Abstract
Chantal Butchinsky aims to explore the ways that neoliberal urban policies have affected the lives of homeless people and discusses how street homeless people deploy survival and resistance strategies in neoliberal cities. Research using an anthropological methodology focuses particularly on the case study of a chronically homeless man, Double Diamond. ‘Roll out’ neoliberal policies since the 1980s have created a ‘new regime’, whereby city organisations consider homeless people who do not accept their services as anti-social individuals who require the control and discipline of experts. Yet ‘resistance’ can be re-conceptualised as a diffuse, at times subversive, idea of a homeless lifestyle and culture, while concepts of ‘unhome’ and ‘economies of makeshift’ facilitate a discussion of how homelessness may be considered an effective strategy of survival.
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Notes
- 1.
Pseudonyms are used throughout this chapter.
- 2.
Oxford City Council, ‘Ending Rough Sleeping in Oxford Action Plan’ (2013).
- 3.
Research with homeless people in Oxford took place between 1999 and 2016. I undertook participant observation with homeless people on the streets of Oxford, on a part-time basis, for the first three years of research; I also used other methods: ‘hanging out’, chats, simple observation, unstructured interviews, walks around routes, and visits to sleep, work, and drug-using/drinking spots. I visited people in their bedsit rooms and in hostels where they sometimes stayed, and accompanied them on visits to friends, doctors, job centres, police stations, meetings with agency workers and drug dealers. I also had a small admin job with The Big Issue (which operated an outlet from a housing advice centre, which has since shut down) and worked in a winter shelter, for three months, in the nearby town of Banbury. These jobs gave me contacts with homeless people , some of which I was able to follow up, and also gave me a small glimpse of some of the work of these organisations. I have done historical research and was able to interview former staff members and formerly homeless people from the Simon Community, that used to exist in Oxford during the late 1960s and 1970s, which formed the roots of several of the services provider organisations currently operating in Oxford. During the first phase of fieldwork I met over 200 homeless and ex-homeless people who I could talk to. Of these, I became quite close to 40 or 50. Some are still homeless now, and some of them had already been homeless for a while before I met them. So the research has always concerned long-term homelessness. I have known Double Diamond since the start of my research, but his words, which have been quoted here, come from fieldwork undertaken over the last five years. We have frequently met over this time, sometimes for coffee or something to eat and sometimes to walk around together, chatting on the move.
- 4.
Most qualitative research on homelessness has been obtained through interviews taking place in sites of service provision . Much of this research is ethnographic (see, for example, Ravenhill [2008]) but no other researchers have undertaken participant observation with homeless people in the UK, so many aspects of homeless people ’s lives have not been examined including, importantly, what it is like to sleep outside. Participant observation enables one to see sociality not exclusion. For example, by the end of my first day I knew how to beg, sell The Big Issue, establish and sustain a begging spot, find a sleeping spot, make a cardboard bed; I learnt about the different drug dealers and how to obtain drugs (had I wanted to), I learnt where everybody else was—their different sleeping and work spots, who was in which shelter or hostel; as well as where housed people shared their rooms or houses with homeless people . I had been given a sleeping bag and various cigarettes, hot drinks and chocolate. And I had made about 20 friends—people who subsequently looked out for me, gave me protection and advice, knew about my personal life, told me about theirs, sent presents for me to give to my son and offered to show me around. Every time I met someone, there would be an exchange of news—where others were staying, warnings about cops moving people away from certain spots, particular security guards who were friendly or hostile towards homeless people . The issue of this gap in the research literature is beyond the scope of this chapter but is examined elsewhere by this author (Butchinsky, C. 2004. An Anthropological Study of Repeated Homelessness in Oxford, unpublished doctoral thesis; also, writing in progress currently under way).
- 5.
Oxford City Council. (2001) Street Scene Task Force: Progress Report.
- 6.
See, for example, Whiteford (2008, 2010) ‘… contemporary policy tropes and discursive strategies … position homeless people as degraded or shadow citizens’ (2008, 88) who thus could be deemed in need, not of charity, but instead, of ‘a sense of responsibility … for their own welfare’ (2010, 193); see also, Tonkens and van Doorn (2001).
- 7.
See, for example, Sir John Bird’s prominent article in which he claimed that giving to beggars is ‘murdering whatever chance those people have of getting off the streets’ (‘Don’t give money to beggars’, Sunday Times 22/12/2002, 1). See also, ‘… no one has ever been improved by handouts. Feeding homeless people on the streets isn’t even a good solution in the short-term—they become just like pigeons’ (The Independent 08/12/2001, Special Supplement, 7).
- 8.
Epitomised in these words, from Margaret Thatcher: ‘Crowds of drunken, dirty, often abusive and sometimes violent men must not be allowed to turn central areas of the capital into no-go zones for ordinary citizens. The police must disperse them and prevent them coming back once it was clear that accommodation was available. Unfortunately, there has been a persistent tendency in polite circles to consider all the ‘roofless’ as victims of middle class society, rather than middle class society as victims of the ‘roofless’ (Thatcher [1993] cited in Madden 2003, 291).
- 9.
To identify ‘areas of concern’ in the city, the city council undertook a phone consultation with 1000 nominated members of the general public, called the ‘Talkback Panel’.
- 10.
- 11.
A ‘drop’ is any item given to a rough sleeper—it can be money, food, clothing, dog food, and so on. from a passer-by ; it can also be used to refer to a back-payment of welfare/housing benefit (homeless people sometimes call this a ‘Government drop’).
- 12.
Bird, J. The Independent, 8/12/2001, Special Supplement, 7.
- 13.
Oxford City Council and partners, see online: https://www.oxford.gov.uk/info/20019/homelessness/367/your_kindness_could_kill_campaign.
- 14.
- 15.
See Newburn and Rock (2005) on how homeless people are more often victims rather than perpetrators.
- 16.
- 17.
I witnessed an unsuccessful attempt to organise a boycott of the Night Shelter and read about one homeless man who occupied a tree in Bonn Square, to prevent its redevelopment.
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Butchinsky, C. (2017). Homeless Survival and Resistance in the Neoliberal City. In: Erdi, G., Şentürk, Y. (eds) Identity, Justice and Resistance in the Neoliberal City. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-58632-2_9
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