Urban makeovers, homeless encampments, and the aesthetics of displacement
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 3977772 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Johanna Speer (0000-0003-1636-803X, Syracuse University, corresponding author), Jessie Speer (Syracuse University) |
| Year | 2019 |
| Volume | 20 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Pages | 575-595 |
| Publication date | 2019-05-04 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Social & Cultural Geography (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1464-9365 • E-ISSN: 1470-1197 |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/14649365.2018.1509115 |
| OpenAlex | W2886354308 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 38 |
| References cited | 49 |
This paper brings together geographic literature on homelessness and theories of aesthetics to analyse how city beautification projects in contemporary American cities promote the displacement of homelessness. Based on research conducted in Fresno, California, I argue that the seemingly innocuous realm of aesthetics often undergirds anti-homeless politics. In Fresno, officials sought to create a visual landscape that was conducive to middle-class consumption and leisure, such that the project of building a desirable city was deeply influenced by market pressures. In turn, homeless encampments were framed as unpleasant objects that must be removed to make way for economic opportunities. Efforts to reinforce this 'live play work' aesthetic resulted in a politics of displacement and criminalisation. Yet people who resided in encampments championed an alternative aesthetic practice grounded in reuse, survival and collective appropriation of urban space. Thus, the example of Fresno shows that aesthetic norms not only reinforce revanchist politics, but simultaneously present the possibility of resistance
Aesthetics · Appropriation · Art · Consumption (sociology · Economic growth · Economics · Gentrification · Political science · Politics · Public space · Realm · Social science · Sociology · Engineering · Homelessness and Social Issues · Housing, Finance, and Neoliberalism · Law · Urban Planning and Governance
Policing homelessness
Makeover welfare
Refusing to Hide
The Social Housing Crisis and the Barriers to Developing Dementia-Friendly Communities in Chile
Homelessness and nature across landscapes and disciplines
Spatial Patterns, Utility, and Limitations of Volunteered Reports of Urban Homeless Campsites in Portland, Oregon
Visits to social and community establishments and services by persons experiencing homelessness after shelter decentralization
A never-ending game of “cat and mouse” – encampments as sites of contestation, claim and denial of the right to housing and homemaking possibilities
Confucian care meets neoliberal logic in East Asia
Inclusive gentrification? Reproducing logics of exclusion in strategies for inclusive urban planning
Beautified Brutality
Digital Geographies and The City
Encampment geographies
Decolonizing the Green City
Punishment, support, or discipline? Taking stock of recent debates about homeless governance in neoliberal cities
Visual criminology and lives lived in public space
Where life and leisure intersect
A Narrative Political Ecology Approach to Unsheltered Homelessness and Episodic Poor Air Quality along an Urban Riparian Corridor
Rainbow infrastruggles
Trapped in liminality
Shadow care infrastructures
Behind the Faces of Aestheticized Urbanism in Tunxi, China
Expulsion
Seeing like a shadow state
Police and Politics in Aesthetics‐Based Urban Governance
Condemned to green? Accessibility and attractiveness of urban green spaces to people experiencing homelessness
Everywhere they are trying to hide poverty. I hate it!’
Neoliberal necropolitics and the global competition for urban dominance
Debilitating mobilities
Hostile prototypes
Encampments as neighbors
Spatial Governance of the Unhoused
Back Off! Stop Making US Illegal
Designing a ‘vibrant, attractive and sustainable city
Homelessness and Sofa-Surfing
Portraits for change
The City Is not Innocent
Yielding Returns on Homeless Policy Through the Micro-Economisation of Housing First Recipients
The transparency of evil
The black Atlantic
The Ugly Laws
Social Justice and the City
Hobos, Hustlers, and Backsliders
Unbearable Weight
The Beauty Industry
Rule by Aesthetics
Discipline and Punish
Discipline and Punish
Visualizing homelessness
The entrepreneurial city
Broke Not Broken
The right to infrastructure
Invisible homelessness
The value of homelessness
Spatial Regulation, Dispersal, and the Aesthetics of the City
Neoliberalism and the Aestheticization of New Middle‐Class Landscapes
It's not like your home”
From Madonna to Marx
The Annihilation of Space by Law
The ‘lamentable sight’ of homelessness and the society of the spectacle
Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844
Middle-Class Poverty Politics
Imag(in)ing ‘homeless places’
The production of space
The condition of postmodernity
The New Urban Frontier
Visible identities
The rise of the tent ward
The Right to the City
The Ideology of the Aesthetic
Peek-A-Boo, We See You Too
Reontologising Race
Living Room
Picturing the poor
Body, Image and Affect in Consumer Culture
Intradisciplinarity and Visual Politics
The Unaccommodated Woman
Seeing Like a State
The Homeless Body
Conceptualising body work in health and social care
| Unique citing works | 38 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 6,33 |
| Citation span | 2020 - 2026 (7) |
| Citation velocity | current |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 38 |