Stilling Unhoused Mobilities: Tent Cities and the Politics of Mobility

Keywords: politics of mobility, stillness, homelessness, camps
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Sunday
Session Start / End Time: 2/27/2022 03:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/27/2022 05:00 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 29

Abstract

As with other themes in urban geography, an increased attention to mobility has enhanced our understanding of homelessness in contemporary cities. In an emergent literature on unhoused mobilities, scholars explore survival strategies of unhoused individuals, the role of displacement in shaping their daily routines, and differentiated experiences of mobility amongst the unhoused community. Understandably, much of this research focusses on moments where unhoused individuals are literally “on the move.” This paper argues that such scholarship would benefit from increased attention to the other half of the mobilities dialectic: stillness. I suggest that using stillness as an analytic can further analyses of the politics of unhoused mobilities in two ways. First, it allows for consideration of the ways in which the stillness of unhoused individuals is subversive and conflicts with a bourgeois urban imaginary and political economy that privileges hyper-mobility and consumption. Second, it calls attention to how unhoused urban residents resist forced displacement. I demonstrate these points using examples taken from an ongoing conflict over the presence of unhoused camps in a Washington, DC business improvement district.