The Cost of a Cleaner City

By Kavya and Akshara

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The everyday city is not only built by its citizens. It is inhabited by beings who do not vote, do not complain in public forums, and do not appear in development plans. They exist in the margins of pavements, under parked cars, near garbage bins, beside construction sites, and in the shadows of gated apartments. Street dogs, abandoned cats, injured cattle, overworked horses, displaced birds they form a parallel population whose struggles remain largely invisible.

Urban life is structured around speed, property, and ownership. Animals disrupt that order simply by existing. A dog sleeping on a pavement is seen as an obstruction. A cow crossing a road is a traffic problem. A monkey entering a balcony becomes a nuisance. Their presence is framed not as life sharing space, but as interference. The language used to describe them reveals the hierarchy: “stray,” “menace,” “infestation.” These terms justify removal, control, or violence. Daily survival in the city is relentless. Animals navigate traffic without understanding its rules. They scavenge for food from waste that humans produce yet guard aggressively. Construction sites displace nesting birds and street animals without notice. Firecrackers, pollution, heat waves, and shrinking green spaces intensify their vulnerability. Injuries often go untreated. Hunger is routine. Fear is constant.

Abuse, both subtle and explicit, is embedded in the urban environment. Some animals are beaten for entering private property. Others are poisoned to “clear” areas. Puppies are relocated far from their territories in the name of cleanliness. Working animals such as horses used for ceremonial rides or bullocks in informal transport are overworked with minimal care. Even affection can become a form of control, when feeding is done without responsibility for vaccination, sterilisation, or medical attention.

Power in the city operates visibly and invisibly. Those who control land, law, and infrastructure decide who belongs. Animals have no recognised claim to space. They are tolerated only conditionally, and that tolerance is fragile. When urban aesthetics demand sanitised streets, animals are the first to be removed. Development projects rarely account for ecological corridors or habitat continuity. The stronger institutions, corporations, and organised resident groups reshape the city in ways that push animals further into danger. Yet these voiceless inhabitants persist. Street dogs form territories and communities. Cattle find shade in narrow lanes. Birds adapt to electric wires when trees disappear. Their resilience is not romantic; it is a response to systematic exclusion. The everyday city survives partly because of them they consume waste, maintain ecological balance, and remind us that urban life is not purely human.

To recognise their struggles is to question the idea that the city belongs only to those with documents and property. Safety, dignity, and coexistence cannot be selective. A truly inclusive city measures its humanity not by its skyline, but by how it treats the most vulnerable lives within it. The everyday city is not just where we live. It is where they endure often silently, always watching, waiting for space that may never fully be theirs.