Modes of Attentiveness: Reading for Difference in Geographies of Homelessness

Abstract

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.

Neoliberalism, Big Society, and Progressive Localism

“…A key component in understanding these processes o f continual contestation and negotiation has been a development o f Katz's (2004) typology o f resistance to include elements o f reworking and resilience that take place 'in the meantime' o f neoliberalism, and to acknowledge the capacity o f locally situated agency to circumvent a priori assumptions that assume that neoliberalism somehow works in programmatic ways. Instead, the intermediatory power o f institutions and locally situated agency are acknowledged to shape, sometimes radically, the trajectory o f governance and action (see Bames and Prior, 2009;May and Cloke, 2013).…”

“…In this paper we argue that the latest formation of localism, underpinned by the hard metrics of fiscal austerity (Featherstone et al, 2012), has inadvertently opened up a number of ethical and political spaces in which various forms of interstitial politics of resistance and experimentation have sprung up. Following Gibson-Graham's (2006, page xxxi) prioritisation of "reading for difference rather than domination", we therefore join with other authors (Featherstone et al, 2012;Ferguson, 2011;May and Cloke, 2013) in the task of focusing analytical attention on the actually existing struggles through which neoliberal processes and techniques are being negotiated and resisted through social agency.…”

“…Secondly, we emphasise the importance o f alternative analytical grammars that render visible the potential for resistance that has been largely overlooked in overly pessimistic narratives o f neoliberal govemmentality. Here we bring together discussion on ethical agency (Barnes and Prior, 2009), emergent publics (Barnett et al, 2008), and interstitial spaces o f resilience, reworking, and resistance (Katz, 2004; see also May and Cloke, 2013) to offer up new grammars that help identify and guide new research agendas attuned to the politics o f possibility within the vicissitudes o f neoliberal governance. We wish to make clear from the outset our acknowledgement that the current political trend is indeed marked by a regressive and punitive withdrawal o f public sector involvement and a privatisation o f the finance and delivery o f services.…”

“Daring to Care”: Challenging Corporate Environmentalism

“…Such ethics are evident in, for example, direct action against environmentally destructive projects such as fracking in the UK or the Standing Rock protest against the extension of the North Dakota Access Pipeline. Macgregor (2006) had reported how those who get involved in local campaigns of this sort are often politicized in that they begin to question existing forms and systems of domination and power and to become more interested in environmental and social issues beyond their own neighbourhood (see also Cloke et al 2016;May and Cloke 2014;Williams et al 2016). Equally, the sense of outrage at the abuse of corporate power by, for example, Volkswagen who have been found to be fitting diesel vehicles with software designed to cheat US pollution emissions tests 11 is one generated through a sense of care for self and others combined with an emotional as well as rational sense of the injustice of such abuses of corporate power.…”

Self-Build Homes

“…Homelessness cannot be rationalised by pathological explanations. The homeless person is not a sick patient (Cloke et al, 2010;May and Cloke, 2013;Jackson, 2015). And whilst, through the lens of austerity, we can witness new geographies of exclusion and corporeal survival and how new emotional and material landscapes of 'otherness' have opened up -such as the rise of punitive measures for begging and rough sleeping in urban centres -during this project we also recognised elements of care and compassion: a hand on 9 9 the shoulder; the words, 'Are you OK?…”