Urban Geography

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Introduction—Rights, Space, and Homelessness

Fran Klodawsky & Nicholas Blomley

To cite this article: Fran Klodawsky & Nicholas Blomley (2009) Introduction—Rights, Space, and
Homelessness, Urban Geography, 30:6, 573-576, DOI: 10.2747/0272-3638.30.6.573
To link to this article: [Link]

Published online: 16 May 2013.

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Fran Klodawsky1
Department of Geography and Environmental Studies
Carleton University
Ottawa, Ontario, Canada

Nicholas Blomley
Department of Geography
Simon Fraser University
Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada

The articles in this and a subsequent special issue of Urban Geography were first pre-
sented at a series of panels, organized for the 2007 Association of American Geographers
Meeting, on the theme of rights, space, and homelessness. The conference was held at the
Hilton Hotel, located on the edge of San Francisco’s infamous Tenderloin District, but
also close to fashionable Union Square, home to Prada, De Beers, and Gucci. At the fault
line between the city’s public commercial face and a zone of sharp poverty and mass
homelessness, the very geography of the Meeting spoke eloquently to many of the themes
of the presentations.
A right is a privilege or claim to which one is justly entitled. Conversely, to be denied
a right is to be placed at a particular disadvantage, forced to acquiesce to the rights
claimed of others. In liberal societies, rights are notionally universal, applying to all
equally. The reality, of course, is that people are differently positioned in relation to
rights. Homeless men and women—who disproportionately consist of stigmatized and
marginal populations—occupy a highly ambivalent position in relation to rights. On the
one hand, the rights of the homeless (to equal treatment, to security, to expression, to
economic and social entitlements, to health and the like) are routinely abrogated, cur-
tailed, and hedged about. Yet rights can provide a rallying call, either in broad terms (such
as the right to the city, noted by Mitchell and Heynen), or as the basis for analysis in a
more specified sense (including Klodawsky’s appeal to gender-sensitive rights to shelter,
Blomley’s critical unpacking of meanings of property vis-à-vis homelessness, Sylvestre’s
examination of disorder policing, or Sparks’s examination of meanings of privacy). Sim-
ilarly, the Tenderloin provides clear evidence of forms of exclusionary practice, such as
the trespass notices widely posted on commercial premises, in which property rights are
mobilized to provide the police carte blanche to roust the sleeping bodies of the public
poor; yet the neighborhood is also testament to years of creative and engaged organizing

1
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Fran Klodawsky, Department of Geography
and Environmental Studies, Carleton University, 1125 Colonel By Drive, Ottawa, Ontario, K1S 5B6, Canada;
telephone: 613-520-2600, ext. 8689; fax: 613-520-4301; email: fran_klodawsky@[Link]

573
Urban Geography, 2009, 30, 6, pp. 573–576. DOI: 10.2747/0272-3638.30.6.573
Copyright © 2009 by Bellwether Publishing, Ltd. All rights reserved.
574 KLODAWSKY AND BLOMLEY

and activism on behalf of the homeless and marginal, often in the name of equality and
social justice.
Rights can easily appear to be bloodless or rarified abstractions, to be parsed and
policed by jurists. These articles reveal rights at work in the world, deployed and fought
over by real people in real places, whether activists, city merchants, the police, housing
policymakers, academics, or homeless people themselves. Through careful, empirically
grounded accounts, the actual workings of rights are revealed. This includes, importantly,
their institutional and ideological contexts. Several authors appropriately point to the
impacts of neoliberalization on the rights of homeless people. Others, notably Blomley,
underscore the significance of liberalism more generally in relation to similar dynamics.
Rights in this sense have a history. But they also have crucial geographies, being
worked out in, experienced through, and productive of space. The papers variously speak
to these important geographies. Several, such Heyman and Mitchell, and Sparks, docu-
ment changing patterns of spatial exclusion and marginalization, where even minimal
rights to equality and resources are increasingly eroded through the reshaping of urban
geographies. Thus, for example, fashionable forms of housing policy threaten to erode
more supportive forms of living, and the spread of surveillance technologies, flexible
forms of trespass law, and the ever-exclusionary geographies of property rights actively
organize space in increasingly punitive and diminished ways. As DeVerteuil et al. note,
the diminution of poor people’s rights is spatially variable, as are homeless peoples’
responses to exclusion. But generally, as one of their homeless respondents noted, the
experience is that of “running out of places” to simply exist.
If space is an instrument of exclusion, it is also a means by which those who are
homeless produce what Mitchell and Heynen term geographies of survival, ad hoc and
vulnerable networks, institutions, and practices through which the homeless are able
to—against all the odds—sustain themselves in urban spaces. These may not constitute
forms of organized resistance, but nonetheless, as some authors note, we can consider
these through the lens of rights, whether DeVerteuil’s “resistance through persistence,”
Peters and Robillard’s excavation of mobility as a strategy used by First Nations to both
maintain social ties and stretch limited resources, Mitchell and Heynen’s “right to the
city,” or Berti’s excavation of the legal consciousness of homeless individuals. Both
through forms of stubborn inhabitation and simply because of a lack of alternatives,
homeless people embody and live out a rights claim to urban space. More ambitious are
Klodawsky’s appeal for social justice by promoting gender- and diversity-inclusive
housing policies, and Blomley’s call for a remaking of the geographies of property. Such
calls are utopian, perhaps, but then rights-talk has always been transgressive, pushing the
envelope of the possible.
Together, these articles contribute new insights and new evidence on the theme of
“rights, space and homelessness.” Blomley focuses on the effects of property rights on
homeless people, drawing from Waldron’s influential characterization of the homeless as
comprehensively unfree by virtue of the fact that they experience none of the benefits that
private property provides, only its disabilities. While acknowledging the significance of
these insights, Blomley’s goal is to extend Waldron’s analysis beyond its liberal con-
straints by exploring the implications of private property and its geographies in other
crucial aspects of homelessness. His analysis is theoretical, yet it also speaks directly to
the choices of lawmakers in their interpretations of property and other rights.
 INTRODUCTION 575

Klodawsky also wants to speak to policymakers, this time in the fields of housing and
social services. In her article, questions are raised about the interactions between certain
kinds of housing policies directed at chronically homeless populations in general, and
their long-term, quality-of-life implications for women in neoliberalizing urban environ-
ments in Canada. Her goal is to foreground social justice concerns in order to make con-
nections between neoliberally inflected changes going on in cities, newly emerging
housing policy discourses and practices, and the spaces that are being made available (or
not) for marginalized populations. A gender and race–sensitive lens is used to highlight
critical, spatially pertinent differences within these groups and what these might mean for
the relative benefits of certain kinds of living environments. A focus on chronically
homeless women highlights the neglect of this population in both research and policy
development.
For Mitchell and Heynen, the primary goal is to unveil what urban securitization pol-
icies and practices have wrought for homeless peoples’ geographies of survival, to spec-
ulate on what the future holds given current trends, and to draw lessons for activist
responses to these trends. They focus on three elements of securitization: the rise of
automated surveillance (CCTV), innovations in trespass law, and the criminalization of
sharing food in public. Also drawing on a wide range of secondary sources to substantiate
their claims, they detail the efforts of and lessons learned from the direct action group,
“Food Not Bombs,” and identify the myriad ways that legal and institutional changes
are making these geographies of survival more fragile and tentative. Throughout, they
incorporate the insights of Lebefvre’s “right to the city” and consider how this conceptu-
alization might be revised to more fully acknowledge those forced to live in increasingly
hostile public places.
Revisiting and updating debates about what it is to “resist” while homeless is the goal
of DeVerteuil et al.’s article. They avoid the tendency to either romanticize the resistance
of homeless people, or ignore it entirely. Through a small-scale account of homeless
people’s responses and behaviors in diverse spaces within Los Angeles, a more nuanced
account of various forms of resistance is sought. The authors recognize that resistance is
always entangled with power, rather than simply opposed to it. Further, geographies of
resistance are acknowledged, and through empirical analysis, given clear designations
within the variable and changing urban landscape of Los Angeles. Certain places are
more or less tolerant of homeless people. Respondents were rare in engaging in overt
forms of resistance, such as political protest. The authors suggest that the simple persis-
tence and adaptation of homeless people can be read as a form of transgressive opposi-
tion, a holding of ground despite punitive policies and social responses.
Resistance is also a central theme in the article by Peters with Robillard, which captures
insights of interviews with 123 First Nations people in Saskatchewan who are “hidden
homeless” (that is, without a permanent living arrangement but not living on the streets).
The authors note a significant gap in research that registers high levels of mobility among
such First Nations people, but neglects their geographic dimensions including the specific
role of reserves. They explore the diverse meanings of their respondents’ movements
between rural reserves and urban areas, both with regard to the ongoing impacts of colo-
nization, but also as important places of social connection and support. Their work under-
scores the potential power of qualitative analyses: the fine-grained excavation of trends
within broad categories that likely would otherwise have been missed. Subtle differences
576 KLODAWSKY AND BLOMLEY

among men’s and women’s, adults’, and youths’ experiences of cities, and rural reserves
and mobility are revealed, and connections made to insights of benefit to institutional
actors. This article urges a reassessment of the scale at which interventions are delivered.
In a subsequent special issue, articles by Marie-Eve Syvestre, Mario Berti, and Tony
Sparks will add depth to several of the themes outlined above, including the interplay of
law and property, the impacts of public policy and local practices on homeless peoples’
urban geographies, and strategies of resistance and challenge to regressive measures. Syl-
vestre explores how disorder policing in Montreal reflects the law, but is also a conduit
for other regressive measures that reflect local understandings of proper and improper
public behaviors and activities. Berti, too, uses a “law and society” frame of reference,
but his focus is on the perspectives of homeless individuals with regard to their interac-
tions with the justice system. Drawing on themes somewhat similar to those of Berti,
Sparks explores the meanings of privacy for homeless individuals who have claimed
spaces in Seattle’s HomelessWheel self-managed shelter system, and who resist efforts to
be incorporated into systemwide data collection efforts.
The social and political dynamics revealed above offer little comfort to those who
would hope for more egalitarian futures. Geographies of survival are not assured even as
more and more individuals and households confront the “ragged edge” of the Canadian
and U.S. social security systems. Resistance takes place but the extent to which it has
contributed even to maintaining “status quo” privileges is very much an open question.
Whereas multiple strategies of contestation are suggested, perhaps the overriding
message is the need to continue to raise questions about the retrograde rationales and
arguments that daily move ever-greater numbers of individuals farther from an ability to
live with dignity, within cities and elsewhere. In analyzing and contesting such rationales,
careful attention to the geographies of rights is critical.