The City Is not Innocent: Homelessness and the Value of Urban Parks

ABSTRACT

This paper builds on contemporary memoirs of homelessness from cities across the United States to develop a more nuanced understanding of the use value of urban parks and green spaces. Based on analysis of over seventy memoirs, we synthesize the writings of nine memoirists who examine their relationship to green spaces in cities. Instead of framing nature as something pristine and distinct from society—or something dangerous and untamed—these writings portray urban green spaces as sites of belonging and everyday life. In the US today, cities often either value parks as playgrounds for middle-class leisure or devalue them as targets of racialized anti-homeless policing. In both instances, parks are framed in relation to their impact on the exchange value of surrounding urban areas. In contrast, the memoirs of homelessness we examine portray parks and other green spaces as enabling privacy, survival, and emotional solace in an urban landscape often marked by surveillance, deprivation, and violence. These crucial values reveal a new conceptualization of urban parks as profoundly useful to those who are subject to the exclusions of capitalist property.

KEYWORDS:

• Homelessness
• value
• urban ecology
• parks
• memoirs
• nature

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank the anonymous reviewers and editors for their extremely helpful feedback. Additionally, we are deeply grateful to all homeless memoirists cited here.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This research was assisted by a Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies.