Beyond Punitive Regulation? New Zealand Local Governments' Responses to Homelessness

Abstract: This article investigates the ways in which New Zealand local authorities respond to homelessness. It finds that while some punitive bylaws targeting homeless people exist, they are not widespread, and in three case study cities are accompanied by efforts to support social service providers. This indicates that New Zealand local authorities are prepared to look at alternatives to address homelessness, as opposed solely to following trends towards the increasing persecution of homeless people. However, cities' attitudes are subject to political whim, and on occasion they articulate an exclusive vision of public space linked to concerns for public safety and city image. Such thinking has led, for example, to homeless people being served with trespass notices by local authorities asserting “ownership” of public space. Nevertheless, the actions of New Zealand cities depart significantly from the dominant approaches seen elsewhere. This may be explained in part by the relative invisibility of homelessness in New Zealand, and by a popular distinction between “good” and “bad” homeless individuals. The net result is a generally positive approach to reducing homelessness by providing appropriate housing and support to those on the streets, complicating any direct application of the critical geographical literature on this issue to the New Zealand context.     

A trip to the library: homelessness and social inclusion

This article explores homeless men's visits to a public library. It shows how homeless men identified the library as a space for safety and social participation, at a time when the regional newspaper published an item questioning the appropriateness of their presence in the library. The news report promotes universal narratives that would exclude homeless people, showing the intimate relationship between the symbolic space of news, the material space of the local library, and the lifeworlds of homeless men. We report fieldwork in which we interviewed homeless men, library staff and patrons. In addition, we worked with journalists on follow-up articles foregrounding the positive function of the library in homeless men's lives, and to challenge existing news narratives that advocate the exclusion of ‘the homeless’ from prime public spaces.     

Governing the Homeless in an Age of Compassion: Homelessness,Citizenship, and the 10‐Year Plan to End Homelessness in King County Washington

Abstract: In 2001, President Bush announced his intention to “end chronic homeless by the year 2012” as part of his broad “Compassion Agenda”. Since then, departmental consolidation, changes in funding allocation, and continued decentralization of services provision have dramatically reshaped the landscape of homeless service provision in the US. In this paper I examine how these roll‐out policies reify and re‐entrench liberal equations of property with rational self‐governance at the local scale. Particularly, I illustrate how tropes of homeless otherness work alongside and through federal neoliberal roll‐out policies to exclude homeless voices from the formation of local social policy. In doing so, I attempt to call attention to the mutually constitutive relationship between the spatial management of homeless bodies, tropes of homeless deviance and dependence, and limits to citizenship in the context of neoliberal urban governance.     

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.     

“It's not like your home”: Homeless Encampments,Housing Projects,and the Struggle over Domestic Space

Based on an analysis of housing projects and homeless encampments in Fresno, California, this paper argues that both anti‐homeless policing and housing provision mutually constrain homeless people's expressions of home, such that struggles over domestic space have become integral to the contemporary politics of US homelessness. In particular, this article asserts that contemporary homelessness policy is marked by a clash between competing visions of home. While housing projects in Fresno are based on a model of privatized and surveilled apartments, people who lived in local encampments often asserted alternative notions of home grounded in community rather than family, mutual care rather than institutional care, and appropriation rather than consumption. Meanwhile, local officials viewed such alternative domestic spaces as non‐homes worthy of destruction. Rather than valorizing domestic struggles above public or institutional struggles, this article seeks to move beyond geographic binaries to more holistically approach the politics of US homelessness.     

Planning for Climate Change Adaptation in a Multi-level Context: The Gothenburg Metropolitan Area

Individual local governments are key players in Sweden's strategy for climate adaptation but their authority does not match the scale of climate change and its impacts. Competences are divided among local, regional and national authorities. Climate adaptation thus requires cooperation, particularly in metropolitan regions. This raises issues of coordination, legitimacy and effectiveness of adaptation measures recommended in local Master Plans. The focus here is on how the 13 municipalities in the Gothenburg Metropolitan Area—expected to be the part of Sweden most affected by impacts of climate change—address and act upon issues of climate change adaptation within the framework of Sweden's Planning and Building Act, which places responsibility for the “common interest” of climate adaptation with local governments. Analysing municipal Master Plans, as well as the comments on these plans from the regional County Administrative Board and from Göteborg Region Association of Local Authorities, the inter-municipal association charged with infrastructural planning, I identify patterns in terms of coordination, legitimacy and effectiveness of planning for climate change adaptation. Results are discussed in relation to propositions from recent research on planning for climate adaptation in multi-level contexts.     

“Compassionate” Strategies of Managing Homelessness: Post‐Revanchist Geographies in San Francisco

Abstract: After almost 30 years of Federal retraction from anti‐poverty initiatives, many American cities have been left with the dual burden of intensified poverty and far fewer resources to combat the problem. At the same time, such devolution has afforded cities the authority to forge poverty policy at the local level, such that the familiar neoliberal imperatives of state retraction and the mobilization of territory for capitalist expansion are frequently tempered by more progressive political imperatives at the local scale. What has thus emerged is a deeply ambivalent policy landscape, of which “kinder and gentler” poverty management strategies are a central feature. Using the example of a recent homeless program in San Francisco, “Care Not Cash”, this paper argues that such poverty management strategies, while less punitive than their revanchist predecessors, nonetheless introduce a new set of exclusions to the service delivery system, many of which are obscured by the language of compassion. In order to illustrate those new exclusions, I describe the city's homeless geographies—the public spaces, shelters, service sites, and housing models—that have been produced and reconfigured according to a logic of managing homelessness through the provision of care.     

The Annihilation of Space by Law: The Roots and Implications of Anti-Homeless Laws in the United States

There is a link between changes in the contemporary political economy and the criminalization of homelessness. Anti-homeless legislation can be understood as an attempt to annihilate the spaces in which homeless people must live, and perform everyday functions. This annihilation is a response to the economic uncertainty produced by the current political economy. The process of criminalizing homelessness 1) destroys the very right of homeless people to be; and 2) reinforces particularly brutal notions of citizenship within the public sphere. Such laws are made possible when urban government and surrounding communities and elites seek to promote the urban landscape at the expense of urban public space. This usurpation of public space will have profound impact not only on homeless people but also on how the housed interact with each other.     

Exploratory Analysis of the Homeless Shelter System in Columbus, Ohio

Abstract: A geographic information system (GIS)-based framework is structured to analyse the spatial characteristics and patterns associated with a system of homeless shelters and services. Given the lack of detailed spatial information available to decision-makers and shelter operators, the siting of new shelters and services is often carried out with little supporting information. The shelter system in Columbus, Ohio is investigated. Personal interviews with shelter providers and local decision-makers offers a look at their collective understanding of the services needed by Columbus' homeless population and the spatial patterns and socio-economic characteristics that define the neighbourhoods in which shelters are located. The use of GIS facilitates an exploratory data analysis that allows these understandings to be examined, affording planners and decision-makers the opportunity to move beyond perceptions of the system. Findings indicate that while many perceptions are supported empirically, there are perceptions that are not substantiated. This research provides a basis for the evaluation of important social services in an urban area where perception influences planning and decision-making.     

Economic Regionalization in the People's Democracies

The author traces the development of administrative-economic regionalization in Eastern Europe from the initial phase of centralized economic planning and management to the present stage in which central control in combined with greater local autonomy and coordination of economic development. Economic regions are considered effective only if they embody actual agencies for economic coordination within their territory.     

‘I'm protective of this yard’: long-term homeless persons' construction of home place and workplace in a historical public space

Though research has examined the ways homeless persons work to be in public space, less research covers tying these ways to personal and social needs associated with home place and workplace. Additionally, scholars have given less attention to how central public spaces may not only be integral to long-term homeless persons' daily paths but also how they may be employed differently from marginal public spaces. In this article, I explain how long-term homeless persons attempted to make a historical-tourist public space, the Jackson Square area in New Orleans' French Quarter, personally and socially meaningful as home place and workplace. Drawing from participant observation and observation, I examine long-term homeless persons' attachment to Jackson Square. I argue that the Square's historical and tourist attraction status actually supported long-term homeless persons' desire and ability to occupy it in significant ways. This status along with long-term homeless persons' negotiating practices and inconsistent practices of authority and policing by those with (more) power made it possible for the Jackson Square area to become long-term homeless persons' home place and workplace.     

Methodologies for Examining Homelessness and Their Application to a Mandated Statewide Study

Using findings from a federally mandated statewide study of homelessness in the state of Iowa, this paper presents methodologies developed to address various aspects of homeless research, including enumeration of the population, screening for reporting duplications, estimating the annual number of incidents of homelessness, and exploring county-level estimates of homelessness. After implementing an algorithm to eliminate duplicate reporting, and using the baseline unduplicated reported number of homeless persons, a statewide estimate of the number of homeless individuals was derived. Following further adjustments for differences in agency reporting practices and after extrapolating for nonreported time periods, we estimated the number of Unique incidents of homelessness experienced in the state during the year of the study (1997). The policy implications of these findings are discussed.     

From Madonna to Marx: Towards a Re‐theorisation of Homelessness

Homeless people, so the story goes, are regularly excluded from spaces of consumption because they offend customers. For a significant portion of homelessness scholarship, such exclusion is the point of departure for subsequent analysis. Others, by examining homelessness within these consumption spaces, theorise that anti‐homeless policies and attitudes emerge because homeless people cannot or have not properly consumed (e.g. nice clothes, housing). This article, conversely, argues that homeless people's “offensiveness” derives from their relation to production (rather than consumption), from their class position. Homeless people's spatial incongruity, specifically, originates in their apparent unproductivity, their violation of the capitalist law of value and its ideological justifications. This historical materialist analysis is not only more revealing, it also positions homeless people as a working class faction in need of political organising rather than an abstract population in need of pitiful charity.     

中原经济区的“三化”协调发展之路

中原经济区走新型工业化、新型城镇化与农业现代化"三化"协调发展之路,是中原崛起的时代呼唤,是中原经济区建设的最高境界,是中原儿女的庄严承诺。选择"三化"协调作为中原经济区的发展之路,有着深厚的宏观背景。在整体、协调、融合、可持续原则的制约下,"三化"协调发展的主要途径为:产业集群发展、产城互动发展、城乡统筹发展。其中,城乡统筹发展是"三化"协调发展的最终落脚点,包括构建现代城镇体系,搭建城镇化本土承载平台,推进新农村和新型农村社区建设,构建城乡资源共享平台和社会保障体系。     

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.     

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.     

‘My Dog is My Home’: multispecies care and poverty politics in Los Angeles,California and Austin,Texas

My Dog is My Home is an art activist project in Los Angeles dedicated to sharing testimonies about the redemptive bonds of care and love between homeless persons and their canine companions. These testimonies politicize the structural violence and oppressive norms about propertied citizenship and notions of home that operate to render homeless human and animal lives disposable and ungrievable. Informed by the experts’ testimonies on multispecies homelessness and an engagement with feminist care theory, we bring relational poverty studies into conversation with critical animal studies to reject this framing of homeless lives as disposable and to trouble the idea of property as the fundamental basis for value. We problematize these notions by highlighting the insights gained from witnessing the entangled empathetic relationships forged between homeless humans and dogs. These relationships are not only a window into the political economic material conditions and discourses that reproduce homelessness and the animal-as-property. We conclude that studying these bonds offers a collective politics of multispecies mutuality, care, and love.     

Care and the Lives of Homeless Youth in Neoliberal Times in Canada

Socio-spatial insights from feminist theories of care are examined in relation to the complex, difficult lives of some homeless youth in Ottawa, and their embeddedness within multiple scales of public policy construction and implementation. As lengthy interviews with 78 female and 78 male homeless youth in Ottawa revealed, both care and self-sufficiency figure strongly in these young peoples' lives. It is our contention that care is generally not part of current senior government agendas geared to marginalised youth and that as a result, there is a gap in funding that supports efforts of community organisations who work with homeless youth. We suggest that one way in which to understand this gap is by recognising that senior government programming for marginalised youth is geared problematically to narrowly defined employability issues. Furthermore, we assert that this results in local organisations being left to bridge the gaps between these one-dimensional characterisations and the complex gendered, racialised and situated lives of marginalised youth. In this article, we draw upon our preliminary findings from on-going research with homeless youth in Ottawa to expand on these arguments, in conjunction with theoretical insights drawn from selected ethics of justice and ethics of care arguments. We assert that there are important socio-spatial implications to be considered. Incorporating care into the framework of senior government policies implies that there is an onus not only to provide sufficient funds but also to direct those monies in such a way that the gendered and racialised contexts within which homeless youths are living manifest qualities of both care and justice. This article suggests that the role of appropriately located, multifaceted social services may have a significance that has not been appropriately recognised.

Cuidado y las vidas de jóvenes que faltan viviendas en tiempos de tendencia neoliberalista en Canadá

Se examinen perspicacias socio-espaciales que viene de teorías feministas de cuidado en relación a las vidas complejos y diversas de jóvenes sin hogares en Ottawa y a su fijación (embeddedness) en escalas múltiples de la construcción e implementación política publica. En entrevistas largas con 78 jóvenas y 78 jóvenes que no tienen hogares en Ottawa se revela que el cuidado e independencia se destacan en las vidas de las/los jóvenes. Sostenemos que generalmente el cuidado no es parte de las agendas actuales del gobierno superior que orientan a jóvenes marginalisados, y como consecuencia existe una brecha de financiamiento para apoyar organisaciones que trabajan con jóvenes sin hogares. Sugerimos que una manera para entender ésta brecha es reconocer que los programas del gobierno superior se orientan a cuestiones de empleabilidad limitado. Además afirmamos que resulta que organisaciones locales tienen la responsabilidad para tender puentes entre la brecha de caracterisaciones unidimensional y las vidas complejas, generificadas (gendered), racialisadas, y situatadas de jóvenes marginalisados. En éste artículo utilisamos conclusiones preliminares de investigaciones continuas con jóvenes que no tiene viviendas en Ottawa para extender los dichos argumentos en conjunción con perspicacias teoréticas de argumentos específicos de las éticas de justicia y las éticas de cuidado. Afirmamos que hay implicaciones socio-espaciales importantes que se necesitan tomar en cuenta. La incorporación de cuidada en el marco de las políticas desgobierno superior implica que no solo hay una responsabilidad para aprovisionar financiamiento suficiente sino que dirigir los fondos en una manera en que los contextos racialisados y generificados de las vidas de jóvenes marginalisados manifestan las calidades de cuidado y justicia. Éste artículo sugiere que el papel de servicios multifacéticos que se ubica adecuado tengan una importancia que no se reconocen apropiado.     

La mobilité forcée des personnes utilisatrices de drogue par injection et inhalation en situation d'itinérance à Montréal

This article focuses on the various actors in the urban setting who contribute to the increase in the forced mobility of homeless injection drug users and crack smokers in Montréal, Canada. The objective is to analyze who these actors are and how they contribute to increasing this forced mobility from the perspective of homeless injection drug users and crack smokers in relation to three needs : basic needs, acquisition of financial resources, and drug use. One hundred and six semi-structured interviews were conducted among this population. The results indicate that various actors—police officers, community organization, peers, municipal administration, storekeepers, and residents—contribute to the forced mobility of this population in their daily activities. As for their needs, it is when they use drugs, sleep, or loiter that they are more likely to experience events of forced mobility. Police officers are by far the actors who contribute the most to this, often in a repressive way. The role of the municipality is also a determining factor in the daily activities of homeless injection drug users and crack smokers.     

Toward Self-Sufficiency: Evaluating a Transitional Housing Program for Homeless Families

Homeless families face the economic and personal challenges of sparse employment opportunities and child care and nutrition needs, compounded by the loss of adequate housing. The Family Development Center (FDC) is a transitional housing program in Atlanta, Georgia, designed to provide young homeless mothers an opportunity to emerge from what may well be desperate circumstances and begin the journey to economic self-sufficiency. This paper describes the research on programs for homeless families and presents the results of a comprehensive look at the operation and effectiveness of the FDC program during its first 5 years of existence. The work shows that while many families were able to effect notable positive changes in their lives during and after taking part in the housing program, for some the recovery from homelessness was extremely difficult. For even the most successful formerly homeless families—those that secured employment, housing, and other social supports—the escape from welfare dependence and poverty proved very difficult. The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications for relevant public policy.