Alternative Cartographies of Homelessness: Rendering visible British women's experiences of ‘visible’ homelessness

This article focuses on a group largely ignored by both geographers and feminist scholars of homelessness alike—the growing number of ‘visibly homeless’ women in Britain. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 19 ‘visibly homeless’ women, we delineate between four ‘alternative cartographies’ of homelessness, each articulating quite different gendered homeless identities. The article suggests that whilst it is important to recognise that women too suffer the exclusions of visible homelessness, it is also clear that the experience of visible homelessness differs for different women. Any attempt to respond to the (immediate) needs of such women necessitates a recognition rather than denial of these differences.     

‘Wherever I lay my head is home’ – young people's experience of home in the Brazilian street environment

Although academic research on street children is increasing, few have discussed the multiple meanings of home, as well as young people's perspectives on their homeless status. Drawing on several qualitative fieldwork studies in Salvador, Brazil, this article explores the ‘home’ narratives of a group seldom appraised: the grown-up ‘street children’ of the 1980s and 1990s. Although many of these young people may be described as homeless in a territorial sense, their narratives demonstrate the complex ways in which many feel or have felt at home in the streets of a middle-class neighbourhood. The feeling of being at home is closely interlinked to aspects they find important in their everyday lives, namely that of autonomy, safety and belonging. This analysis illustrates earlier ignored dimensions of why young people choose the street rather than home, and in addition, challenges some common definitions and assumptions.     

Drifting Along or Dropping into Homelessness: A Class Analysis of Responses to Homelessness

Abstract: Prominent assumptions about street homelessness and how it should be addressed originate primarily from middle class domiciled worldviews. This article draws on interviews with 58 street homeless people to develop a typology for explaining different forms of homelessness resulting from differences in class of origin. The concepts of social distance and abjection are used to illustrate how class politics manifests in street homelessness and in responses to this issue. Many of our homeless participants referred to two broad groupings of homeless people who display distinct experiences and cultures in their daily lives on the streets. Drifters are people who do not experience homelessness as a sharp disjuncture from their previously housed life. Street homelessness is a continuation of the hardships of their lower class backgrounds. Droppers are people who have “fallen” on hard times and aspire to return to mainstream middle class lifeworlds. Differentiating between these two groups provides a space for defamiliarizing dominant understandings of, and current generic responses to, homelessness and foregrounds the need for reorienting services to better meet the needs of drifters.     

Modes of Attentiveness: Reading for Difference in Geographies of Homelessness

Hegemonic accounts of urban homelessness, focusing on attempts to restrict homeless people's presence in public space, stress the punitive nature of current homelessness policy. In contrast, in this paper we explore the “messy middle ground” of the UK homeless services system. Examining Stacey Murphy's (2009) (Antipode 41(2):305–325) arguments regarding a shift to a “post‐revanchist” era in San Francisco, we chart the apparent similarities between developments in San Francisco and changes to the management of street homelessness bought in to effect by the New Labour government in the UK, and assess the extent to which such developments might be read as holding in tension more obviously punitive and supportive trends usually viewed as necessarily oppositional. In the final part of the paper we present a re‐reading of recent changes to the management of street homelessness in the UK through a postsecular lens. We suggest that this lens provides the possibility for a much more optimistic reading of homeless services and of the grammars of homelessness and urban (in)justice more broadly, and make the case for an alternative mode of academic attentiveness open to sometimes subtle and smaller‐scale yet nonetheless important examples of different ways of understanding and doing.     

The Everyday Geography of the Homeless in Kansas City

Homelessness in the United States is a multifaceted problem that appears to be growing. However, very little is known about the geography of homelessness. This paper will document the daily lives of the homeless in Kansas City, Missouri, within the milieu of the emergency shelter. The purpose of this study continues in the humanistic tradition, which is attempting to restore human subjectivity to a field considered to have been dominated for too long by scientific objectivism. Fieldwork took place in Kansas City from 1988 to 1993. Two types of shelters were identified: street and transitional. The street shelters primarily served individual men and were best characterized by the rescue mission. Transitional shelters, on the other hand, catered for men and the more recent additions to the homeless population, single women and families with children. The spatial activity of the homeless was constrained as a result of living in a shelter. One typical response to homelessness was apathy and depression. After approximately 30 days in a shelter, a homeless person often underwent a change in physical appearance and activity. This shelterization meant that homeless men and women became increasingly isolated and conformed to the view of themselves imposed by their fellow homeless, the caretakers, and society at large. Homelessness is more than simply lacking a roof over one's head; it is a process of institutionalization into the milieu of the emergency shelter. Shelter facilities in the US are transforming into long-term caretaking institutions.     

CHILDREN OF THE STREETS: RESCUE,REFORM AND THE FAMILY IN LEEDS, 1850-1914

Abstract

Attempts to rescue and reform destitute, orphaned and street children - the ‘waifs and strays’ of the new urban environment - led to a proliferation of children’s homes and welfare organizations in the second half of the I9th century. Local studies enable us to build up a detailed profile of the individuals involved from a grass-roots level. Using a study of Leeds, this article sketches the motives and aspirations of, on the one hand, philanthropists and, on the other, of parents and children enmeshed in what was a complex and ad hoc system. ‘Welfare’ was not simply a rigid mechanism that was imposed on the urban poor; from a local perspective it can be viewed as a relationship, albeit an unequal one. The institution of the children’s home could provide an important strategy for family survival in a world of limited choices.     

Action heritage: research,communities, social justice

Societies are unequal and unjust to varying degrees and heritage practitioners unavoidably work with, perpetuate and have the potential to change these inequalities. This article proposes a new framework for undertaking heritage research that can be applied widely and purposefully to achieve social justice, and which we refer to as action heritage. Our primary sources are semi-structured conversations we held with some of the participants in three heritage projects in South Yorkshire, UK: members of a hostel for homeless young people, a primary school, and a local history group. We examine ‘disruptions’ in the projects to understand the repositioning of the participants as researchers. The disruptions include introducing a scrapbook for personal stories in the homeless youth project and giving the school children opportunities to excavate alongside professional archaeologists. These disruptions reveal material and social inequalities through perceptible changes in how the projects were oriented and how the participants thought about the research. We draw on this empirical research and theorisations of social justice to develop a new framework for undertaking co-produced research. Action heritage is ‘undisciplinary’ research that privileges process over outcomes, and which achieves parity of participation between academic and community-based researchers through sustained recognition and redistribution.     

National Shame/National Treasure: Narrating Homeless Veterans in Australia 1915–1930s

For twenty years after World War I veterans experiencing homelessness inspired narratives that left their mark on the politics of repatriation. Fear of the vagrant mob underpinned the establishment of the system itself. Once it was in place, those suffering homelessness became figures of pity, slowly and unevenly drawn into the Anzac legend by its attachment to the nobility of defeat. But the figure of the homeless digger remained deeply ambivalent. His street presence was a cause of scandal and once he dropped from sight, so did the needs of men and their families experiencing homelessness.     

The Natural Contract: From Lévi‐Strauss to the Ecuadorian Constitutional Court

In 2008, the Ecuadorian Constituent Assembly became the first juridical body in the world to legalize what Michel Serres might have called a ‘natural contract.’ With the assistance of the U.S.‐based Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, representatives at the Assembly in July of 2008 re‐wrote their 1998 constitution to include a landmark series of articles delineating the rights of nature — a notion long familiar to Indigenous communities in the Andean region, actively propagated by anthropologists like Claude Lévi‐Strauss at the French National Assembly as early as the 1970s, and often mocked by mainstream Western jurists for its conceptual confusion about the sorts of entities that can properly be said to have rights. Drawing on the experiences of activists currently engaged in the first national‐level lawsuit to make use of these rights as well as a range of both activists and non‐activists involved in alternative implementations of them, the article explores the possibilities, limitations, and paradoxes of this extension of rights‐based discourse. At a time when the natural world is increasingly being talked about at the United Nations and elsewhere not as a ‘rights‐holder,’ but as an ‘ecosystem services provider,’ I suggest that while the discourse of ‘rights' signals promising shifts in how Andean governments are conceptualizing agency and responsibility in ways that productively break with the trend toward marketization, it also runs the risk of providing the administration with symbolic cover for its intensifying commitment to what Eduardo Gudynas has called, a ‘new extractivism.'     

Urban makeovers,homeless encampments,and the aesthetics of displacement

ABSTRACT

This paper brings together geographic literature on homelessness and theories of aesthetics to analyse how city beautification projects in contemporary American cities promote the displacement of homelessness. Based on research conducted in Fresno, California, I argue that the seemingly innocuous realm of aesthetics often undergirds anti-homeless politics. In Fresno, officials sought to create a visual landscape that was conducive to middle-class consumption and leisure, such that the project of building a desirable city was deeply influenced by market pressures. In turn, homeless encampments were framed as unpleasant objects that must be removed to make way for economic opportunities. Efforts to reinforce this ‘live play work’ aesthetic resulted in a politics of displacement and criminalisation. Yet people who resided in encampments championed an alternative aesthetic practice grounded in reuse, survival and collective appropriation of urban space. Thus, the example of Fresno shows that aesthetic norms not only reinforce revanchist politics, but simultaneously present the possibility of resistance.     

George W. Bush's War on Terrorism and Sin

Abstract

In George W. Bush's inaugural address, informed by ‘compassionate conservatism’, there was a tension between two familiar goals in US political discourse: conserving the status quo and changing the world for the better by cleansing it of sin. In Bush's discursive construction of the war on terrorism, ‘compassionate conservatism’ and the construction of sin were folded into a unified discourse, with the emphasis on preventing dangerous change rather than creating positive change. A static state of safety, constantly protected by ‘compassionate conservatism’ and war, is now offered by American conservatives as the most viable and most patriotic way to stave off the forces of sin.     

Negotiating social identities: The influence of gender,age and ethnicity on young people's ‘street careers’ in Tanzania

This paper explores the diverse ways that children and young people negotiate their social identities and construct their life course trajectories on the street, based on ethnographic research with street children in Tanzania. Drawing on the concept of a ‘street career’, I show how differences of age, gender and ethnicity intersect with the time spent on the street, to influence young people's livelihood strategies, use of public space, access to services, and adherence to cultural rites of passage. Using the notion of ‘gender performativity’, I analyse how young people actively reconfigure gender norms and the concept of ‘the family’ on the street.     

European integration and the social science of EU studies: the disciplinary politics of a subfield

This article takes the 50th anniversary of the Treaty of Rome as an opportunity to reflect upon half a century of academic discourse about the EU and its antecedents. In particular, it illuminates the theoretical analysis of European integration that has developed within political science and international studies broadly defined. It asks whether it is appropriate to map, as might be tempting, the intellectual ‘progress’ of the field of study against the empirical evolution of its object (European integration/the EU). The argument to be presented here is that while we can, to some extent, comprehend the evolution of academic thinking about the EU as a reflex to critical shifts in the ‘real world’ of European integration (‘externalist’ drivers), it is also necessary to understand ‘internalist’ drivers of theoretical discourse on European integration/the EU. The article contemplates two such ‘internalist’ components that have shaped and continue to shape the course of EU studies: scholarly contingency (the fact that scholarship does not proceed with free agency, but is bound by various conditions) and disciplinary politics (the idea that the course of academic work is governed by power games and that there are likely significant disagreements about best practice and progress in a field). In terms of EU studies, the thrust of disciplinary politics tends towards an opposition between ‘mainstreaming’ and ‘pluralist versions’ of the political science of EU studies. The final section explores how, in the face of emerging monistic claims about propriety in the field, an effective pluralist political science of the EU might be enhanced.     

‘Our home,our way of life’: spiritual homelessness and the sociocultural dimensions of Indigenous homelessness in the Northwest Territories (NWT), Canada

In this article, I examine the sociocultural dimensions of Indigenous home and homelessness through a case study of increasing visible homelessness in two northern Canadian communities. Drawing on five years of ethnographic research on Indigenous homelessness in Yellowknife and Inuvik, two regional centres in the Northwest Territories (NWT), Canada, I suggest that Indigenous experiences of homelessness are at once collective and immediate. In particular, I draw on the concept of ‘spiritual homelessness’ (Keys Young 1998) to examine the multiple scales of homelessness experienced among northern Indigenous people. Research participants highlight several key elements of rapid sociocultural change that have an enduring impact on a collective sense of home and belonging, and play integral roles in shaping the experiences of homeless Indigenous people. Social and material exclusion, breakdowns in family and community, detachment from cultural identity, intergenerational trauma and institutionalisation are all woven throughout the personal narratives of homelessness articulated by research participants. I argue that the alleviation of Indigenous homelessness in the NWT depends on a decolonising agenda that specifically addresses contemporary colonial geographies and their expressions in the key institutions in Indigenous peoples' lives.     

“They want a different life”: Rural northern settlement dynamics and pathways to homelessness in Yellowknife and Inuvik,Northwest Territories

Visible homelessness in the Northwest Territories, Canada is often described as a recent phenomenon by policy makers and the popular media alike. Indeed, since the late 1990s, homeless shelters in Yellowknife and Inuvik report a steady increase in demand for beds and other support for homeless people. Homelessness in these two communities disproportionately affects Aboriginal northerners, however little is known about their individual pathways to homelessness. Moreover, homelessness in the Northwest Territories is often portrayed as an issue confined to larger “urbanizing” regional centres, yet many homeless Aboriginal northerners have originated from small, rural settlement communities. Despite this, little concern has been paid to how factors at the small community level intersect with more visible forms of homelessness in larger, urban centres, not to mention how these intersections shape a territorial geography of homelessness. In this article, I aim to uncover and explore the often hidden factors at the northern rural settlement level that ultimately contribute to more visible forms of homelessness in northern urban centres. I suggest that uneven and fragmented social, institutional, and economic geographies result in a unique landscape of vulnerability to homelessness in the Northwest Territories. This geography emerges through the production of particular dynamics between rural settlement communities and northern urban centres. In particular, four main factors represent these rural‐urban dynamics: 1) the attractions of opportunity in northern urban centres; 2) rural settlement‐urban institutional flows; 3) chronic housing need in the settlements; and, 4) disintegrating social relationships in the settlements. I explore the particular ways in which these factors influence rural‐urban migration among the homeless population and what roles this mobility plays in individual pathways to homelessness.     

‘I like to let them have their time’. Hidden homeless First Nations people in the city and their management of household relationships

This paper responds to recent challenges to geographers to explore spaces of homelessness other than those of the streets and other public spaces. It focuses on hidden homelessness, where individuals stay with family and friends in order to avoid living in homeless shelters or on the street. Based on interviews with fifty-six First Nations hidden homeless men and women living in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, Canada, the paper explores participants' accounts of how they negotiated their relationships with their hosts in order to maintain access to shelter. Participants monitored the tension their presence created in the household and they used five strategies to attempt to manage household relations. They minimized their presence, provided services for other members, moved frequently, contributed to household budgets and ate little of the household's food. By focusing on relationships within the household, this paper extends contemporary research on the ways homeless people negotiate different social and spatial environments.     

Escaping Violence,Seeking Freedom: Why Children in Bangladesh Migrate to the Street

In Bangladesh, as in many developing countries, there is a widespread belief amongst the public, policy makers and social workers that children ‘abandon’ their families and migrate to the street because of economic poverty. Ignoring and avoiding mounting evidence to the contrary, this dominant narrative posits that children whose basic material needs cannot be met within the household move to the street. This article explores this narrative through the analysis of detailed empirical research with children in Bangladesh. It finds that social factors lie behind most street migration and, in particular, that moves to the street are closely associated with violence towards and abuse of children within the household and local community. These findings are consistent with the wider literature on street migration from other countries. In Bangladesh, those who seek to reduce the flow of children to the streets need to focus on social policy, especially on how to reduce the excessive control and emotional, physical and sexual violence that occur in some households. Economic growth and reductions in income poverty will be helpful, but they will not be sufficient to reduce street migration by children.     

"We Know What the Problem Is": Using Oral History to Develop a Collaborative Analysis of Homelessness from the Bottom Up

Using audio, video, and radio interviews, the Cleveland HomelessOral History Project (CHOHP) has sought to foster the developmentof a collaborative analysis of homelessness from the bottomup. Designed to overcome problems with traditional academicresearch on homelessness, CHOHP explicitly seeks to share researchwith those living on the streets and in the shelters in Cleveland,Ohio and involve homeless people in the process of analysis.Rather than focusing on the personal pathologies of the homeless,the analysis that emerges from CHOHP suggests that trends indowntown and neighborhood real estate development, the criminalizationof the poor, the growth of the temporary labor industry, andthe retrenchment of the welfare system have led to the emergenceof powerful interests invested in perpetuating homelessness. Beyond analyzing these trends, CHOHP's formal research settinghas emboldened homeless people to act and become agents forsocial change.     

Street child spaces: belonging,conflict and resistance in the city of Durban through the eyes of street youth

ABSTRACT

This article is concerned with the everyday ‘spatial tactics’ deployed by children in a street situation in order to deal with notions of public space that define them as ‘out of place’, marginal and deviant. Using photovoice, we reconstruct former street children’s definitions of and feelings about their spaces in the city, bringing into view a complex set of social problems, attitudes and strategies that moves beyond the traditional binary notion of street children as either deviants or victims. This work points to the importance of finding ways to ensure the voices of marginalized and disadvantaged children are heard and presents the narratives that are important to our understanding of their worlds. Analyzing their spatiality in contexts of conflict, belonging and resistance, we found that children and youth in a street situation are mainly concerned with empowering themselves and resisting dominant labels and police repression.     

‘Social Exclusion’ Discourse and Chronic Poverty: A South African Case Study

This article questions the export of ‘social exclusion’ discourse to the field of development and poverty studies. It considers the findings of ongoing research into chronic poverty in the Western Cape district of Ceres, one of the centres of the South African deciduous fruit export industry. It explores the links between the livelihood options of poor people and processes of global integration, agro‐food restructuring and the modernization of paternalist farming styles. In this context the concept of ‘social exclusion’ is of only limited utility, and has significant disadvantages. Although it has the potential to focus attention on the disabling effects of poverty, its most common usage often fails to capture how poverty can flow not only from exclusion but also from processes of integration into broader economic and social networks. The author argues that these are better captured by the notion of ‘adverse incorporation’, and calls for a more cautious approach to the modernizing myths and moralizing narratives that shape policy debates.