Small Things in Everyday Places: Homelessness, Dissent and Affordances in Public Space

Abstract

In ‘a world that has been built to accommodate only some’ (Ahmed 2019: 221), how do those engaging in public protest or experiencing housing insecurity make use of the material environment? In this article, we examine adaptation of the built environment in four sites in Melbourne, Australia. Everyday urban places are composed of myriad ‘small things’ acted upon as affordances for survival within structures of silencing and dispossession for the urban undercommons. We draw from cultural, spatial and atmospheric criminology to inform an ethnographic method focusing on materiality, use, adaptability and sensory composition. In so doing, our research contributes to criminological understanding of the significance of ‘minor’ events, activities and encounters in everyday life by proposing that ‘small things in everyday places’ constitute potentialities for defiance and resistance.

Counter-mapping the mobile border: Racial surveillance and data justice in spaces of disappearance

“…Counter-mapping initiatives have the capacity to ‘locate in place phenomena that might have been thought unmappable’ (Popovski and Young, 2023: 7), such as sounds, sensations, or infrastructural arrangements premised on invisibility and disappearance. Recent contributions in this vein use visual, sonic and digital methods (that rely upon web-based geographic information systems such as Google Maps, for example) to study a range of social and cultural changes in different environments, such as patterns in gender-based violence (Fileborn and Trott, 2021), the privatisation and securitisation of ‘public’ space (Tulumello, 2015), and the construction of border walls (Margulies, 2023).…”

Signifying dissent: The sensory semiotics of protest

“…Frequently protesters adapt the existing affordances of street locations for uses related to the protest (Popovski and Young, 2022). While a roadway is a surface intended for vehicles to drive on, its bitumen can be adapted as a surface on which to glue large tubes encasing the limbs of protesters from Extinction Rebellion, Blockade Australia, or Insulate Britain.…”

“…To investigate this question, a number of street-based actions are considered, in cities including New York City, London, Tokyo, Paris and Melbourne, on issues such as climate justice, women’s rights, nuclear power, immigration detention, taxation and petrol costs, unequal wealth distribution, vaccination mandates and Covid-19 lockdowns. Protests discussed include Occupy Wall Street, which occupied Zuccotti Park in New York City from 17 September to 15 November 2011, with its wide range of issues circling around financial and social inequalities (Bassett, 2014; Harcourt, 2012; Mitchell, 2012; Taussig, 2012); Extinction Rebellion, originating in Britain in 2018 and taken up in Japan, Australia, Norway, New Zealand, Canada, Germany and elsewhere (Fotaki and Foroughi, 2022; Lee, 2021; Mansfield, 2020; Martiskainen et al, 2020); action against economic and social inequalities carried out since 2018 by the gilets jaunes (‘yellow vests’) in France; protests against immigration detention in Melbourne, Australia (Vogl et al, 2021); anti-lockdown/anti-vaccination protests in Australia (Martin, 2021; Popovski and Young, 2022); and Black Lives Matter events occurring in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd by police officer Derek Chauvin (Barrie, 2020). Our aim is neither to evaluate the relative merits of protest objectives (although some of those discussed are events and actions in which we actively participated) nor to flatten the distinctive objectives sought by various organisations or events, which no doubt influence the intensity of control responses to any individual protest.…”

Examining the Impact of Crowding Perception on the Generation of Negative Emotions among Users of Small Urban Micro Public Spaces

“…It is a space type defined as large-and medium-sized urban public spaces, including small street parks, small squares, community gardens, stadiums, and so on [4]. UMPSs exhibit a functional network dimension that integrates with the overall spatial network system, enabling cross-fertilization with culture, economy, and the environment [5,6]. They can also contribute to environmental restoration and facilitate certain beneficial functions such as psychological healing [7].…”