Unsheltered homelessness and the right to metabolism: Urban political ecology and necropolitics during COVID-19

Keywords: homelessness, metabolism, necropolitics, urban political ecology
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Sunday
Session Start / End Time: 2/27/2022 09:40 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/27/2022 11:00 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 21

Abstract

Unsheltered homelessness has increasingly become part of a standard expectation of the contemporary U.S. socioenvironmental urban landscape. People residing in the public spaces of the city – parks, sidewalks, alleyways, riparian corridors, “frags,” and elsewhere – appropriate spaces in the public realm (temporarily or otherwise) for survival. In this appropriation of public space, those facing unsheltered homelessness lay bare the socioenvironmental relations that characterize decidedly necessary aspects of all human life, including eating, breathing, disposing of wastes, and others. The corporeal, embodied experiences of unsheltered homelessness represent the geographic locations of intimate nature-society relations. These human metabolic processes for people facing unsheltered homelessness uncover a justice-focused analysis in which a “right to metabolism” (Heynen, Kaika, and Swyngedouw 2006: 12) is a fundamental necessity for an inclusive and democratic city life.

In this research, an urban political ecology approach is developed alongside Mbembe’s (2003) necropolitics to consider the ways in which a right to metabolism demonstrates that the temporary appropriation of space by those facing homelessness is a biopolitical claim to survival. Data from extended ethnographic engagements with unsheltered homelessness are expanded to consider how urban metabolic functioning has been additionally stifled during the COVID-19 pandemic, with necropolitical management of people experiencing homelessness in mind. These analyses help contextualize the extent of unsheltered homelessness as both a social and environmental justice concern, and place contested constructions of nature and nature-society relations as central in materially addressing these individuals’ lived experiences.