Homelessness In The Neoliberal City

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Homeless encampments or tent cities are shockingly visible representations of poverty and dispossession, and their very visibility challenges the legitimacy of the capitalist economy and the aesthetic landscape of the competitive neoliberal city. For the daily audience of the housed, encountering homelessness in the city presents a number of difficult contrasts and juxtapositions. The close co-existence of improvised housing and capital-intensive projects of gentrification and of “misery in the midst of plenty” can be shocking or disturbing to the supporters and beneficiaries of the status quo (Marcuse 69). As Amster and Cook write, “the homeless exist because our economy exists” (14). One foundational fiction of capitalist society is that …show more content…

Aesthetic control in the city serves a number of purposes. For one, the zero-sum logic of interurban competition incentivizes the purification of urban space and the presentation of ‘cleanliness’ for the purposes of city marketing. As transfer payments decline as a source of revenue for municipal governments, cities are desperately attempting to enhance their international reputation for the purpose of attracting tourism and capital investment. The cleansing of visible poverty from urban space is accomplished through police harassment and displacement of visible poverty and other ‘undesirable’ uses of space(Kennelly 9). The city’s adaptation to market logics also influences the way urban space is produced and presented internally, to its own population. For example, concentrations of homeless people are said to deter visitors and consumers from traveling to and shopping in those parts of the city [BY WHO]. Visible homelessness is also targeted by city authorities because it disrupts attempts to render the city as a landscape (Mitchell 186). Rendering the city as a landscape is a means of presenting the individual with an illusory sense of control and freedom in the complex urban environment where control in fact belongs to the totalizing economy and freedom for some comes at the expense of freedom for others. The illusion of control is in a sense the way citizens are alienated from the constitutive parts and production of the city. Instead of seeing the realities of capital relations, or the activities of labour reproduction required daily to renew the urban workforce, citizens are presented with a stage on which the daily dramas of the “pacified public” can take place (Mitchell 186). On this stage, a certain kind of “legitimate” citizen expects a broad freedom to move through space without resistance or disturbance, such as may come from encountering or being confronted by

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