Whose Occupation? Homelessness and the Politics of Park Encampments

Abstract

As a progressive policy platform and radical political programme, the right to the city suggests that the formulation of specific policy demands for affordable housing, free transit or municipal services can advance in tandem with a shared political understanding of the underlying roots of inequality and exclusion. The right to the city offers a useful, twofold challenge to the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement: to more clearly motivate its tactics in the reclamation of city space; and to cultivate openness to collective political transformation in the midst of struggle. This paper argues that the practical questions associated with OWS encampments—and particularly, the relationship between public space occupations and homelessness—are an opportunity to advance a shared political analysis across an ideologically and tactically fragmented left.

Keywords:

• Public space
• homelessness
• enclosure
• neoliberalism
• right to the city

Notes

1. The de facto supremacy of market logic can be read, for example, in arguments that the removal of homeless people from public space is justified on the grounds that their presence deters shoppers and tourists (Harvey; Mitchell; Smith).