Suchergebnisse

This paper analyzes the City of Portland, Oregon's recent zoning code amendment which legalized sanctioned homeless encampments. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork in Portland, the paper details how the City Government's long-held opposition to homeless camping shifted to a position of acceptance. The paper identifies the state of emergency (SOE) on housing and homelessness as a critical moment for developing not only a legal foundation, but also a social justification, for legalizing encampments as an official shelter strategy. In contrast to research over the past few decades articulating the camp as the realization of punitive sovereign power, the paper suggests the relationality of emergency governance, or "governing-through-emergency," instead provides an opportunity to legitimate the lived experiences and desires of unhoused people residing in sanctioned encampments. It concludes by warning that, although emergency governance serves as a critical tool to advance the interests of the unhoused, such governing strategies are limited by structural forces producing homelessness more broadly.

With the rise of organized houseless encampments or "tent cities" around the U.S., scholars have begun to address the social-spatial effects of encampments on houseless peoples' lives. This scholarship has primarily explained the development of organized encampments as an effect of neoliberal modes of governance as municipalities have sought to offload responsibility for caring for the houseless or to discipline houseless people by containing them through the regulative force of the state. Such explanations address the culpability of the state in relation to capital which shapes houseless peoples' lives. Yet, they leave unaddressed one critical component of houseless encampments: that relations surrounding property ensure that houseless encampment residents remain property-insecure and without a guaranteed right to remain. Through a case study of self-governing houseless encampments in Portland, Oregon, the article advances a relational analysis of property and citizenship to show how self-governing houseless communities are denied key privileges of citizenship that democratic self-governance is intended to realize. In doing so, the case study examines the very tradeoffs houseless encampment residents must make when living in an encampment. The paper ends suggesting that Portland's encampment model allows us to more clearly see the consequences of establishing collective rights to access property within liberal property systems, and from this, where political and scholarly attention ought to be placed to better protect houseless people through a more democratic right to remain.

This paper argues that geographers ought to pay closer attention to the role of property relations within political liberalism. Developing on the idea that propertied-citizenship excludes houseless or other property-insecure people from space, the paper argues that property-insecure people are instead incorporated within the relations of property. Examining how houseless people are incorporated within rather than outside of property, illustrates how key values of property long-held in liberalism are maintained and used to devalue a sense of social and political autonomy for the property-insecure. After tracing the dialectical relations of property with citizenship through the historical emergence of American liberalism, the paper examines how the values connecting property with citizenship continue to diminish the livelihoods of houseless people. Based on ethnographic research with self-governed houseless encampments in Portland, Oregon, I analyze how opposition to these unique types of houseless shelter affect encampment residents. What we are able to see from Portland's encampments, I argue, are the broader limitations of citizenship within liberalism which continue to be demarcated through a proper social order defined by property.

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Bringing together divergent approaches to justice theorising, this volume connects normative and philosophical theories with the more empirically focused approaches emerging today in the social and political sciences and policy scholarship. The chapters overview a variety of mainstream approaches and radical critiques of justice to illustrate their value in addressing the pressing problems of climate change and economic development.
Stressing the value of assessing justice theories in light of the material conditions of our changing world, the book concludes with an in-depth synthesis of how these wide ranging approaches to justice will be useful for students, scholars and practitioners concerned with realising justice.