Realizing citizenship in property: Houseless encampments and the limits of liberalism's promise

Przybylinski, Stephen

doi:10.1016/j.polgeo.2021.102494

Cited by 8 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 21 publications

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“…Despite the legal distinctions between property ownership and citizenship in Western settler colonies, the values shaping both are “stabilised” and interconnected. The property‐insecure are dispossessed of social and political autonomy (Przybylinski 2021), an outcome also entrenched in Canada's legacy of settler colonialism, where private property was established in conjunction with the dispossession of Indigenous peoples (Dorries 2017) and in relation to racial subjectivities. Being a property owner, and having the capacity to appropriate (as a white person), are colonial preconditions for status; for becoming a full citizen‐subject (Bhandar 2018).…”

Section: Propertied Urban Citizenship and The Edges Of Exclusionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The City's eviction tactics distinguished “which members of the public can and cannot enjoy the use of [public space] … and for what activities they can use it for” (Interview, community lawyer, 14 April 2022). Encampment residents are constructed as “improper political subjects” (Przybylinski 2021:8) and non‐citizens as they lack a relation to property that is deemed proper. Their use of public space in deviant ways removes them further from their rights while their illegalised housing, presence, and claims produce insurgent citizenships.…”

Section: The Citizen‐taxpayer and Encampment Residents As Non‐constit...mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The local state strategically mobilises law to protect property owners' sense of security aesthetics, which align with its own. State hostility against unhoused people thus derives from differentiated recognitions of citizenships (Holston 2008), entangled within capitalist property relations that dispossess the property-insecure of social and political autonomy (Blatman-Thomas and Porter 2019;Przybylinski 2021). In this context, unhoused and precariously housed people, including residents of encampments, are subject to exceptional, arbitrary, and informal legal processes (Ferencz et al 2022;Graziani et al 2022).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Barred and Banished: Encampment Evictions, Public Space, and Permanent Displaceability in Toronto

Rady,

Sotomayor

2024

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Despite Toronto's motto of diversity and inclusion, the municipality has recently mobilised exclusionary spatio‐legal tools against unhoused populations using claims to law and order. This article examines one such case of legal action, its precedents, and its constitutive effects on urban citizenship and governance. In 2021, amidst a homelessness crisis aggravated by COVID‐19, Toronto police executed violent raids against encampment residents in three public parks. In response to the public relations backlash, the municipality changed course, issuing suspension notices to encampment leaders that barred them from public spaces and services. The suspension notice, while unenforceable, allows municipal administrators to exclude those whose conduct allegedly disturbs the quiet enjoyment of property from public space. Building on critical planning and socio‐legal debates on propertied urban citizenship, we use legal research and semi‐structured interviews to identify how these arbitrary yet legal tools exacerbate permanent displaceability, banishment, and colonial modes of governance.

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Section: Propertied Urban Citizenship and The Edges Of Exclusionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: The Citizen‐taxpayer and Encampment Residents As Non‐constit...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Barred and Banished: Encampment Evictions, Public Space, and Permanent Displaceability in Toronto

Rady,

Sotomayor

2024

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“…In this way, encampments function simultaneously as “tools and targets in the management of marginality” for governments (Herring 2014, 303). At the same time, municipal governments are beginning to recognize that some encampments serve as spaces of hospitality that many unhoused people welcome, as they foster a stronger sense of dignity and agency for their residents (Sparks 2017; Przybylinski 2021 a , 2022). Herring and Lutz (2015, 695) speak to this dualism, noting that even though “encampments function as complementary strategies to exclusionary policing for the local state that partially relieve the fiscal and legitimation crisis of criminalization, they simultaneously serve as preferred safe grounds for homeless campers from the heavily policed zones of exclusion.” Scholarship on U.S. houselessness thus articulates organized and sanctioned encampments not as being exceptional, in the sense that they are spaces of bare life (though see Feldman 2004).…”

Section: Conceptualizing Encampments: Emerging From the Exceptionalmentioning

confidence: 99%

From Rejection to Legitimation: Governing the Emergence of Organized Homeless Encampments

Przybylinski

2023

Urban Affairs Review

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This paper analyzes the City of Portland, Oregon's recent zoning code amendment which legalized sanctioned homeless encampments. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork in Portland, the paper details how the City Government's long-held opposition to homeless camping shifted to a position of acceptance. The paper identifies the state of emergency (SOE) on housing and homelessness as a critical moment for developing not only a legal foundation, but also a social justification, for legalizing encampments as an official shelter strategy. In contrast to research over the past few decades articulating the camp as the realization of punitive sovereign power, the paper suggests the relationality of emergency governance, or “governing-through-emergency,” instead provides an opportunity to legitimate the lived experiences and desires of unhoused people residing in sanctioned encampments. It concludes by warning that, although emergency governance serves as a critical tool to advance the interests of the unhoused, such governing strategies are limited by structural forces producing homelessness more broadly.

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“…Without a secure interest in property—that is, by not having the legal rights to access propertied space—houseless people are denied citizenship privileges essential for securing their livelihoods. Such a model of “propertied-citizenship” enables those with secure interests in property to leverage their power against those without secure interests in land through economic, political, and legal means (Przybylinski, 2021b). As Roy (2003: 475) argues, the American liberal “paradigm of propertied citizenship” recognizes only the formal rights of property to which all informal claims to space are deemed illegible and thus outside of proper citizenship.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Without a right to remain: Property’s limits on Portland’s self-governing houseless encampments

Przybylinski

2022

Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space

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With the rise of organized houseless encampments or “tent cities” around the U.S., scholars have begun to address the social-spatial effects of encampments on houseless peoples’ lives. This scholarship has primarily explained the development of organized encampments as an effect of neoliberal modes of governance as municipalities have sought to offload responsibility for caring for the houseless or to discipline houseless people by containing them through the regulative force of the state. Such explanations address the culpability of the state in relation to capital which shapes houseless peoples’ lives. Yet, they leave unaddressed one critical component of houseless encampments: that relations surrounding property ensure that houseless encampment residents remain property-insecure and without a guaranteed right to remain. Through a case study of self-governing houseless encampments in Portland, Oregon, the article advances a relational analysis of property and citizenship to show how self-governing houseless communities are denied key privileges of citizenship that democratic self-governance is intended to realize. In doing so, the case study examines the very tradeoffs houseless encampment residents must make when living in an encampment. The paper ends suggesting that Portland’s encampment model allows us to more clearly see the consequences of establishing collective rights to access property within liberal property systems, and from this, where political and scholarly attention ought to be placed to better protect houseless people through a more democratic right to remain.

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Realizing citizenship in property: Houseless encampments and the limits of liberalism's promise

Cited by 8 publications

References 21 publications

Barred and Banished: Encampment Evictions, Public Space, and Permanent Displaceability in Toronto

Barred and Banished: Encampment Evictions, Public Space, and Permanent Displaceability in Toronto

From Rejection to Legitimation: Governing the Emergence of Organized Homeless Encampments

Without a right to remain: Property’s limits on Portland’s self-governing houseless encampments

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