This paper explores some of the more extreme tendencies in the management of public space to consider whether current policy directions, in this case in central Scotland, are driven by a desire to ...

Domestication by Cappuccino or a Revenge on Urban Space? Control and Empowerment in the Management of Public Spaces

‘Home’ and ‘homelessness’ serve to define each other at a phenomenological level. For the settled population, homelessness is a source of fascination and repulsion, an embodiment of their fears (of poverty and alienation) and their dreams (of freedom and simplicity). The ‘unaccommodated woman’ in particular is an aberration and a contradiction in terms: the gender renegade who has rejected, or been rejected by, traditional family and domestic structures.

The home has been constructed as a source of identity and as an essential foundation of social order. Such order, however, is based on the experiences of many women of the home as a prison. These ‘homeless-at-home’ women experience abuse, violence and the suppression of self within the supposed safe haven of the domestic home. The article draws on the author’s own ethnographic research with homeless women and men within the Three Cities Project on youth homelessness and crime, and concludes by examining two ways of being homeless: identity work and the management of bodily space.

The Unaccommodated Woman: Home, Homelessness and Identity

This paper examines recent responses to ‘problematic street culture’ in England, where increasing pressure has been exerted to prevent people from begging and street drinking in public spaces, with rough sleeping also targeted in some areas. Drawing upon in-depth interviews with enforcement agents, support providers and targeted individuals, it assesses the extent to which the strategies employed are indicative of a ‘revanchist expulsion’ of the deviant Other and/or an expression of ‘coercive care’ for the vulnerable Other. It concludes that, whilst the recent developments appear, at first glance, to be symptomatic of revanchist sanitisation of public space, closer examination reveals that the situation is actually much more complex than a revanchist reading of the situation might suggest, and perhaps not as devoid of compassion.

Revanchist Sanitisation or Coercive Care? The Use of Enforcement to Combat Begging, Street Drinking and Rough Sleeping in England

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Homelessness and Homeless Policies in Europe: Lessons from Research

The complex mobilities of homeless people in rural England

Street homelessness (and associated activities such as begging) has become a prominent issue in recent years. This article provides a critical commentary on this phenomenon, informed both by theoretical debates concerning social space, and the author's own fieldwork with street homeless people in Manchester (England). An analysis is provided of temporal and spatial ordering of the homelessness circuit; of survival strategies such as shadow work and sleeping rough engaged in by people living in Cardboard City; and of policing responses to street homelessness and begging.

Julia Wardhaugh

Papers

'Homeless in Chinatown' : Deviance and social control in Cardboard City