Moving on,finding shelter: The spatiotemporal camp

Abstract

Spanish

French

This article orbits two mandated mobilities: moving on and finding shelter – one continual and one oriented toward confinement. Reporting ethnographic fieldwork and archival research in Denver, a city that recently outlawed camping in all open space, this article builds a model of spatial confinement. The article argues that, in concert with other quality of life laws, poverty management sequesters Denver’s poor in what the authors term a spatiotemporal camp, a fluid zone produced by delimiting self-reliance and truncating the ability of individuals to relate to social and physical environments. Incorporating both Agamben’s notion of homo sacer and his conceptualization of the camp with other concepts of the camp derived from theories of abnormality, the authors argue that in effect poverty management measures in Denver simultaneously disperse, concentrate, and conceal its homeless citizens. Because it deprives the undomiciled of the autonomy necessary to conjure home-like spaces, poverty management may exacerbate homelessness.

Keywords

Homelessness home qualitative analysis urban development urban space

In May 2012, Denver, Colorado passed and began enforcing a new quality of life law,¹ section 38-86.2 of its municipal code. This bylaw disallows camping, which is defined as ‘residing or dwelling temporarily in a place, with shelter,’ on any public or private property in the city. The ordinance defines dwelling as: ‘without limitation, conducting such activities as eating, sleeping, or the storage of personal possessions.’ Section 38-86.2 then unambiguously describes shelter as ‘without limitation, any tent, tarpaulin, lean-to, sleeping bag, bedroll, blankets, or any form of cover or protection from the elements other than clothing.’ Lacking access to private property and needing to eat and sleep, people without homes must clearly dwell in public. The ban is particularly harsh considering the city already has a thicket of public nuisance codes, park curfews, right-of-way encumbrance codes, a sit-lie ordinance,² and zoning codes that forbid all manner of permanent or semi-permanent structures on private property and delimit dwelling activities to those carried out within permanent structures. Denver’s camping ban has effectively eliminated every single place, aside from an institution, such as jail cell or a homeless shelter, wherein a person without a home can legally dwell. Thinly veiling punitive policy with charitable purpose, section 38-86.2 then defines police protocols for the ban’s enforcement, instructing officers to admonish people in violation and move them along, or direct them to an appropriate institution – a homeless shelter or mental hospital.

These two mobilities – moving on and finding shelter – frame this article. We argue that Denver’s camping ban represents an essential component in a complex system of spatial confinement working to sequester Denver’s poor in what we term a spatiotemporal camp – an indistinct space wherein autonomy is curtailed and self-reliance is punished. We must make an initial distinction between a homeless camp and the spatiotemporal camp. Homeless camps are homes. The spatiotemporal camp is a time–space of hegemonic control. Our concept of the spatiotemporal camp pivots on the notion of the camp presented by Agamben (1998), who sees it as a realm outside normal society that contains bare life – what he sees as existence bereft of relations to people or to place – and on the theoretical construct of De Cauter and Dehaene (2008), who conceptualize the camp as a space of perfect hegemonic control. The former captures the social production of homo sacer (Agamben, 1998: 65). The latter encompasses processes of spatial discipline interwoven in the purification of urban space (cf. Sibley, 1995). A complex web, the spatiotemporal camp is barely visible. Trapped within it, people without homes are victims of its layered, shifting threads.

The homelessness crises coincided with the ascendance of neoliberalism in the 1970s and its associated revanchism – attempts by dominant groups to reclaim prime urban spaces like sidewalks, parks, and public transportation from the poor, the young, and the homeless (Scullion et al., 2015). In the 1990s scholars began to map a conterminous emergence of the revanchist city and the entrepreneurial city (Davis, 1992; Duneier, 1999; Mitchell, 1997; Wacquant, 1999). Wolch and DeVerteuil (2001) outline an alternative framework to the twin concepts of entrepreneurialism and revanchism: poverty management. Poverty management cleanses public spaces of visible poverty. And it provides services to the poor. Within this framework, governmental and non-governmental actors deploy various, often ambivalent (DeVerteuil, 2006) measures including supportive ones such as health and human services and homeless shelters and punitive ones such as citation and incarceration as punishment for violating quality of life laws.

Denver’s camping ban can read as a revanchist measure. However, we see it as a facet of Denver’s regime of poverty management. A long-standing urge to care (Cloke et al., 2005) in the city has produced a web of services and facilities to improve the lives of people living on Denver’s streets. In fact, service provision served as our doorway into homelessness in Denver. We contacted all and interviewed most of our informants at a harm reduction center. Harm reduction is a configuration of care and control aimed at removing not exacerbating stigma (Evans, 2012). These facilities are vital in not only sustaining life but also preventing survivalist crime in other contexts (Johnsen et al., 2005). We learned that multiple interacting contexts (Marr, 2012) of shelters, day centers, harm reduction facilities are central to the quotidian and extraordinary experiences of Denver’s homeless population. These interacting contexts dramatically shift the geographies of homelessness (cf. Takahashi, 1998). The circulation of homeless people through a web of service spaces and homeless shelters removes them from other economically and socially activated spaces such as retail corridors and public parks. This closed system of poverty management works to conceal structural problems in Denver’s economy, such as a chronic shortage of affordable housing (cf. Desmond, 2016), behind a veil of benevolent service provision.

This article pivots on relationships to people and to place. Poverty management dramatically alters the dynamics of power relationships between homeless people and care providers. To receive assistance, homeless people must behave in certain ways, often simultaneously disavowing personal autonomy and other claims of self-reliance. Most cities in the Global North incorporate some or all aspects of the poverty management paradigm and thus micromanage the daily lives of their homeless citizens. Scotland proves a rare case: there homeless people have a legal rights to housing. Articulating claims to welfare against the state, instead of relying on assistance from the state, can produce surprising outcomes. Beth Watts argues that legal rights to welfare work to empower people who are homeless (Watts, 2014). Watts contrasts the empowerment of the unhoused in Scotland who demand their right to housing, to undomiciled Irish citizens, who must forego such overt acts of autonomy in order to receive housing assistance. Isaiah Berlin (2002 [1958]) strongly argued that depriving people of autonomy renders them not only unfree but as what he termed human material, which benevolent reformers can mold to their purposes. Extending this philosophical insight, we argue that because poverty management is often wound up with the coercive power of service provision, it reduces autonomy and therefore forestalls homeless individuals’ relationships to people and to place.

Wolch and Dear (1993) insist that the history of poverty and homelessness is a ‘tangled tale of contempt, pity, and blank disregard.’ They also argue that some policy makers deliberately manipulate the spatial distribution of services not only to heighten the vulnerability of people who are homeless but also to reduce their quality of life (Wolch and Dear, 1993). Extending this insight, we argue that Denver menaces people living on the street with spatiotemporal confinement. After presenting our methods, we more fully theorize this sequestration process. Then we identify three types of hegemonic control – dispersal, concentration, and concealment – which the City of Denver uses to construct its spatiotemporal camps.

Methods

We knit our theoretical exploration together with the voices of Denver’s homeless residents. We agree with Fairbanks, who insists that ethnography is a particularly powerful methodology for the investigation of city governmentality (Fairbanks, 2012). By considering the real lives of people and the actual regulation of urban space, our spatial ethnography (cf. Kim, 2015) is neither deductive nor inductive: it is abductive. An abductive research logic centers on the modification of theory so as to better explain gaps in conceptual systems (Agar, 1996). In the field, we used a rapid ethnographic approach, which facilitates the triangulation between archival research methods and ethnographic techniques (for a description, see Low, 1981; for its use in studying public space, see Low et al., 2005). Fusing these perspectives, we permit theory to frame our inquiry while the voices of our participants guide it.

We garnered much contextual information using archival methods – news media reportage, blogs, and legal archives. We incorporated viewpoints from city officials in the departments of Parks and Recreation, Police, Public Works, Zoning, and Transportation, as well as from city councilors. The perspective we privileged however was that of the street. This viewpoint allowed us to deconstruct manifold dialectical relationships between structural conditions and individual behavior. Sources of data include field notes, informal conversations with informants, camp visits, guided walking tours outlining the microgeographies and mobilities of homelessness, and written records of neighborhood and city council meetings.

This study extends Robinson’s (2013) work on the criminalization of Denver’s homeless residents, and is nested within ongoing ethnographic research in Denver, including previous work on public spaces and homelessness (Langegger, 2016; Langegger and Koester, 2016a, 2016b), and research among the city’s injection drug using population (Al-Tayyib et al., 2017; Koester and Langegger, 2015). Our primary source of data was in-depth interviews with 20 homeless injection drug users. The ages of participants ranged from 20 to 58. Using an intensive case sampling plan (Trotter, 2012) we recruited participants through the Harm Reduction Action Center, a community-based organization that offers services to Denver’s drug using population. The participants were diverse in terms of ethnicity and gender. All of our participants gave verbal consent. Our respective universities’ institutional review boards approved this research. Most of our fieldwork was carried out during the summers of 2012 and 2013, and for one month in early 2014. We conducted interviews with homeless people in tandem. This non-traditional approach enabled us to integrate the perspectives of our respective disciplines, and also encouraged an iterative and cooperative process of data analysis. Our cross-disciplinary perspectives on human praxis and its spatial patterning were complementary, and created interview environments which encouraged multiple-participant input and elicited in-depth responses. Finally, our familiarity with Denver and its homeless population allowed us to achieve a significant degree of empirical depth.

Social production of home

Homelessness is routinely lambasted as a personal problem, isolated in an underclass comprising lazy, insolent, and, in all likelihood, pathetic people (Kusmer, 2002; Wacquant, 2009). Walby and Lippert (2011) note that municipal codes aid in the social construction of the pathos of homelessness by stripping people living on the street of the full status of legal citizenship. Domiciled people safely reside within boundaries of permanent structures and private property; undomiciled people exist outside of both. What is more, mainstream media reportage contributes to the removal of homeless people from the social body, by portraying them as uncomfortably visible archetypes of unmotivated economic failure, as persons of questionable morals and irrational impulses, and as individuals lacking basic skills of self-governance. Emerging from these tropes, most service provision does little more than afford a stigmatizing corrective (Hopper, 1990, 2003). Rather than a result of personal problems and motivational shortcomings, we understand lacking a home as a component of a common social problem, poverty. In fact most critical scholars insist that homelessness is a core liability built into ‘flexible’ labor markets (Harvey, 2005, 2006), neoliberal urban policy (Wolch and Dear, 1993), and speculation-driven real estate markets (Smith, 1996).

The poor face extreme challenges in securing access to a home. This simple economic truth begs a philosophical question: what is a home? Is it a refuge, an architectural phenomenon, a social space, a personal feeling, a state of being in the world, or is it simply a vague sense of familiarity (Mallett, 2004)? Veness (1993) reminds us that unhoused people attempt to remain active in producing and reproducing their personal worlds. They use symbols, space, language, and routinized behaviors to define place and thus encase themselves within familiar space. In these terms, the homes of the unhoused align with Bachelard’s (1964) notion of a home as a series of possessed things and spaces ingrained, through continual practice, with layers of meaning. A home is produced through relations to people and to place.

Evictions destroy homes (cf. Desmond, 2016). Porteous and Smith’s (2001) term domicide –the deliberate destruction of another person’s home – provides a pertinent frame. Attachments to place run deep; therefore, the willful destruction of places imbued with personal meaning deeply wounds one’s sense of self (Porteous and Smith, 2001). And it disables routines of self-actualization. Life detached from meaningful places is analogous to feeling permanently out of place (Duyvendak, 2011). Our respondents Chloe and Laine, a homeless couple in their twenties, help us imagine where home is and what going there feels like to people dwelling in publicly accessible space:

We have a tent by the river, hidden in the brush, all our blankets and our stuff. It’s a home to go to. So we go home and there’s a bed already set up and a place to rest and we have an iPad so we’ll watch movies at night. Our place has a homey feel to it. (Laine)

Yeah! We’ll watch movies, and it’s really nice. Because we’ve been through so much, our definition of home has changed. We’ve learned to adapt. Home is where we’re together. (Chloe)

Chloe and Laine are often able to maintain a camp after the ban, in large measure due to the fact that they keep it clean and maintain amicable relationships with city employees that produce fragile but effective property rights (Langegger, 2016). By and large, most people living on Denver’s streets have been evicted from campsites and have seen their camps destroyed. Without a place to pause, they must move on. ‘After the ban,’ Ernie points out, ‘you’re technically loitering anywhere you sit down, so you just gotta keep on moving.’ To the human geographer Yi Fu Tuan (1977), the social and personal emptiness of space becomes a place when humans pause long enough to attach meaning to matter arrayed in space. In other words, relations to place, essential to the production of home, require pausing, not moving. After describing his eviction from an encampment he shared with a friend by the Platte River near the railroad tracks under the interstate, John laments, ‘I feel more homeless after the ban. [Being alone] is hard as hell!’ Roxanne helps us understand the practicalities of an uprooted existence, ‘Yeah it takes endurance. It does matter. A camp makes a difference. You don’t have to roll up and carry your stuff around with you.’ Constantly uprooted, marked with visible stigmata like backpacks or shopping carts stuffed full of possessions (cf. Langegger and Koester, 2016b), homeless people are conveyed from normal, anonymous humanity toward a spatiotemporal camp that both reduces their autonomy and contains them in a state of perpetual motion.

Berlin (2002 [1958]) insists that when social reformers deny people autonomy they treat sentient humans as vacant objects. Using the terms animalization and homo sacer, the philosopher Giorgio Agamben (1998) extends this insight to state governance. Following Agamben, relationships are central to humanity; when the state deprives citizens of the ability to form and maintain relationships, it fails to recognize them as fully human. During the Holocaust, this process was overt. Other times, as we claim is the case with poverty management, it is less easy to discern. We uncovered two types of relationships that people living on Denver’s streets struggle to maintain: relationships directed toward material arrayed in space, and relationships that constitute social networks. We suggest that the disablement of these relationships is how the city threatens to produce the bare life of homo sacer. We conceptualize this production process in two steps. First, people are moved to an indistinct zone, a camp, outside the envelope of society. According to Agamben, a full member of human society only faces and never enters the open (Agamben, 2004), the pure space of this indistinct zone; whereas this camp envelopes social outcasts. The second element of the production of bare life hinges on a profound lack of relationships. Unable to escape the stigmatization of homelessness, undomiciled people often find themselves isolated from society. Extending Heidegger’s notion of Dasein, Agamben insists ‘the stone is worldless [weltlos]; the animal poor in the world [weltarm]; man [sic] is world-forming [weltbindend]’ (Agamben, 2004: 51). Fully autonomous humans perceive and consider environmental stimuli then act, whereas bare life is forced to react to stimuli. Put another way, the domiciled create and relate to homes, while the undomiciled behave in a spatiotemporal camp. At the core of human agency lies autonomy. It follows that considering humans as bereft of autonomy conceptually reduces them to something less than human. This lies at the core of the stigmatizing concept of homo sacer. The state produces governable categories like the citizen, the foreigner, and the outcast. Embodied bare life, homo sacer – a term deriving from Roman legal code, literally ‘sacred man,’ but having in Latin the double meaning of ‘hallowed’ or ‘accursed,’ that is, outcast and beyond the bounds of society – must be considered a product of state violence (Agamben, 1998, 2004).

Sometimes cities ignore their outcast residents. Mitchell (2003) contends that urban governance has moved beyond ‘malign neglect’ (Wolch and Dear, 1993) toward the post-justice city that is marked by an escalation of disciplinary measures that render it near impossible for people without homes to survive without breaking the law. In describing the coordinated cleaning of homelessness from public space, critical scholars and homeless advocates use concepts like criminalization (NLCHP, 2014), punishing the poor (Wacquant, 2009), and even genocide (Mitchell, 1997). Divested of relationships, people living on the streets are at increased risk of confinement in a spatiotemporal camp. This divestment disrupts hygiene routines and consequently deprives the undomiciled of anonymity in public space (Langegger and Koester, 2016b). Poverty management measures that deprive people of relationships to other people and to place tend to be difficult to discern because they are components of fractionalized municipal governance (Langegger and Koester, 2016a). Poverty management measures span land use management, property development, public works and code enforcement, as well as the criminal justice system. Further splintering this system is the fact that city offices are staffed by a variety of different players, some elected and some not, with separate budgets and separate agendas (cf. Wasserman and Clair, 2009). A necessary background to this invisible progression from anonymous and autonomous citizenship to marked and confined bare life is an unprotesting general public, normalized to rationales for segregating poverty. Matheiu (1993) identifies a theater of repression, regnant in the United States since the 1980s, that works to normalize the separation of the extremely poor from the social body. We suggest that the spatiotemporal camp, by casting people without homes as hapless individuals who are necessarily reliant on paternalistic regimes of discipline, is a component of this theater of repression.

The spatiotemporal camp

Fundamental to the separation of homeless people from the social body is a vital first step in the social production of the spatiotemporal camp. According to Agamben, stripping them of autonomy moves people toward the open (Agamben, 2004) – an ontological vacuum, an indistinct nowhere without the no – in a space wherein relationships to other people and to places prove difficult. Thus, by depriving people of relationships Denver abandons its homeless population to the threat of bare life. John, homeless for many years and diagnosed as schizophrenic, deeply experiences this frightening dynamic each day. At one point in our interview he turned towards us and asked, ‘What are you going to do, throw me away?’ After rendering the poor as an expression of bare life, we see the production of the spatiotemporal camp as continuing in three stages. First, undomiciled people are dispersed within the urban fabric. Then Denver concentrates them. Finally, various interrelated attempts are made to secret away the uncomfortable truth of embodied poverty.

Bauman (2000) sees estrangement as the core function of spatial segregation, insisting that social processes reduce, dilute, and compress the view of the Other, rendering abnormality unassimilable. It follows that repulsion distances the spatiotemporal camp from most of the geographies of normal society. Spatiotemporal camps are fluid time–spaces that are both separate from normal society and marked by perfect hegemonic control. They arise in lockstep with the diurnal rhythms of service provision. Both formal and informal enforcement of the camping ban forces people living on the streets into lives of constant motion and consequently works to stigmatize them as abnormal, deracinated, and therefore unassimilable. By severely limiting the possibilities for a person living on the street to maintain social networks and attachments to place, Denver immures that person in a camp without walls, one territorialized by dispersal, concentration, and concealment.

Evictions destroy relations to place. By purging all potential for the social and psychological envelope of home, domicide aides and abets the production of the spatiotemporal camp. When we first interviewed Roxanne at a fast food restaurant, we bought her a cup of coffee, she thanked us, smirked and said: ‘If this was before the ban, I’d have invited you to my place for coffee; we’d be sitting around the fire.’ Before May 2012, she shared her camp with four people who all chipped in furniture and household items to make their home, as she said, ‘really really nice, comfy actually.’ The unhoused people in Denver we got to know understand that the opposite of homelessness is not shelter but home (cf. Hopper, 2003). In other words, protection from the elements is necessary but not sufficient to make a home. By extension, shuttling people into homeless shelters does nothing to combat homelessness. Undomiciled people do not merely survive on the streets; they maintain homes there (Wasserman and Clair, 2009). These homes facilitate hygiene routines, anchor social networks, and provide a sheath, ‘which in [its] familiarity protect[s] human being[s] from the outside world’ (cf. Tuan, 1990: 99). Socially produced, homes anchor personhood; they are Dasein, being-in-the-world (Heidegger, 2001); they are poetics of place attachment (Bachelard, 1964); they are not empirical facts. Home/homeless is therefore an artificial dichotomy. A central problem with a definition of homelessness that is constructed around legal tenancy is that it ignores relationships to people and attachments to place. The camping ban destroys homes by weakening relationships of mutual reciprocity and dislocating people from places fraught with meaning (Langegger, 2016). Freed from a legal definition of home, we can understand the homes of the homeless as people, things, and spaces woven together by human agency.

Ernie, homeless for six years, identifies a crucial consequence of the camping ban, saying, ‘People are reducing the stuff they got because they got to be ready to move at any time.’ His words demonstrate that the ban works to disable humanizing relationships. The camping ban exacerbates drift (Ferrell, 2012), by casting people and populations adrift, dislocating them from residential stability and depriving them of the spatial and social orientation provided by familiar places and unsurprising destinations. Rootlessness renders daily life extremely challenging for those, like John, who now must lug all his belongings around the city, including one he was particularly fond of: a tiny yet functional fountain – which he says is ‘a reminder of the creek near [his] childhood home in rural North Carolina.’ All of our informants indicated that having a permanent camp contributed to making them feel more whole. By simply arranging practical and decorative things in their camps, by tidying up their campsites, and by inviting people to come by, they felt attached to their personal histories and fully present in the here and now. They spatially expressed self-reliance and autonomy.

Forcing people to continually move on attenuates personal relationships. In important ways this debilitating process mirrors the mid-twentieth century elimination of skid rows, along with the institutions which served as centers of communication networks among the poor (Kusmer, 2002). Dordick (1997) argues that homeless encampments are not merely stations but constitute lifeworlds unto themselves, powerfully structuring subsistence patterns and survival strategies. Our informants insist that a permanent camp is more than a place of survival and subsistence; for them sharing space strengthens interpersonal bonds. Relationships, some amicable, others antagonistic, influenced their lifeworlds. Relationships frustrated and facilitated safer drug use, how they shared camp space, worked out disputes, and earned trust. In reminiscing about their now-destroyed campsites, all of our informants insisted that these places proffered networks of aid, labor, sharing, and commiseration.

Hannah Arendt’s (1998) definition of a refugee is a person bereft of specific relationships to a nation, a state, and often to humanity. Following a similar dynamic, the break-up of homeless encampments in Denver effectively produced a type of internal refugee in the city. Grounded in relatively stable camps, survival strategies, including not only food and shelter but also safely using street drugs, revolved around relationships and social networks. Deprived of the stability of a camp and an in-place social network, the pivot point of survival on the street is now often simply avoiding being disciplined as an individual. Understanding the current disadvantage of relying on groups, Ronnie, a homeless veteran, shares, ‘[Now] I try to stay away from other homeless people. I try to stay by myself.’ Ernie recalls ‘small groups of people used to settle in camps with hotplates, televisions and tents.’ He shows that a direct consequence of the disruption of such comfortable, convivial group-based encampments is numbers of refugees looking for a hidden place to sleep. If the police show up, he adds, ‘you just roll up your one bag and get out of there.’

Dispersal, concentration, and concealment

Before shelters, outreach offices and soup kitchens located in skid rows served as refuges for the extremely poor (Hopper, 2003; Kusmer, 2002; Robinson, 2013; Wasserman and Clair, 2010). Single room occupancy (SRO) hotels provided affordable shelter, and proximal industrial districts offered day labor opportunities (Blomley, 2004). Wolch and DeVerteuil (2001) argue that ‘poverty management’ is a bundle of spatiotemporal arrangements designed to purify urban space and therefore ensure profitability in gentrifying downtown and industrial districts. The relocation of visibly poor people away from these areas works to prime real estate speculation. In Denver the implementation of poverty management measures, such as a geographically specific sit-lie ordinance, city-wide park curfews, and the spatial clustering of homeless shelters coincided with downtown development: the pedestrianization of Denver’s 16th Street Mall (Jones and Foust, 2008), the condominiumization of Downtown Denver’s SRO hotels (Robinson, 2013), and the gentrification of Lower Downtown Denver (Weiler, 2000).

Dispersal as a form of spatial regulation creates splintered temporal geographies that hide homelessness from the general public (Murphy, 2009). This approach to spatial discipline does not aim to secure prosecution. Instead, the goal is simply dispersal from the present. Dispersal-policing of parks and tourist zones has been noted to target specific times of the day and night (Walby and Lippert, 2011). From the perspective of a person living on the street, the city splinters into punitive barbs of space and time, fragmenting chances to assemble a cohesive survival strategy (Marr et al., 2009). Similarly, Mitchell (2005) suggests the goal of panhandling laws is not to prevent intimidation or assault – which are already illegal – but rather to create time–spaces in which the non-indigent can move unhindered, according to diurnal patterns of work and consumption. We suggest that the first stage of the production of spatiotemporal camps is this dispersal mechanism, a mechanism which serves to confine people in constant motion and render them more reliant on social services.³

To preemptively enforce the camping ban, Denver police officers sometimes admonish groups of homeless people gathered in public spaces during specific times, notably weekends and weekday afternoons. The typical result of this type of spatiotemporal discipline is for the group to break up and move on. This type of spatial discipline cannot be considered a simple matter of Euclidian cartography. For the undomiciled, preemptive enforcement of the camping ban fractures the city into multiple time–spaces. In constant motion, individuals are robbed of stable relationships to place, to things, and to people. They are compelled to react to constantly transforming spatial and temporal boundaries instead of being free to shape stable personal spaces. The ban ultimately fixes people living on the street not in space but in mobility (cf. Jackson, 2012). During our time in the field, very few people had been cited for camping; the city simply used the threat of citation as a means of dispersing people who had paused to rest, sleep, or socialize in public space.

Because enforcement of the ban compels either continual mobility or sporadic confinement in shelters or transitional housing, it must be considered as a biopolitical tool (cf. Williams, 2011). For many, autonomy eclipses the promised safety of shelters. This can be dangerous. ‘A lot of people are risking their ass so they don’t get seen,’ remarked Benny when we asked him how people avoid being admonished for camping. Some people living on Denver’s streets are working their way deeper into abandoned buildings, closer to busy railroads, and further from health and human service providers. Mason says that after what can be a day-long search, ‘I eventually find a place where they can’t see me and I try to sleep.’ John shares, ‘Whenever I can’t go no more, I just find me a somewhere to tuck under a bush, where I think nobody will fuck with me through the night. I’ll just lay my blanket out and go to sleep.’

A salient theme in our findings was continual movement as a rational response to the camping ban. For George it is a constant struggle to figure out where he can be and when he can be there: he says, ‘Yeah it’s hard to figure out, even imagine, where I’m going to stay every night, because there are so many [people] saying today I can’t be here, or tomorrow I can’t be there.’ Constant motion proves key: according to Mason, ‘As long as you stay moving in Denver, the cops don’t really mess with you unless you’re doing something really shady. So you can be walking around at three or four in the morning and no one messes with you.’ Most of our informants came to this realization after repeatedly being made to move on by police. Such structural violence is invisible until enforcement protocols make it manifest. Roxanne’s quote below is indicative of how homeless people experienced the unveiling of complex boundaries of the spatiotemporal camp, as Denver began enforcing the camping ban:

I tried to find a spot under the Sixth Avenue Bridge where I could put up my tent. They left me a note, saying I got to move. So I moved up the bridge, by Father Woody’s [a homeless day shelter]. I stay close to coffee and a shower. They left me another note. I’m like, where the fuck do you want me to move? So now I don’t bother with a tent.

After destroying the campsites of most of our informants, the city kept them moving. Benny shares an experience which demonstrates the aim of this spatial discipline – constant motion, rather than citation:

A cop wakes me up the other night and says, ‘I want to make sure you haven’t been told not to be in this alley.’ She goes to her cruiser, runs my name, sees I have a warrant for drug court and says, ‘I don’t care about that right now. If I find out that you’re in this alley again, you will be arrested for trespassing.’

Some people living on the streets, even those addicted to heroin – an opiate – are chemically fueling Denver’s mandate of mobility with methamphetamine (meth), a powerful stimulant. Though we can make no claim to a measurable increase in the use of meth, many of our informants talked about its increased use as a matter of course, a rational response to incessant demands to move on. Benny jokes, ‘Back when they started talking about the camping ban, I was like, Wow are they promoting meth use? Yeah that’ll do ya pretty good! [With meth] I can get around the sleeping ban, [smirking] uh, I mean the camping ban.’ Mason insists, ‘I know a lot of people, who if they don’t have somewhere to stay [would] just as soon get some meth and stay up all night.’ For some, this choice limits their interaction with police officers. For others, like Lisa, it is a matter of survival in an environment increasingly bereft of legal and safe places to sleep:

I’m scared to fall asleep, for me I have to stay up, go faster. Even without methamphetamine, you should be an insomniac and just keep moving. Logically, I want to be awake all night. I will be faster. I will be on my game. I won’t fall asleep. Morning will roll around.

As Sheri sees it:

[The camping ban] is why a lot of people do meth. They spend all day making money to buy it because they know they have to keep moving at night. Taking meth is a way to stay safe; it’s necessary because, there are so few places where people can sleep.

Continuing, she helps us understand the creeping panic that sets in for those unable to find a well-hidden crack in the city (cf. Loukaitou-Sideris, 1996):

There’s not enough room, so everyone is fighting for that small, safe area. The rest of us are stuck wandering and running, trying to find another safe area or trying to get into a hotel room. We’re all fighting for drugs, because that’s the only way to keep from getting [figuratively] eaten by wolves or arrested.

Already dispersing the unhoused from public view, how does the enforcement of the ban also concentrate them? To gain insight into this dynamic, we need look no further than the lines extending down sidewalks from homeless shelters and social service providers. A consequence of this unrelenting mobility is that people without homes are continually de-concentrated from areas of privilege and concentrated near service providers and in lines extending from shelters. Neither the people walking or driving by these lines nor the people waiting in them are outwardly happy to encounter homelessness writ large. Nonetheless, this type of concentration is perhaps the most visible facet of homelessness in modern society. Not only do such lines concentrate homelessness, they homogenize it into a mass of indiscernible, anonymous individuals who are reliant on social services.

Each of our informants claimed that homeless shelters typically diminish autonomy. As we argued above, autonomy is central to the production of a home. Sometimes shelters erode autonomy by obligating saccharine politeness. Although prohibitions of loud music, conversation, smoking or drinking work to create livability in the cramped quarters of homeless shelters, they necessarily reduce the self-sovereignty of the residents. Sometimes enforcing temporal rules erases independent choice. For example, many shelters lock their doors at 9:00 p.m., then open them and shepherd everyone to the street at 5:00 a.m. the next morning. Finally, because religious institutions operate many shelters, self-rule can be weakened by the ecclesiastical mandate that residents say grace before meals. The treatment of unhoused adults as truant children, or as morally or physically weak, positions homeless shelters among institutions which operate based on patronizing ideals of magnanimity (Wasserman and Clair, 2009). However, it is self-evident that scripting the minutiae of adults’ lives does little to empower them as agents in control of their destinies. Consequently our informants generally avoid shelters as a matter of principle. And they understand that residing in –and, it tends to follow, belonging to shelters – proves a formidable identity marker (cf. Hopper, 2003) and therefore a key component of territorial stigmatization (Wacquant, 2007; Wacquant et al., 2014).

Also spaces of concentration, transitional housing can seem more like a prison than a home. Reporting on the CAAP program in San Francisco – a SRO conversion project with the aim of providing housing for the poor – Murphy (2009) notes high levels of surveillance and restrictions on overnight guests along with unannounced unit searches and intrusive inspections of personal property. Ernie, one of our informants who is long accustomed to housing choices available to the poor in Denver, reports a similar thicket of restrictions in local YMCA transitional housing units. He says, ‘You have to be out at a certain time, you have to be responsible for doing certain chores at certain times.’ He further asserts, ‘If I’m paying rent somewhere, then I’ll clean my room when I want to. And I don’t want to earn visitation time and have someone tell me how many people I can have visit me.’ For Ernie the choice is clear: avoid places where autonomy is limited.

Our informants generally consider homeless shelters to be a last resort where they might seek refuge from exceptional situations like extreme cold, blizzards, and thunderstorms. Roxanne recalled seeking a shelter bed during a blizzard and being told, with indifference, ‘You’re number 76.’ To her, to be labeled and treated numerically is ‘not even corporate; it’s robotic. It’s like they don’t care about you one bit. They just move you in at night and move you out in the morning.’ Mason describes the time required to secure a spot in a shelter: ‘It’s miserable. You have to stand in line for hours just to do a raffle. Then, there’s a chance you might not even get in.’ Chloe and Laine avoid shelters for a simple reason: none allow couples. Recall, for them, home is where they are together. Furthermore, Chloe bristles at memories of carceral geographies within shelters, commenting that ‘they seem like jails.’ Ernie and Max point out the patronizing and draconian temporalities of shelters. Ernie describes the regimentation shelters insist upon, ‘You got to be in at a certain time, out at a certain time.’ Max explains the consequences of tardiness, ‘There were times that I got pushed away just because I was a half an hour late, and I had to stay outside in the rain or snow anyway.’

Adjectives like ‘nasty,’ ‘disgusting,’ and ‘filthy,’ phrases like ‘bed bugs’ and ‘body odor’ and verbs like ‘molested,’ ‘attacked,’ and ‘robbed’ peppered our informants’ descriptions of shelter spaces. Clearly, for the segment of the homeless population we had access to – who were generally streetwise injection drug users – shelters are places to steer clear of. Confirming our notion of the spatiotemporal camp, our informants bristled as they recounted the loss of autonomy their shelter experiences entailed, strongly indicating they would rather actively interact with their environment than passively react to it. Charlie insists, ‘I’d rather stay on the streets instead of going into a shelter, where at least I have the freedom to get up, smoke a cigarette or grab a bite to eat. [In shelters] when the doors close at 9:00, you’re done. You can’t do anything but sit around or try to sleep.’ Ernie prefers the autonomy of the street to the questionable safety of shelters. He would rather strategize his way through potentially dangerous urban spaces, than be confined and passive within an often equally dangerous institutional environment:

Once I figured it out, how to live on the streets, I found that it is actually easier, better, and safer to be out here than it is in a shelter. You don’t need to deal with all the different idiots who end up in shelters. Sure anyone could sneak through the alley and attack you, but when you’re in a shelter, you’re in with all sorts of people, checking out your things, planning on how to steal them from you.

In addition to depriving the homeless of autonomy, municipal policies that foreground temporarily sheltering homeless people effectively concentrate poverty in and around institutions. Regardless of political or charitable motivations, homeless shelters remain premised on the theory of the bum (Hopper, 2003). Reformation of ‘bums’ propels shelters as viable policy mechanisms, which depend upon complex bureaucracies and funding channels, which in turn rely and are sustained by a broadly-construed perspective of homelessness as a curable disease (Hopper, 1990, 2003; Wasserman and Clair, 2009). This judgmental theoretical context leads inevitably to the praxis of treating clients in paternalistic ways, and justifying the frequently deplorable conditions in shelters (Hopper, 2003).

Though tiny, Downtown Denver’s Triangle Parks were notorious. Comprising five triangular shaped pockets, these parks are strung along Broadway as it cuts through the offset grid of Downtown Denver. During our fieldwork, many people gathered daily in the largest triangle park where Lawrence Street meets Park Avenue, waiting for social service assistance or a shelter bed from the Denver Rescue Mission, the Samaritan House, Saint Francis Center, or the Colorado Coalition for the Homeless (see Figure 1). This spatial concentration of people served to provide data for two contradictory outreach initiatives. First, for service providers, it concentrated those in need or social services in a delimited geographical context, allowing for quick surveillance and effective triage. Second, it illuminated the blight of homelessness on spaces being primed for development.

Figure 1.

Northern LoDo (Lower Downtown) Denver. Parks represented as shaded areas.

For the latter group, concealment is key. A locked shelter does an excellent job of screening society’s outcast poor from public view. Esthetics, always a key component of urban design and architecture, serves as an organizing principle in concealment strategies. To illustrate, during the public hearings debating Denver’s camping ban, proponents of the ban described homelessness in terms of ‘a stain’ on the city, frequently claiming that visible homelessness negatively impacts Denver’s economically important, historically significant, and architecturally notable places of business. Esthetic language can also be dehumanizing. In illustration, Denver’s news media often use the allusion to an unsightly blemish when describing the homeless throng gathered in Triangle Park. Deverteuil’s (2006) work in Los Angeles shows how cities faced with similar esthetic crises use flashy architecture to obscure the warehousing purpose of homeless shelters.

Currently, the Lawrence Street Community Center (located within the Denver Rescue Mission), sited directly across from Triangle Park near Coors Field Baseball Stadium in the gentrifying Ballpark neighborhood, serves as a brand new example of esthetic concealment (see Figure 1). Though it faced early opposition from the Ballpark Neighborhood Association (BNA), the city’s zoning board approved the project in November 2014. Construction began January 2015 on this expansion of the Denver Rescue Mission. It was completed in October 2015. Using similarly colored bricks and façade features the Lawrence Street Center seamlessly blends with the surrounding built environment. By providing toilets, showers, food, and counseling, this facility itself serves many needs of individuals living on the streets. One of its architectural features is notable. Though much of the facility is dedicated to an outdoor, park-like space complete with landscaping and outdoor furniture, this space is completely enclosed by a solid 10-foot wall. This logic of concealment hinges on ‘get[ting] men who are waiting for a nightly stay at the Denver Rescue Mission off of the sidewalks’ and protecting them from ‘drug dealers and from becoming prey to streetwise predators’ (Op-ed, 2014). In response, the BNA insists that a wall ‘hides instead of solves homelessness.’ Ironically, the neighborhood association’s language mirrors the central theme of this article: instead of attending to the structural causes of homelessness or providing permanent affordable housing, the Lawrence Street Community Center moves homeless men temporarily off the street into a camp, a space of perfect control, that is out of the sight-lines of a public trying hard to ignore the reality of poverty in its midst. In other words, while this new community center offers privacy to those waiting for services, it also serves as a component of Denver’s spatiotemporal camp.

Discussion

Though this study is limited by geography – downtown Denver – by scope – a spatial ethnography involving 20 in-depth interviews – and by our informants’ lifeworlds – streetwise and homeless injection drug users – we feel that it proffers important insight into how Denver deprives homeless people of many opportunities and even the capacity to relate to social and physical environments. Compelling homeless people to constantly move on, Denver’s camping ban fixes the city’s homeless problem in mobility. We conceptualize this permanent motion as the spatiotemporal camp. Neither a time nor a place, the spatiotemporal camp is a process comprised of four stages, the first of which is the vilification of visible poverty. Thus stigmatized, people without homes come to be viewed as pathetic people who are incapable of looking after themselves. Then, as part of the purification of urban space, concerted eviction from and destruction of homeless camps disperse homeless people throughout the city. Denver then visibly concentrates its indigent so that the enormity of the problem can be ascertained, triaged, and attended to. Finally, poverty management measures secrete away visible signs of poverty in day shelters, overnight shelters, and transitional housing.

Comfortably distanced from outward signs of homelessness, society can blithely ignore poverty. The dispersal of homeless camps purifies prime urban space. It incapacitates people dwelling in public from relating to other humans and to home territories. It recasts them as the wretched of the earth and hurls them into an urban world devoid of humanizing relationships. Faced with a police force charged with moving them on, many undomiciled people may be fueling this endless journey with methamphetamine. The components of the spatiotemporal camp form a vicious circle that authenticates homelessness as a problem of individual deviance, addiction, or mental illness. The concentration and concealment of the pathos of homelessness in a carceral archipelago of shelters prevents mainstream recognition of extreme poverty as a society-wide phenomenon. The removal of the miseries of poverty from public sight-lines enables a collective turning away from suffering. The spatiotemporal camp inculcates the habit of ignoring poverty. Emergency shelters and transitional housing do their part in cultivating this habit. Behavioral theories of causation contribute to this pattern by defining and treating homelessness as a ‘condition’ of disaffiliation from the usual ties that bind persons to society. All contribute to the slippery slope poor people continually risk, toward the untouchable-caste status of homo sacer. Only by first recognizing the spatiotemporal camp can we work toward understanding how it functions and then determine ways to dismantle it. Our exploratory study raises many questions. How does domicide affect the undomiciled? How do moral economies of the homeless operate? How do quality of life laws affect the social structure of street life? What is the nature of the relationship between visible poverty and public opinion of the impoverished? Is there a causal link between an increase in methamphetamine use and quality of life laws? There is much conceptual, empirical, and practical work to be done to this end; we hope that this article will contribute to this important project.

Footnotes

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Notes

Author biographies

Sig Langegger is an assistant professor of geography at Akita International University in Japan. His work examines the spatial conditions that affect people’s lives and the urban plans and policies producing these conditions. Sig researches public space, social and environmental justice, gentrification, as well as the moral geographies and moral economies of homelessness.

Stephen Koester is a professor in the Departments of Anthropology and Health and Behavioral Sciences at the University of Colorado Denver. His work examines the structural conditions that affect people’s lives and their responses to these conditions. Steve researches issues related to public health and the intersection of health and environment.

References

Agamben

(1998) Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Agamben

(2004) The Open. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Agar

(1996) The Professional Stranger: An Informal Introduction to Ethnography, 2nd edn. New York: Academic Press.

Al-Tayyib

Koester

Langegger

Raville

(2017) Heroin and methamphetamine injection: An emerging drug use pattern. Substance Use & Misuse. Epub ahead of print 21 March 2017. DOI: 10.1080/10826084.2016.1271432.

Arendt

(1998) The Human Condition, 2nd edn. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Bachelard

(1964) The Poetics of Space, trans. JR Stilgoe. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.

Bauman

(2000) Social issues of law and order. British Journal of Criminology 40: 205–221.

Berlin

(2000 [1958]) Two concepts of liberty. Four Essays on Liberty. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Blomley

(2004) Unsettling the City: Urban Land and the Politics of Propert y. New York: Routledge.

10.

Cloke

Johnsen

May

(2005) Exploring ethos? Discourses of ‘charity’ in the provision of emergency services for homeless people. Environment and Planning A 37(3): 385–402.

11.

Davis

(1992) City of Quartz. New York: Vintage Books.

12.

De Cauter

Dehaene

(2008) The space of play: Towards a theory of heterotopia. In: Dehaene

De Cauter

(eds) Heterotopia and the City: Public Space in a Postcivil Society. New York: Routledge, pp. 87–102.

13.

Desmond

(2016) Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City. New York: Crown Publishers.

14.

DeVerteuil

(2006) The local state and homeless shelters: Beyond revanchism? Cities 23(2): 109–120.

15.

Dordick

(1997) Something Left to Lose: Personal Relations and Survival among New York’s Homeless. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

16.

Duneier

(1999) Sidewalk. New York: Ferrar, Straus and Giroux.

17.

Duyvendak

(2011) The Politics of Home: Belonging and Nostalgia in Europe and the United States. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

18.

Evans

(2012) Supportive measures, enabling restraint: Governing homeless ‘street drinkers’ in Hamilton, Canada. Social and Cultural Geography 13(2): 185–200.

19.

Fairbanks

(2012) On theory and method: Critical ethnographic approaches to urban regulatory restructuring. Urban Geography 33(4): 545–565.

20.

Ferrell

(2012) Anarchy, geography and drift. Antipode 44(5): 1687–1704.

21.

Harvey

(2005) A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

22.

Harvey

(2006) Notes towards a theory of uneven geographical development. Spaces of Global Capitalism: Towards a Theory of Uneven Geographical Development. New York: Verso, pp. 69–116.

23.

Heidegger

(2001) Sein und Zeit. Tuebingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag.

24.

Hopper

(1990) Public shelter as ‘a hybrid institution’: Homeless men in historical perspective. Journal of Social Issues 46(4): 13–29.

25.

Hopper

(2003) Reckoning with Homelessness. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

26.

Jackson

(2012) Fixed in mobility: Young homeless people and the city. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 36(4): 725–741.

27.

Johnsen

Cloke

May

(2005) Day centres for homeless people: Spaces of care or fear? Social and Cultural Geography 6(6): 787–811.

28.

Jones

Foust

(2008) Staging and enforcing consumerism in the city: The performance of othering on the 16th Street Mall. Liminalities 4(1). Available at: http://liminalities.net/4-1/16thstreet.htm

29.

Kim

(2015) Sidewalk City: Remapping Public Space in Ho Chi Minh City. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

30.

Koester

Langegger

(2015) ‘Never be stationary’: Survival drug use in the neoliberal city. In: American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting, Denver, CO.

31.

Kusmer

(2002) Down and Out and on the Road: The Homeless in American History. New York: Oxford University Press.

32.

Langegger

(2016) After the ban: The moral economies of property. Antipode 48(3): 645–664.

33.

Langegger

Koester

(2016a) Dwelling without a home: Denver’s splintered public spaces. In: De Backer

Melgaco

Varna

Menichellil

(eds) Criminology Meets Geography: Order and Conflict in Public Space. New York: Routledge, pp. 140–159.

34.

Langegger

Koester

(2016b) Invisible homelessness: Anonymity, exposure and the right to the city. Urban Geography 37(7): 1030–1048.

35.

Loukaitou-Sideris

(1996) Cracks in the city: Addressing the constraints and potentials of urban design. Journal of Urban Design 1(1): 91–103.

36.

Low

(1981) Social science methods in landscape architecture design. Landscape Planning 8: 137–148.

37.

Low

Taplin

Sheld

(2005) Rethinking Urban Parks: Public Space and Cultural Diversity. Austin: The Texas University Press.

38.

Mallett

(2004) Understanding home: A critical review of the literature. The Sociological Review 52(1): 62–89.

39.

Marr

(2012) Pathways out of homelessness in Los Angeles and Tokyo: Multilevel contexts of limited mobility amid advanced urban marginality. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 36(5): 980–1006.

40.

Marr

DeVerteuil

Snow

(2009) Towards a contextual approach to the place-homeless survival nexus: An exploratory case study of Los Angeles County. Cities 26: 307–317.

41.

Mathieu

(1993) The medicalization of homelessness and the theater of repression. Medical Anthropology Quarterly 7(2): 170–184.

42.

Mitchell

(1997) The annihilation of space by law: The roots and implications of anti-homeless laws in the united states. Antipode 29(3): 303–335.

43.

Mitchell

(2003) The Right to the City: Social Justice and the Fight for Public Space. New York: Guilford Press.

44.

Mitchell

(2005) The S.U.V. model of citizenship: Floating bubbles, buffer zones, and the rise of the ‘purely atomic’ individual. Political Geography 24: 77–100.

45.

Murphy

(2009) ‘Compassionate’ strategies of managing homelessness: Post-revanchist geographies in San Francisco. Antipode 41(2): 305–325.

46.

NLCHP (National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty) (2014) No safe place: The criminalization of homelessness in U.S. cities. Available at: www.sentencingproject.org/detail/publication.cfm?publication_id=170

47.

Op-ed (2014) Day center for Denver homeless is a worthy project. The Denver Post, 3 May.

48.

Porteous

Smith

(2001) Domicide: The Global Destruction of Home. Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press.

49.

Robinson

(2013) The Denver camping ban: A report from the street. Denver Homeless Out Loud. Available at: https://issuu.com/denverhomelessoutloud/docs/surveyreport

50.

Scullion

Somerville

Brown

Morris

(2015) Changing homelessness services: Revanchism, ‘professionalisation’ and resistance. Health and Social Care in the Community 23(4): 419–427.

51.

Sibley

(1995) Geographies of Exclusion: Society and Difference in the West. New York: Routledge.

52.

Smith

(1996) The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City. London: Routledge.

53.

Takahashi

(1998) Homelessness, AIDS, and Stigmatization: The NIMBY Syndrome in the United States at the End of the Twentieth Century. New York: Oxford University Press.

54.

Trotter

(2012) Qualitative research sample design and sample size: Resolving and unresolved issues and inferential imperatives. Preventative Medicine 55(5): 398–400.

55.

Tuan

Y-F

(1977) Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

56.

Tuan

Y-F

(1990) Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes, and Values. New York: Columbia University Press.

57.

Veness

(1993) Neither homed nor homeless: Contested definitions and the personal worlds of the poor. Political Geography 12(4): 319–340.

58.

Wacquant

(1999) Urban marginality in the coming millennium. Urban Studies 36(10): 1639–1647.

59.

Wacquant

(2007) Territorial stigmatization in the age of advanced marginality. Thesis Eleven 91(1): 66–77.

60.

Wacquant

(2009) Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

61.

Wacquant

Slater

Pereira

(2014) Territorial stigmatization in action. Environment and Planning A 46(6): 1270–1280.

62.

Walby

Lippert

(2011) Spatial regulation, dispersal, and the aesthetics of the city: Conservation officer policing of homeless people in Ottowa, Canada. Antipode 44(3): 1015–1033.

63.

Wasserman

Clair

(2009) At Home on the Street: People, Poverty and a Hidden Culture of Homelessness. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner.

64.

Wasserman

Clair

(2010) Housing patterns of homeless people: The ecology of the street in the era of urban renewal. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 40(1): 71–101.

65.

Watts

(2014) Homelessness, empowerment and self-reliance in Scotland and Ireland: The impact of legal rights to housing for homeless people. Journal of Social Policy 43(4): 793–810.

66.

Weiler

(2000) Pioneers and settlers in Lo-Do Denver: Private risk and public benefits in urban redevelopment. Urban Studies 37(1): 167–179.

67.

Williams

(2011) The Politics of Sleep: Governing (Un)consciousness in the Late Modern Age. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

68.

Wolch

Dear

(1993) Malign Neglect: Homelessness in an American City. New York: Jossey-Bass.

69.

Wolch

DeVerteuil

(2001) New landscapes of urban poverty management. In: May

Thrift

(eds) Timespace: Geographies of Temporality. New York: Routledge, pp. 149–168.