious lives, but also included other species. It was mentioned that dogs are often even less tolerated than cats, and that “managed” areas sometimes become dumping grounds for abandoned dogs. Many of the dogs are pure-bred, bought abroad and later discarded if not wanted any more. These dynamics underscore the multiple dimensions of human-nonhuman relationships, very different conceptions of “care”, and the hierarchies induced by anthropocentric viewpoints.
Toward Multispecies Urbanism: Politics of walking, visibility, and precariousness
Throughout, walking ties the threads together. On foot, processing of environmental stimuli slows down and makes mindful processing of surroundings possible. One notices the microarchitectures of care across different parts of the city. One sees how non-human animals disregard human-made borders as they craft their own geographies. One meets the security guards whose precarious, underpaid labour and migration experiences intersects with the cats’ precarious ways of living. Cities, Neha insists, cannot be adequately captured by cartography. They are made and remade by small forces, including care routines, feeding stops, and shaded corners, through which humans and nonhumans cohabit.
What would it mean to take these insights as guidance rather than anecdote? It asks humans to read the city not only through infrastructure and policy but through routes of care that migrants and non-human animals co-constitute. It reframes “home” as a practice - something done with others, in the everyday, under different individual circumstances. It challenges conservation and urban governance to adopt reparative, situated ethics: evaluating harms and obligations through relationships, not through assigned categories. Finally, it suggests that the most consequential urban design may be the small, distributed, and relational architectures that make life possible: micro-architectures that deserve recognition, support, and protection.
In Neha’s account, cats and other non-humans are not an urban afterthought. They are co-authors of city life and of homemaking. Attending to them is not sentimentality, but an ethical, political, and empirical opening to the multispecies realities of the Gulf city.
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