Making city-bases: homeless places, poverty management, and urban change in Pilsen, Czechia

ABSTRACT

The article explores how homeless people make places in the public space, while revealing some of the overlooked effects these places may have on the wider city. The article relies on extensive ethnographic research and media coverage analysis of a place called Eskalátory (the Escalators) in Pilsen, a second-order city in Czechia. Eskalátory is part of an underpass with a four-lane road, a tramway, and four outdoor escalators, altogether, forming a specific urban assemblage. The paper describes three specific assemblage enactments of poverty management, homeless placemaking, and socio-materiality, and argues the place played a crucial role in urban change involving the surrounding area. Therefore, it conceptualizes Eskalátory as a “city-base”, an assemblage produced by actors human and non-human that contributes to urban outcome.

KEYWORDS:

• Homelessness
• place
• poverty management
• NIMBY
• assemblage urbanism
• comparative gesture
• post-socialist city

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. In the European context, the ETHOS typology is used to distinguish between four groups of homeless people: (1) roofless (i.e., living rough), (2) houseless (e.g., institutional settings), (3) insecure (e.g., squat), and (4) inadequate (e.g., a trailer) (Edgar & Meert, 2005). In contrast to this typology, I do not define homelessness primarily in terms of housing. I understand the actors studied herein as the poorest class (Vašát, 2012). Thus, I view homelessness as an entirely dynamic phenomenon with its specific culture where housing represents one of the culture’s dimensions. The article primarily deals with people frequenting a place called the Escalators. That place, along with a number of other places in Pilsen, was typically visited by individuals from all categories of the above typology, including those living in a dwelling (typically in precarious conditions).

2. While occupying only one of the four escalators, my informants were usually using the word in the plurale tantum form, the Escalators, which was grammatically wrong. However, I keep using this form as well, because it expresses the qualities of their placemaking.

3. It should be added that there is an established scholarship examining the role of materiality in home-making and unmaking (for overview see McCarthy, 2020), which is, however, still a bit different issue.

4. This was part of the Hobohemia project (http://hobohemia.soc.cas.cz/en).

5. I used the Newton Media databases in which I search for two complementary words strings: “podchod AND Sirková” (underpass AND the Sirková Street) and “Sirková AND Plzeň AND bezdomovci” (the Sirková Street AND Plzeň AND homeless people).

6. These are specifically: Decree of the Statutory City of Pilsen No. 17/2004, Plzeň 2004; Decree of the Statutory City of Pilsen No. 10/2006, Plzeň 2006.

7. This is specifically the Decree of the Statutory City of Pilsen No. 19/2006 on certain obligations of dog breeders (Article 3).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Czech Science Foundation [GA15-17540S].