The City Is not Innocent: Homelessness and the Value of Urban Parks

Abstract

This paper builds on contemporary memoirs of homelessness from cities across the United States to develop a more nuanced understanding of the use value of urban parks and green spaces. Based on analysis of more than seventy memoirs, we synthesize the writings of nine memoirists who examine their relationship to green spaces in cities. Instead of framing nature as something pristine and distinct from society-or something dangerous and untamedthese writings portray urban green spaces as sites of belonging and everyday life. In the US today, cities often value parks either as playgrounds for middle-class leisure or devalue them as targets of racialized anti-homeless policing. In both instances, parks are framed in relation to their impact on the exchange value of surrounding urban areas. In contrast, the memoirs of homelessness we examine portray parks and other green spaces as enabling privacy, survival, and emotional solace in an urban landscape often marked by surveillance, deprivation, and violence. These crucial values reveal a new conceptualization of urban parks as profoundly useful to those who are subject to the exclusions of capitalist property.

Obstinate curiosity and situated solidarity in urban political ecology

“…Derickson and Routledge (), in reflecting on their own work with grassroots groups, note the importance of curiosity as a mechanism for creating powerful scholar–activist partnerships: “In both cases, our political and emotional commitments inspired an intellectual curiosity regarding the groups with which we worked, and it was that curiosity that compelled us to reach out to these groups as potential research subjects and collaborators in the first instance.” (p. 4). We can find this crucial emphasis on curiosity at play in other UPE settings as well: in working with homeless people as experts on environmental degradation and on navigating ecological terrains (Goodling, ; Speer & Goldfischer, ), in the articulation of home amidst indigenous knowledge of local environments in pipeline battles (Wood & Young, ), and in an analysis of green retrofitting of urban housing in an impoverished city (Edwards & Bulkeley, ). In all of these examples, the authors utilize UPE not as a framework from which to expect answers but as a collection of ideas from which to begin asking questions alongside nonacademic collaborators.…”

Intersecting hazards, intersectional identities: A baseline Critical Environmental Justice analysis of US homelessness

“…Such policing that keeps people on the move occurs in commercial and residential spaces, in the name of public safety and livability (Mitchell, 2003; Staeheli and Mitchell, 2006). It also occurs in “pristine” green spaces, in the name of environmental sustainability (Dooling, 2009; Goodling, 2019; Mokos, 2017), even as urban green spaces remain places of relative material and spiritual refuge for some houseless people (Speer and Goldfischer, 2019). Dozier (2019) and Stuart (2016) illustrate how even entire neighborhoods with dense houseless populations, such as LA’s Skid Row, become extensions of the carceral system.…”