All talk and no movement? Homeless coping and resistance to urban planning

Abstract

Privileging the discursive expression of micro-resistance while exploiting spatial metaphors such as cynical distancing and escape, recent work in Critical Management Studies (CMS) has tended to find resistance everywhere without actually examining its spatial whereabouts. Utilizing a spatial approach, this paper therefore investigates how homeless people in Stockholm not only resisted but also coped otherwise with two urban planning projects that intended to drive them away from two public places. Whereas some of the homeless subverted the planners' intentions by returning, others confirmed their intentions by leaving. The paper further discusses the nomadic nature of these movements and how they were related to homeless discourses of apathy, cynicism and contentment. Finally, it discusses what implications this may have for homeless people and urban planning organizations, and for the understanding of resistance in CMS.

‘Living Space’ at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe: Spatial tactics and the politics of smooth space

“…Johansson and Kociatkiewicz, 2011;Kornberger and Clegg, 2004;Thanem, 2012). Deleuze and Guattari (1988) contrasted the concept of 'striated space' with that of 'smooth space'.…”

“…Halford (2008: 927) has observed that research into the sociology of space has been colonized by economic geographers with a preference for studying macro spatial processes 'of industrial location, economic restructuring, globalization and so on'. Studies that have investigated spatial practices on the micro level are relatively rare, such as Watkins ' (2005) analysis of the spatial practices of a theatre company and Thanem's (2012) inquiry into the tactics that homeless people employ adapting to the strategies of city planners whose efforts were directed at their removal.…”

Deleuze and the deterritorialization of strategy

“…Examples of the nomadic war machine are everywhere: in the non-linear movements of homeless people who subvert the plans of urban reconstruction schemes by continuing to use the public places that planners and politicians seek to exclude them from (Thanem, 2012); in the creative tactics that street artists use to appropriate public spaces for performance (Munro and Jordan, 2012); in natural disasters which overwhelm urban infrastructure and communications networks (Curtis, 2008); and in the informational attacks of peer-to-peer hacker networks seeking to set free the flow of information on the internet (Munro, 2010). There are good and evil war machines, and there are war machines that operate beyond good and evil.…”

“…Both schizoanalysis and nomadism operate along a vector of 'deterritorialization', where desire and matter spread beyond the boundaries of property, where identities and bodies are pushed towards absolute destratification, and where radically new forms of social life may be created on a 'new earth'. These deterritorializing processes can challenge existing social codes and boundaries as in the example of the Occupy Movement's occupation of important capitalist spaces such as Wall Street, and in the creation of nonmonetatized forms of production, consumption and communication, such as practices of house squatting, home-growing and the development of the creative commons (Lessig, 2002;Thanem, 2012). Indeed, Guattari (1988, 1994) explained that the creation of a 'new earth' entails processes of revolutionary becoming and deterritorialization, and later interpreters of their work have argued that the 'common' is a deterritorialized earth, which is the foundation of both social and ecological production (Hardt and Negri, 2009).…”

Estudos Organizacionais Baseados Em Michel De Certeau: A Produção Internacional Entre 2006 E 2015

“…Já o estudo de Thanem (2011) focalizou as resistências por parte de pessoas em situação de rua, frente a dois projetos de planejamento urbano que tinham o intuito de expulsá-las de dois locais públicos no centro da capital da Suécia, Estocolmo. Nesse contexto, as noções de lugar e espaço foram relevantes para o autor na medida em que ele explorou um vazio encontrado na literatura sobre resistência.…”