Housing First Research Digest
Welcome to the 10th volume of the Housing First Research Digest!
This edition of the Housing First Research Digest is curated by Giulia Cavallo, who recently graduated with a Master’s in Urban Studies from Malmö University and has completed an internship at Y‑Foundation in Finland.
The focus of this edition of the research digest is on studies that look at different understandings of homelessness. Homelessness has commonly been understood as an individual and/or structural issue. However, this division has been considered too rigid, and scholars have begun to develop diverse understandings of homelessness beyond this dichotomy.
Here, I present three recent studies that propose bold and nuanced approaches to move beyond the individual/structural dichotomy. The first study uses Corporeo-cartographies to give the homeless people’s bodies spatial recognition as an experiential and epistemological site. The second introduces the concept of propositional politics to reject the framing of homelessness as an “alternative” to normative housing experiences. The third uses a posthumanist ecology approach to challenge the dichotomy of human/nonhuman. What these studies have in common is the attempt to move beyond dichotomous understandings of homelessness as examples of individual trauma or as victims of structural dynamics. They understand homeless people’s bodies and experiences as already enacting their own existence and becoming, on their own terms, according to their own practices. Additionally, they challenge the separation of the physical body from the external environment by giving relevance to the entangled relations among bodies, territories and nonhuman elements.
This study engages with the understanding of homeless bodies as epistemological sites that challenge an ontological separation of body and space. It explores how homeless women experience the city through their bodies and how these experiences are shaped by urban power relations. Methodologically, it draws on the combination of corporeography and Cuerpo-Territorio. The exploration of bodily and emotional experiences through corporeography is combined with the Latin American decolonial, indigenous-community and feminist epistemologies that consider the body as territory, and recognise that territory within the body: when the places people inhabit are violated, their bodies are affected; when bodies are affected, the places they inhabit are violated. This inevitably links body-territories to the capitalist, colonial and patriarchal logic of exploitation that structurally inflict violence and oppression on women/marginalized people, their bodies, and the land. Cuerpo-Territorio offers an epistemological and methodological framework shift from mapping urban space to mapping urban experiences of homelessness within and upon the body. Women’s bodies are understood as sites of knowledge, shifting the focus from mapping bodies to “embodied mapping”. The findings of the study are based on a collective body map co-created and discussed by three homeless women and the researcher. The map provides visual insight into how it feels to be homeless and how certain structures, people, places or connections alleviate or put pressure on bodies living on the streets. Participants talk about the effects of urban environments, unhealthy food and unhygienic sleeping arrangements, and also their constant being surrounded by people’s comments. The map shows how bodies as territories experiencing homelessness are entangled with urban structures and dynamics, and how urban power relations affect the body. It emphasises the bodily consequences of the private urban housing market that exploits the female homeless body as rent, the physically and mentally draining experiences of finding a place to stay, and the collective feeling of powerlessness in institutional settings. The study clearly shows how the governing of urban homelessness is experienced on a bodily and emotional scale by providing insights into physical and psychic stress on the body in relation to urban institutions of care and control.
This ethnographic study explores the urban life of a long-term community of drug users and “homeless” living in a tunnel beneath Bucharest’s central train station. The study challenges the understanding of life at the margins as an alternative to an opposing side. Instead, it introduces the concept of propositional politics of life at the margins: propositional because it stands on its own within the relationalities composing its assemblage, is characterised by its own existence and becoming, and doesn’t rely on being the alternative to anything else. Accordingly, the definition of margins moves beyond its binary understanding and is instead considered a tension emerging from historically unbalanced power relations that co-constructs people and spaces as part of bordering processes through which the margins become actualized. Life underground does not need alterity to be defined, and it does not need an external intervention to save it. It requires allowances and spaces to grow, forms of care and harm reduction that are crafted around its politics rather than around detached normativities. The study explores what life at the margins is on its own terms, according to its own practices. It reveals the tunnels’ lively proposition, an affirmation of the tunnel as a form of the here and the now, present, tangible, embodied, performed, grounded urban life. Its inhabitants assembled their alternative desires, their right to be alive in the city. They did not identify as homeless bodies, and did not want to be governed as such. Tunnel life was about being at home within a civilized and violently normalized Bucharest. Any genuine politics of care towards them has to take their proposition seriously.
This study adopts a posthumanist political ecology perspective that challenges the dualisms between culture/nature, human/nonhuman, and agency/structure. It rejects the foundational distinctions between humans and “the rest”, and locates humans and nonhumans in a constant yet dynamic state of becoming, of producing and being produced, mutually constituted in and through social relations, without privileging the ontologically given positioning of human experiences. The research explores how denying agency to nonhuman actors relates to homelessness by studying the meaning-making experiences of housed park visitors related to both coyotes (“wildlife”) and people experiencing homelessness (“wild lives”), as both share a similar position as outsiders in urban parks. The study understands unsheltered homelessness as a complex assemblage of actors, discourses, and power relations and leverages ideas from actor-network theory and assemblages, specifically, to illustrate networked interconnections. Much of the interview material both blurred and reinscribed boundaries and dualisms associated with human/nature, wild/domestic, and others, revealing a complex network of social and environmental relations. The denial of agency for nonhuman actors is deeply connected to the marginalization of unsheltered people, as both are often categorized as “wild” or “other”. By treating nature as a passive backdrop, society also devalues the lives of those who live most closely within it. The research shows how both groups are marginalized, suggesting that social justice for humans is deeply connected to our relationship with the environment.
Concluding remarks
These pieces make us reflect on the role of Housing First. The model supports the unconditional provision of housing and individual support, designed specifically to reject a moralizing, individual-blame model of homelessness. However, despite noble principles, the studies presented remind us to remain attentive to what happens in practice, in the lived and embodied experiences of people who are homeless. From this angle, Housing First should not be understood as a finished or perfect solution, but as an evolving practice that continuously expands by questioning its own frameworks and assumptions. Here, research becomes crucial by keeping theory and practice in continuous relation, grounded in everyday experiences, while also allowing those experiences to transform the frameworks through which we understand them. The core principle of Housing First is that material access to housing is non-negotiable. Building on this shared foundation, the approaches presented can serve as useful tools for further development and expansion. Housing First must become a space where people can grow within forms of care and harm reduction crafted on their own terms and practices. This requires Housing First practices to be grounded in an understanding of homeless people as agents actively producing meanings and spaces, rather than as beneficiaries of housing interventions.