Mooring in the Homeless City. A Practice Theoretical Account of Homeless Urban Dwelling and Emplacement

Natalia Martini

doi:10.18778/1733-8077.17.3.03

Authors

Natalia Martini Jagiellonian University, Poland https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8254-7621

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.18778/1733-8077.17.3.03

Keywords:

homelessness, dwelling, spatiality, place, mooring, theories of practice

Abstract

Taking a practice theoretical approach and building on the research conducted with a group of people who live their lives on the streets of two Polish cities, this paper provides an account of the homeless city dwellers’ mode of emplacement. It offers the terms licensed, invisible, motile, material, relational, affective, and ad hoc mooring to describe how homeless people establish a place of and for various activities that make up their everyday practice of inhabiting the city. While highlighting the accomplishments of homeless places, the paper also underscores their tentativeness and instability. It situates the homeless mode of emplacement within a wider landscape of normative urban geography, against which the ways homeless people establish themselves in place are often judged out-of-place. It attends to the role that this transgressive potential plays in limiting homeless dwellers’ capabilities for mooring and considers how they might be enhanced.

Downloads

Download data is not yet available.

Author Biography

Natalia Martini, Jagiellonian University, Poland

Natalia Martini is a Doctoral Student at the Institute of Sociology, Jagiellonian University, Cracow, Poland. She is a sociologist with a background in cultural studies. She has a strong interest in urban everyday life and creative methodological approaches for studying its varied spatialities and temporalities. Her work cuts across sociology and human geography and favors an activist approach to scholarship. Her current research focuses on everyday practices of inhabiting the city. It uses participatory, mobile, and reflexive methods to discover how homeless dwellers navigate the city and anchor their places in various urban spaces, and how their capabilities for exercising the right to stay put might be enhanced.

References

Archard, Peter. 1979. Vagrancy, Alcoholism, and Social Control. London: Macmillan.

Bourlessas, Panos. 2018. “‘These People Should Not Rest’: Mobilities and Frictions of the Homeless Geographies in Athens City Centre.” Mobilities 13(5):746-760. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/17450101.2018.1464544

Boyer, Kate. 2012. “Affect, Corporeality, and the Limits of Belonging: Breastfeeding in Public in the Contemporary UK.” Health & Place 18(3):552-560. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.healthplace.2012.01.010

Butler, Ruth and Sophia Bowlby. 1997. “Bodies and Spaces: An Exploration of Disabled People’s Experiences of Public Space.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 15(4):411-433. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1068/d150411

Casey, Rionach, Rosalind Goudie, and Kesia Reeve. 2008. “Homeless Women in Public Spaces: Strategies of Resistance.” Housing Studies 23(6):899-916. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/02673030802416627

Certeau, Michel de. 1984. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Cloke, Paul, Jon May, and Sarah Johnsen. 2008. “Performativity and Affect in the Homeless City.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 26(2):241-263. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1068/d84j

Cloke, Paul, Jon May, and Sarah Johnsen. 2010. Swept Up Lives?: Re-Envisioning the Homeless City. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1002/9781444324655

Cresswell, Tim. 1996. In Place/Out of Place: Geography, Ideology, and Transgression. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Dear, Michael J. and Jennifer R. Wolch. 1987. Landscapes of Despair: From Deinstitutionalization to Homelessness. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

DeVerteuil, Geoffrey, Jon May, and Jürgen von Mahs. 2009. “Complexity Not Collapse: Recasting the Geographies of Homelessness in a ‘Punitive’ Age.” Progress in Human Geography 33(5):646-666. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132508104995

Duff, Cameron. 2017. “The Affective Right to the City.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 42(4):516-529. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/tran.12190

Fricker, Miranda. 2007. Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing. Oxford: Oxford University Press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198237907.001.0001

Giorgi, Amedeo. 1970. Psychology as a Human Science: A Phenomenologically Based Approach. New York: Harper & Row.

Goffman, Erving. 1963. Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Gowan, Teresa. 2010. Hobos, Hustlers, and Backsliders: Homeless in San Francisco. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5749/minnesota/9780816648696.001.0001

Groot, Shiloh and Darrin Hodgetts. 2012. “Homemaking on the Streets and Beyond.” Community, Work & Family 15(3):255-271. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/13668803.2012.657933

Hall, Tom. 2017. Footwork: Urban Outreach and Hidden Lives. London: Pluto Press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt1jktrw6

Hodgetts, Darrin J. et al. 2010. “The Mobile Hermit and the City: Considering Links between Places, Objects, and Identities in Social Psychological Research on Homelessness.” British Journal of Social Psychology 49(2):285-303. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1348/014466609X450465

Hopper, Kim. 1991. “Symptoms, Survival, and the Redefinition of Public Space: A Feasibility Study of Homeless People at a Metropolitan Airport.” Urban Anthropology 20(2):155-175.

Jackson, Emma. 2015. Young Homeless People and Urban Space: Fixed in Mobility. Milton Park, New York: Routledge. DOI: https://doi.org/10.4324/978131515858418

Johnsen, Sarah, Jon May, and Paul Cloke. 2008. “Imag(in)ing ‘Homeless Places’: Using Auto-Photography to (Re)Examine the Geographies of Homelessness.” Area 40(2):194-207. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-4762.2008.00801.x

Kawash, Samira. 1998. “The Homeless Body.” Public Culture 10(2):319-339. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-10-2-319

Kearns, Robin A. 1993. “Place and Health: Towards a Reformed Medical Geography.” The Professional Geographer 45(2):139-147. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/j.0033-0124.1993.00139.x

Knowles, Caroline. 2000. Bedlam on the Streets. New York: Routledge.

Lancione, Michele. 2016. “Beyond Homelessness Studies.” European Journal of Homelessness 10(3):163-176.

Lancione, Michele. 2020. “Underground Inscriptions.” Cultural Anthropology 35(1):31-39. DOI: https://doi.org/10.14506/ca35.1.05

Langegger, Sig and Stephen Koester. 2016. “Invisible Homelessness: Anonymity, Exposure, and the Right to the City.” Urban Geography 37(7):1030-1048. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/02723638.2016.1147755

Lefebvre, Henri. 1991. The Production of Space. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.

Lefebvre, Henri. 1996. “The Right to the City.” Pp. 63-181 in Writings on Cities, edited by E. Kofman and E. Lebas. Oxford: Blackwell.

Lingis, Alphonso. 1996. Sensation: Intelligibility in Sensibility. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press.

Mallett, Shelley. 2004. “Understanding Home: A Critical Review of the Literature.” The Sociological Review 52(1):62-89. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-954X.2004.00442.x

Malpas, Jeff. 2006. Heidegger’s Topology: Being, Place, World. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/3467.001.0001

Martini, Natalia. 2017. “Capturing the Lived Experience of the City through Methodological Practice of Walking.” Pp. 303-317 in Re-Imagining the City. Municipality and Urbanity Today from a Sociological Perspective, edited by M. Smagacz-Poziemska, K. Frysztacki, and A. Bukowski. Cracow: Jagiellonian University Press.

Martini, Natalia. 2020. “Using GPS and GIS to Enrich the Walk-Along Method.” Field Methods 32(2):180-192. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/1525822X20905257

Martini, Natalia. forthcoming. “Walking with Homeless Persons in Kraków and Łódź.” In Deathworlds to Lifeworlds: Collaboration with Strangers for Personal, Social, and Ecological Justice, edited by V. M. Bentz and J. Marlatt. Berlin: De Gruyter Press.

Massumi, Brian. 2002. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Durham: Duke University Press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822383574

Mathews, Vanessa. 2019. “Reconfiguring the Breastfeeding Body in Urban Public Spaces.” Social & Cultural Geography 20(9):1266-1284. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/14649365.2018.1433867

May, Jon. 2000. “Of Nomads and Vagrants: Single Homelessness and Narratives of Home as Place.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 18(6):737-759. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1068/d203t

Mazzei, Lisa A. 2014. “Beyond an Easy Sense: A Diffractive Analysis.” Qualitative Inquiry 20(6):742-746. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/1077800414530257

Miles, Matthew B. and A. Michael Huberman. 1994. Qualitative Data Analysis: An Expanded Sourcebook. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Mitchell, Don and Nik Heynen. 2009. “The Geography of Survival and the Right to the City: Speculations on Surveillance, Legal Innovation, and the Criminalization of Intervention.” Urban Geography 30(6):611-632. DOI: https://doi.org/10.2747/0272-3638.30.6.611

Mol, Annemarie. 2002. The Body Multiple: Ontology in Medical Practice. Durham: Duke University Press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822384151

Nicolini, Davide. 2017. “Practice Theory as a Package of Theory, Method and Vocabulary: Affordances and Limitations.” Pp. 19-34 in Methodological Reflections on Practice Oriented Theories, edited by M. Jonas, B. Littig, and A. Wroblewski. Cham: Springer International Publishing. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-52897-7_2

Nóżka, Marcjanna. 2020. “Rethinking Homelessness. Residence and the Sense of Home in the Experience of Homeless People.” Housing, Theory, and Society 37(4):496-515. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/14036096.2019.1658622

Perry, Samuel L. 2013. “Urban Hybrid Space and the Homeless.” Ethnography 14(4):431-451. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/1466138112457314

Radley, Alan et al. 2010. “From Means to Occasion: Walking in the Life of Homeless People.” Visual Studies 25(1):36-45. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/14725861003606845

Rennels, Tasha R. and David F. Purnell. 2017. “Accomplishing Place in Public Space: Autoethnographic Accounts of Homelessness.” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 46(4):490-513. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/0891241615619990

Ruddick, Susan M. 1996. Young and Homeless in Hollywood: Mapping Social Identities. New York: Routledge.

Sandberg, Jörgen and Gloria Dall’Alba. 2009. “Returning to Practice Anew: A Life-World Perspective.” Organization Studies 30(12):1349-1368. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/0170840609349872

Schatzki, Theodore. 1996. Social Practices. A Wittgensteinian Approach to Human Activity and the Social. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511527470

Schatzki, Theodore. 2001. “Introduction: Practice Theory.” Pp. 10-23 in The Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory, edited by T. Schatzki, K. Knorr Cetina, and E. Von Savigny. London, New York: Routledge.

Schatzki, Theodore. 2010. The Timespace of Human Activity: On Performance, Society, and History as Indeterminate Teleological Events. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.

Schatzki, Theodore. 2011. “Where the Action Is (On Large Social Phenomena Such as Sociotechnical Regimes).” Sustainable Practices Research Group Working Papers. Retrieved October 15, 2019 http://www.sprg.ac.uk/uploads/schatzki-wp1.pdf

Schatzki, Theodore. 2015. “Spaces of Practices and of Large Social Phenomena.” EspacesTemps.Net. Retrieved October 15, 2019 http://www.espacestemps.net/articles/spaces-of-practices-and-of-large-social-phenomena/

Schatzki, Theodore. 2016. “Practice Theory as FLat Ontology.” Pp. 28-42 in Practice Theory and Research. Exploring the Dynamics of Social Life, edited by G. Spaargaren, D. Weenink, and M. Lamers. London, New York: Routledge.

Schatzki, Theodore. 2018. “On Practice Theory, or What’s Practices Got to Do (Got to Do) with It?” Pp. 151-65 in Education in an Era of Schooling: Critical Perspectives of Educational Practice and Action Research. A Festschrift for Stephen Kemmis, edited by C. Edwards-Groves, P. Grootenboer, and J. Wilkinson. Singapore: Springer Singapore. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-2053-8_11

Schmidt, Katharina. 2015. “Seeing the ‘Homeless City’? Some Critical Remarks on the Visual Production of Homelessness through Photography.” European Journal of Homelessness 9(2):283-303.

Shields, Rob. 1991. Places on the Margin: Alternative Geographies of Modernity. Milton Park, New York: Routledge.

Snow, David A. and Leon Anderson. 1993. Down on Their Luck: A Study of Homeless Street People. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Snow, David A. and Michel Mulcahy. 2001. “Space, Politics, and the Survival Strategies of the Homeless.” American Behavioral Scientist 45(1):149-169. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/00027640121956962

Strauss, Anselm L. and Juliet M. Corbin. 1998. Basics of Qualitative Research: Techniques and Procedures for Developing Grounded Theory. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Wikström, Tomas. 2005. “Residual Space and Transgressive Spatial Practices—the Uses and Meanings of Un-Formed Space.” Nordisk Arkitekturforskning 18(1):47-68.

Wright, Talmadge. 1997. Out of Place: Homeless Mobilizations, Subcities, and Contested Landscapes. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.