At the dog park: Symbolic boundaries and everyday sociability


Saara Liinamaa, University of Guelph; Meg Aebig, University of Guelph

This paper examines dog parks as distinctive public spaces where the personal and public collide. Based on ethnographic observations at municipally sanctioned and unsanctioned ‘off-leash’ public parks, we are interested in the socio-spatial context and content of dog park interactions. This approach responds to a growing body of work on sociability and/in public spaces in the social sciences (Valentine 2008; Wise and Velayutham 2009; Lowe 2023). Curiously, dog parks as social spaces exhibit above average sociability and above average conflict compared to other everyday public leisure spaces. There have been many high-profile dog park conflicts in the news, including a serious dog attack on a child at an informal school green space in Toronto and a dog dispute turned assault on a dog walker by another dog walker at a designated dog park in Vancouver. Yet at the same time, dog parks are increasingly important sites for regular, sociable interaction in urban public space. By virtue of the mix of necessity and regularity, the dog park can become a key point of social contact within many pet owners’ lives. While there is considerable interest in underscoring the positive effects of dog facilitated social interactions for communities (Bulsara et al. 2007), there is the risk of generalizing or simplifying sociological understanding of these processes. Accordingly, in order to better understand the social life of the dog park and its mix of sociability and conflict, this paper emphasizes the role of symbolic boundaries (Lamont and Molnár 2002). Drawing on examples from our research, we will discuss the production, maintenance, and crossing of symbolic boundaries of various kinds (waste, personal space, class, gender, race and ethnicity, mobility, species). In particular, we will address instances that blur the boundary between public and private in unexpected ways, and to either sociable or conflictual ends. We use this case study to demonstrate how strong symbolic and spatial boundaries facilitate heightened positive and negative interactional unpredictability in public spaces.

This paper will be presented at the following session: