“Home Is Wherever I Go”

“Home is wherever I go”

Rethinking Home and Publicness from the Perspectives of Unhoused People in Bern

Leandra Maria Choffat “Home is wherever I go”: Rethinking Home and Publicness from the Per- spectives of Unhoused People in Bern

A Master Thesis written by Leandra Maria Choffat Matr. Nr.: 14-053-607

Supervised by: Dr. Laura Nkula-Wenz

Department of Urban Studies Master of Arts in Critical Urbanisms Submitted on November 12, 2020

Cover Photo: Taken by Raphael, A Person walking in Public Space Acknowledgements

First and foremost, I would like to express my gratitude to Mischu, Beat, Nadine, and Raphael. I sincerely appreciate your contributions and the insights you granted me into your lifeworlds. This thesis would not have been possible without your honesty, patience, and effort. In addition, I thank the Streetwork Bern (Kirchliche Gassenarbeit Bern) for their support and for not giving up on my project during these difficult times.

To Laura Nkula-Wenz, my supervisor, I am very thankful for her ever constructive feedback, her positivity, and her guidance throughout this process. I thank Sophie Old- field for deeply engaging with the results of this thesis.

Last but not least I thank my dear friends and my wonderful family for their limitless support. Nuria for giving me invaluable input on how to critically engage with my data. Louisa and Mats for their moral support and showing an interest in all of my insights and ideas.

Contents

Introduction 2 1. Home, Publicness, and the Criminalization of Public Subjects 4 1.1 From Homeless to Houseless to Unhoused 5 1.2 Notions of Home 8 1.3 Public Space 11 1.4 Criminalization of Public Space 12 1.5 Criminalization of Public Subjects 13 1.6 Inclusion as Exclusion in Public Space 14 2. Contextualizing Unhousedness in Bern, Switzerland 16 2.1 Hidden Forms and Figures of Unhousedness 16 2.2 Bern’s Housing Market 18 2.3 Exemplifying Regulation and Creation of Public Space in Bern 19 2.4 Local Struggles in a Pandemic 23 3. The Research Process 25 3.1 Participation and its Limitations 25 3.2 Reflexive Photographs as Valid Data 26 3.3 Getting to Know the Research Participants 28 3.4 Elicit Conversation Through Photographs 28 3.5 Transcription, Coding, and Composing Narratives 29 3.6 Situating my own Positionalities 31 4. Narratives 33 4.1 Mischu 34 4.2 Beat 41 4.3 Nadine 47 4.4 Raphael 53 5. Analysis 58 5.1 Diverse Notions of Home 58 5.2 Having Private Sphere in Public 60 5.3 Evaluating the Swiss Housing Market and Social Services 62 5.4 Navigating the Lockdown 65 5.5 Defamiliarizing the Familiar 66 Conclusion 68 Bibliography 70 List of Figures 70 Conversations 70 Literature 71 Appendix 77 Interview Guideline 77 Declarations of Consent 79

Institutions in Bern with English Translation or Description

Kirchliche Gassenarbeit Bern Streetwork Bern Verbatim Translation: Ecclesiastical Street- work Bern. Commonly referred to as Street- work Bern by participants. Therefore, throughout this thesis, this organization is also referred to as Streetwork Bern. Their relationship to the church is briefly explained in Chapter 3.1.

Direktion für Tiefbau, Verkehr und Stadtgrün (TVS) Directorate of Civil Engineering, Traffic, and Green Urban Spaces Division of the city administration in Bern

Wohn- und Obdachlosenhilfe Assistance for Unhoused People Division of the Social Services Department Bern

PINTO (Prävention, Integration und Toleranz) PINTO (Prevention, Intervention, and Tol- erance) Division of the Directorate for Education, So- cial Issues and Sports

Heiliggeistkirche Bern Holy Ghost Church Bern Church close to main train station of Bern

Kompetenzzentrum öffentlicher Raum KORA Center of Competence for Public Space Responsibility of the Civil Engineering De- partment Bern, management consists of actors from TVS

Emergency Shelters:

Sleeper Bern

Passantenheim Bern

Institutions for Addiction and/or Housing Assistance:

CONTACT

Klinik Südhang

WEGE Weierbühl

Azzurro

KODA

Introduction

To me, home is sitting at the dinner table with my loud and very lovable family, conversations and hugs from my friends, the warm atmosphere of my old but cozy apartment, the city of Bern with all its familiar places, and the many new things I have yet to discover. Home to me is love, relationships, trust, and the familiar physical structures surrounding me. Even though home is a concept without a universal definition, it is arguably one of the most significant expressions of place. The notion of home is relevant to almost every human being. Each individual’s experiences of the various notions of home have the potential to either confirm or deny one’s “fundamental sense of belonging in the world” (Springer 2017, 102). Notions of home are diverse and can express themselves in manifold ways. So, how is it possible that a large number of people in the contemporary world are designated as homeless: as not having a home? This thesis therefore starts with the question, what does home mean to unhoused people in Bern? In order to address this question, I had conversations with four people who all have a rather complex background regarding their housing history and name public space as part of their home. Through this, a multitude of questions about the terminology and definition of homeless, the notions of home, public spaces, and participation unfolded. In order to put forth a deeper understanding of the various forms and definitions of unhousedness, a critique of the adequacy of the term ‘homeless’ is presented in Chapter 1. Following this, the definition from the European Typology of Homelessness (ETHOS) and Sabine Springer’s redefinition of the term are incorporated to make an enhanced definition of unhousedness. To legitimize my claim of the term ‘homeless’ being somewhat of a misnomer, what follows is an in-depth elaboration on the various notions of home. This is an attempt to answer the question, how can the term ‘home’ be re- conceptualized in order to do justice to the diversity of lived experiences? It is an approach meant to go beyond the concept of the built structures of a house or an apartment as the only form of an expression of home. On the contrary, home does not simply exist but is constantly made and recon- structed (Blunt and Dowling 2006, 23). According to Mallett (2004), the term ‘home’ functions as a source of complex and interacting ideas about people’s relationships with one another and different places, spaces, things, and emotions (84). The most striking commonality of the four research participants, apart from the multiplicity that informs their notions of home, is that they all named public space as one place that they consider their home. So, in the second part of Chapter 1 I expound on various contemplations of what the publicness of public space consists of. How do people who name these spaces as a second home feel perceived within them and by whom? What would need to change for them to fully be a part of these spaces? When taking a closer look at public space in general, it becomes evident that it is always situated and lived, meaning every public space has its own rhythms of use and regulations (Qian 2020, 81). One of the techniques of regulating public space is closely examined, as it was frequently mentioned by the interviewees. It is the state’s technique of criminalizing spaces and therefore a connotation of the subjects within it as criminal and disorderly. Nowadays, the formulation of such regulations often does not denominate and exclude certain groups or individuals directly. According to Qian, these regulations are often formulated as inclusive and participatory to achieve a subtle mobilization of exclusion (87). On a more practical note, Chapter 2 provides a survey of the small amount of available data on the topic of unhousedness in Switzerland. Key numbers like the median income, the unemployment rate,

2 and some key figures concerning the housing market in Switzerland and the city of Bern are presented and examined. To exemplify the theoretical approaches made in Chapter 1.5 and 1.6, the norm of expulsion (Wegweisungsnorm) exercised in the city of Bern is discussed. What follows is an analysis of how public space is perceived and conceptualized on a policy level within this particular Swiss city. On account of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic1, there is a brief analysis of Bern’s local newspapers and their reports on unhousedness during the Swiss-wide lockdown from March 16 until May 11, 2020. In Chapter 3, a detailed description of the research process is given. Firstly, the possibilities and limitations of a participatory research process and the applied methods of photo voice or reflexive photography and photo elicitation interviews (PEI) are examined. Then, a recounting of the process of transcribing, coding, and reformulating the transcripts as narratives is presented. As the thesis included some very sensitive themes and methods, I reflect on my own positionality within this process. To anchor this work in the lived experiences and the points of views of the research participants, the narratives serve as the centerpiece of this thesis. Each narrative tells the story of what the participants told me about their lives. The red thread that runs through all of these narratives is the expression of what home means to them. Along the way, a variety of themes and anecdotes relevant to the discussion about publicness, the state system, and social justice are elucidated. In the analysis following the narratives, Chapter 5 outlines some of the key themes of the preceding theoretical debates that are closely interwoven with the accounts of the research participants. The point of view of Nora, one of the managers of the Kirchliche Gassenarbeit Bern (Ecclesiastical Street- work Bern), adds some valuable insights to support these final thoughts. Finally, the conclusion revisits the most important arguments made throughout the thesis. Hereby, the various contributions to the conversation about a refined understanding of unhousedness, state responsibilities and participation are reemphasized. Lastly, I propose some possibilities for future research.

1 The term coronavirus disease (COVID-19) is used throughout this thesis due to recommendations of the WHO (https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2019/technical-guidance/naming-the-coronavirus-disease-(covid-2019)-and-the-virus-that-causes-it).

1. Home, Publicness, and the Criminalization of Public Subjects

Urban spaces in particular manifest a complex […] [system] that is comprised of people, […] architecture, technology, […] the natural environment, [and its regulations]. Taken together, these spheres interact in the city to create both opportunities and challenges. (Amster 2008, 43)

Looking at the contemporary city and the people living within it brings up questions of urban transformation, inequality in terms of access, inclusion and participation, and social justice. A primary facet to look at in the context of this research are the concepts of homelessness and home. Both of them are socially constructed and their definitions and meanings are relational and change over time. So, what follows in the first part of this chapter is an attempt to define these two concepts through existing scholarly work without any claim to comprehensiveness. It is my intention to avoid romanticizing unhoused lives, while also making a case for challenging stereotypes of defi- ciency and dysfunction all too often associated with unhoused people. Or as Susan Fraiman (2017) asserts, “To bringing out evidence of agency, competence, imagination, and community in contexts more often assumed to preclude these” (164). Firstly, the commonly used term ‘homeless’ is investigated. Hereby, the terminology is a crucial aspect of how people without permanent residency are framed and talked about. It can be a tool for self-identification and creating a sense of belonging in the world and the society we live in. Additionally, Springer (2000) stresses that it can be a powerful tool of policy makers and politics. The definition of terms can define who is enumerated as unhoused and ultimately benefits from certain services (476). It can bear the power to determine how much of the citizen’s welfare lies within the responsibility of the state. This first subchapter therefore looks at the terminology and definitions of homelessness to subsequently elaborate upon the concept of home. If people without permanent residency are described as homeless, what then does home mean? The second subchapter is an attempt to go beyond the framing of the physical structure of a house or an apartment as the only possibility of home. The various notions of home are discussed without denying the importance of being housed. This is done to legitimize the claim that the term ‘homeless’ might be partly inadequate in representing the various, complex experiences and meanings of home of people without permanent residency. In a second part of this chapter, the theme of public space as spaces of urban contestation and negotiation is addressed. Kawash (1998) states that “the question of homelessness is […] necessarily always also a question of public space” (325). All of the research participants interviewed for this thesis name one or various public spaces either in the past or present as a central part of their home; it is a space they use for recreational purposes, income generation, or other daily activities. The themes relating to public space have been selected according to the topics that emerged from the interviews. Firstly, a general overview of the concept of public space is established in order to situate the following discussion. What follows is an explanation of how certain areas or public spaces in a city are being criminalized and therefore the people within them. Lastly, an analysis is given of how current measures meant to guarantee order, safety, and cleanliness in public spaces are formulated under the guise of an inclusionary city in order to expel ‘disorderly’ people.

1.1 From Homeless to Houseless to Unhoused Homelessness is regarded as a current, pressing problem in many capitalist societies. Its increased prevalence has been widely linked to the underfunding of public services, diminishing access to supported accommodation and social housing, and an increasingly unaffordable private rent housing market (Stonehouse et al. 2020, 1). According to Randall Amster (2008), public discourses, scholarly work, and policy making regarding the definition of homelessness mainly move between the two extremes of framing it as pathological condition ‘at worst’ and a state of victimization ‘at best’. He argues, there is the conservative perception of the homeless as the scum of our society at one extreme. At the other end of the extreme, there is the more progressive view of homelessness as a purely structural phenomenon, shaped through unemployment rates, housing prices, and a lack of treatment options for substance addictions. What is generally lacking in both of these narratives is any regard for agency. Homeless people are portrayed as either defective people to be repaired or unwitting victims to structural issues. Amster reiterates that even though homeless people may be severely constrained in their options of choice, they do have the ability to exercise choices and construct their identities. To deny this is to deny them the status as full human beings. On the other hand, it can also be problematic to frame homelessness as a purely voluntary state. This framing can be hijacked by conservatives to deny the quest to secure more and better social services due to the fact that they chose to live on the streets (11-12). Amster proposes a third way to frame homelessness, “one that credits structural explanations yet seeks to preserve individual autonomy and promote a spirit of contestation.” His understanding is guided by the thought that homeless people do make decisions within the spatial and political constraints they encounter (13). In recent years, there has been a growing body of scholarly work on homelessness that simultaneously portrays the complexities of agency and the influence of wider social contexts on the basis of individual, subjective accounts (Stonehouse et al. 2020; Parsell 2018; McNaughton 2008). However, it is still crucial to closely examine the terminology of homelessness in order to see how framing people as homeless is problematic. The term ‘homelessness’ brings with it an inherent contrast to the notion of home. This has resulted in homelessness being discussed as the antithesis or total absence of home and therefore a lack of belonging or being in the world. Moore (2007) argues that this dichotomy represents neither the complexity of the concept of home nor homelessness adequately (144). She adds that “while people may be without a roof, it could be argued that home is never wholly absent” (150). So, the term ‘homeless’ can actually be regarded as somewhat of a misnomer. Fraiman (2017) proposes that it should not be asked how these people manage in the absence of domesticity that is already implicated by the term ‘homeless’, but rather how aspects of domesticity and notions of home are replicated under these widely varying circumstances (161). Many of those without permanent housing are not actually living on the street. They are living with friends or family, in transitional housing, squatting in abandoned buildings, occupying semi-permanent camps, spending their nights in emergency shelters, or temporarily living in an institution (Fraiman 2017, 161). The complexity of homelessness is then further shaped by a shortage of affordable, permanent accommodation, poverty, conflicts within the social network, addiction, mental health problems amongst other structural factors (Moore 2007, 146). As these circumstances are hardly general- izable, a much more nuanced notion of the term ‘homeless’ is needed. Another fact is that the choice of the definition of the term ‘homeless’ determines who is included and enumerated within policy surveys. Hence, who receives financial or other support from the state in the end. Therefore, a more

5 flexible definition and classification is needed. One that allows for regional adaptations that can be accepted globally (Springer 2000, 476). The European Federation of National Organizations Working with the Homeless (FEANTSA) has devoted significant time and effort to develop the European Typology of Homelessness (ETHOS). Their intention was to draw attention to the multiple dimensions and the variety of forms of homelessness that exist. Another reason to develop the ETHOS was to pave the way to a more standardized, comparable measurement of homelessness in different European countries. The ETHOS categories attempt to cover most of the living situations that are part of the forms of homelessness across Europe. Additionally, they developed the ETHOS light, for the use of surveys and statistical research, as the typology is quite complex:

Figure 1: ETHOS Light

The ETHOS Light includes six operational categories. Each category contains sub-categorizations to illustrate different kinds of living situations in even greater detail (FEANTSA, n.d.). This more detailed definition of homelessness helps to enlarge the frame of people who fit into the description of homeless. Even though this development is praiseworthy, FEANTSA still uses homeless as the overall term for people without permanent residency. Another attempt to facilitate international comparison and help formulate targeted policy responses regarding homelessness is made by Sabine Springer (2000). She goes one step further as she proposes a different terminology and abolishing the term ‘homelessness’. According to Springer, as a home is not restricted to the housing situation in a socio-economic sense, the term ‘homeless’ cannot be seen without controversy. When using the term ‘homelessness’, more than only people’s housing situation needs to be understood (479-480).

What she proposes is to use the terms ‘houseless’ and ‘inadequate shelter’ as substitutes (Springer 2000, 480). At the core of Springer’s term ‘houseless’ are those who live without access to shelter: people living on the streets or other forms of rough sleeping combined with those finding temporary institutional places to sleep, like emergency shelters. The second group includes people living in ‘inadequate shelter’. This category is further divided into three sub-categories: ‘Concealed houselessness’, denoting that one takes shelter with relatives or friends; ‘at risk of houselessness’ including people threatened by eviction or release from an institution; and lastly, those living in ‘substandard housing’ (Springer 2000 in Kellett and Moore 2003, 126). The houseless population and the ones living in inadequate shelter are not static but characterized by a high frequency of mobility in time and place, and also moving from one housing situation to another over time (Springer 2000, 480). Springer’s categories are accordingly not static, and individuals would move between the groupings as their circumstances change over time. Through this porosity of categories and detailed differentiation, regional and cultural variations can be acknowledged and incorporated (Springer 2000 in Kellett and Moore 2003, 126). Springer’s (2000) separation into two categories of ‘houseless’ and ‘inadequate shelter’ has multiple reasons and goals. One is to raise a claim to policy makers to develop different forms of action for different groupings. These should include emergency actions for the houseless and sustainable policies and measures for all categories. What is needed for the policies and actions to be based on people’s needs are new methods of enumeration and data collection considerations. With this, it should be possible to develop a deep understanding of the causes and needs of these people and adequate solutions to be generated (482). Adding to the very detailed categorization of the ETHOS and the substitutional terminology developed by Springer, another proposition would be to additionally abolish the suffix less in both the terms ‘homeless’ and ‘houseless’.2 On January 14, 2014 the mobile soup kitchen OSL from Seattle published the entry “Homeless or Unhoused?” on their blog. According to their article, the label of ‘homeless’ has very unfortunate connotations. It implies that one does not have a home, is ‘less than’ compared to others, and often inadequately represents those who live ‘unhoused’. To reframe homeless people as unhoused is not only a change in language but also a change of perception. Often, the term ‘homeless’ is already inherently linked to assumptions of people being derelict, dirty, drug addicts, alcoholics, or criminals. OSL (2014) states that all of these assumptions are mostly unjust and in today’s unstable economic environment, anyone can find themselves living without shelter. Additionally, it could be said the term ‘unhoused’ implies that people are not being housed by someone. That there is an underlying responsibility to house the people who are currently without shelter. It would be a way of linguistically giving back the responsibility to the state to provide adequate shelter for every human being. So, the use of the term ‘unhoused’ within this thesis implies a demand to the state for taking responsibility to house people, simultaneously taking into consideration all of the categories proposed by either the ETHOS or Springer (2000).

2 The term ‘houseless’ was still used as a subcategory of ‘unhoused’, as no more appropriate term could be identified.

Figure 2: Definition of Unhoused

Within the fields of academia, popular-media, and policy discourses there are as many definitions of unhousedness as there are points of view. This being the case, there is still a significant lack of statistical information about those without shelter. The lack of appropriate data collection methods makes it additionally complicated to enumerate and estimate the number of unhoused people in different contexts. Reliable data about the unhoused population in Switzerland is a fundamental need of policy makers to find positive and sustainable solutions and actions. These should avoid ignorance or sup- pression of the visible signs of unhousedness and work in a more sustainable and long-term oriented way (Springer 2000, 476).

1.2 Notions of Home To be able to legitimize my claim that the term ‘homeless’ might be partly inadequate to describe the experience and meaning of unhousedness, an examination of the relative meanings and experiences of home is necessary. At current, home is increasingly perceived as a very complex concept with many layers. Nonetheless, Mallet (2004) argues that many scholarly works and public perceptions still predomi- nantly link contemporary White Western conceptions of a physical structure, such as a house or an apartment, with the notion of home (65). According to Lawrence (1987), these physical structures express the administrative, cultural, judicial, and sociopolitical rights of residents, visitors, neighbors, and strangers. He holds that from the perspectives of the law, economics, and politics, the tenure status is what makes a house a home (155). Mallett (2004) states that the house and the home are conflated not only in popular media, but also by governments in connection with certain social agendas. Through the conflation of the home, house, and the people that live within it, the burden of the responsibility

8 for citizen’s welfare is shifted away from the state and its institutions towards the home and the citizens. She argues that the tenure state is often linked to concepts of personal identity, socio-economic status, personal or familial security by the citizens themselves, and can provide a sense of place and belonging (66). The word home, originally meaning ‘one’s place of origin’, was only linked to one’s own domestic dwelling during the 16th century (Lappegard Hauge 2009, 28). Hareven (1993 in Mallett 2004) argues that the conception of home as a safe haven is integrally linked to the equally fluid concept of the nuclear family. In Europe, the concept emerged among middle-class households in the mid-eighteenth century. She recounts that this shift occurred as a consequence of industrialization, urbanization, and the related separation of family life and work. Before, the household has simultaneously served as the place of work. Only with the advent of industrialization did work become relocated outside of the household, according to Hareven. Thus, households were increasingly linked to a notion of home as a private, safe space (71). Among other things, these historical and social transformations have added to the common usage of the house and the home as interchangeable terms (Ioannidou 2019, 157). Moore (2007) adds that the concept of home as a physical unit delimited by walls and doors, reinforces notions of exclusion and inclusion. She points out that this nurtures the idea that we are at home, because the physical space grants us privacy, as well as the belief that if one can control just a small territory in this large world they have achieved something (149). But if we acknowledge that the house or the apartment are just a built structures allowing people to experience home, then we can start looking at home as a multi-dimensional concept or multi-layered phenomenon (Ioannidou 2019, 157; Mallett 2004, 68). The aim is to explore broader place and social relationships in order to move away from the perception of home as residence. Referring to homemaking in a physical space, Abdul Aziz and Sani Ahmad (2012) argue that the use and appropriation of space encourage attachment, care, and investment to create a place of home. People try to fill places with meaning and significance. They propose that an additional sense of home is achieved through conducting everyday activities and creating social relations within it. Abdul Aziz and Sani Ahmad generally perceive social relations as a key factor in the process of making a home that includes establishing, maintaining, and enlarging social relationships. They name attachment as an essential element in the act of homemaking. Attachment refers to the ability of people to relate to their social, as well as physical surroundings (270-75). According to Simone (2017), the notion of home can be regarded as one of the most significant expressions of place, even if there is no universal definition of it. Home is a concept or phenomenon that has relevance to almost every human being. It bears the potential of either a confirmation or denial of one’s individual fundamental sense of belonging in the world (102). Mallett (2004) assumes that the term functions as a source for complex, at times contradictory or interrelated socio-cultural ideas about people’s relationships with one another, and with different places, spaces, or things (84). She dares to establish a definition of home, trying to answer the question of how home is, should, or could be understood:

It can be a dwelling place or a lived space of interaction between people, places, things; or perhaps both. The boundaries of home can be permeable and/or impermeable. Home can be singular and/or plural, alienable and/or inalienable, fixed and stable and/or mobile and changing. It can be associated with feelings of comfort, ease intimacy, relaxation and security and/or oppression, tyranny and persecution. It can or can not be associated with family. Home

can be an expression of one’s (possibly fluid) identity and sense of self and/or one’s body might be home to the self. It can constitute belonging and/or create a sense of marginalisation and estrangement. Home can be given and/or made, familiar and/or strange, an atmosphere and/or an activity, a relevant and/or irrelevant concept. It can be fundamental and/or extraneous to existence. Home can be an ideological construct and/or an experience of being in the world. It can be a crucial site for examining relations of production and consumption, globalisation and nationalism, citizenship and human rights, and the role of government and governmentality. Equally it can provide a context for analysing ideas and practices about intimacy, family, kinship, gender, ethnicity, class, age and sexuality. (84)

This extensive definition of what a home is, should, or could be includes the suggestion that home might also be an expression of one’s subjectivity in the world. Therefore, it could be perceived as a space where people feel at ease. The space could be a physical one, an emotional environment, a geographical location, a political system, or a combination of all the above (Tucker 1994 in Mallett 2004, 82). Moore (2007) adds that the home can consist of many different and individual qualities at once, that can be social, personal, physical, and cultural. However, it is usually experienced as a whole. Home is both a way of expressing one’s individual identity and a way of belonging to a culture. It is therefore important to bring together the broader social and cultural roles of home in society with the experiential significance (145). Finally, adding to home as a multi-layered concept, Blunt and Dowling (2006) conceptualize home as a space that various feelings are attached to – both positive and negative. They state that home can only be thought of as a process of creating and understanding forms of dwelling and belonging. A home does not simply exist but is made (23). Many people spend their lives in search of the ultimate home. They reside in the gap between what they momentarily call home, and their ideal home in which they would be completely fulfilled (Tucker 1994 in Mallett 2004, 69). The idea of home is on the one hand an individual ideal to aspire to, and be inspired by. On the other hand, it is also a socially and politically imposed ideal that can constrain people from arriving (Kellett and Moore 2003, 128). The ideal home is often defined as a very idealistic and romanticized space that does not correspond with the reality of most people by far. Moore (2007) says, “Home is continually mythicized as an almost universal site of utopian longing” (148). What can arise is a tension between an individual imagination of what the relationships in and to home should be like, and what they really are. Apart from the past individual experiences and guiding individual purposes, home is also a shared cultural goal. Even without a shelter people are experiencing, remem- bering, or desiring home (148-51). The idea of home is therefore an assemblage of our past experiences, our individual aspirations of what it should be like, and the conception that society and politics impose on citizens. The ideal home is therefore often linked to physical structures and a secure tenure status (see Chapter 5.1). According to Moore (2007), the importance of home is additionally brought to the forefront in instances of disruption, loss, upheaval, and trauma in people’s lives (145). Lappegard Hauge (2009) states that a lack of a sense of home can be related to various factors, such as temporariness in accommodation, dissatisfaction with the physical design of housing, psychological tension among living partners, or others. There are a variety of factors involved when achieving, and therefore also in feeling the loss of a sense of home (28).

The concept of home itself is multivariate, ambivalent, and contradictory and refers to a set of complex and dynamic experiences. Thereby, directly opposing it to homelessness or conceptualizing unhoused people as people without a home becomes less viable. It would be too short-sighted to deny a unified group of people a sense of home, therefore also denying them a sense of belonging in the world. Home as the physical, private space where people can relax and retreat is founded on ideas of the distinction between the public and the private, the inside and the outside world. Mallett (2004) maintains, that according to this dichotomy, the inside of the residence represents a comfortable, secure, and safe confined space. The outside, in contrast, is conceived as an imposing, threatening, and dangerous space in need of regulation (70). This dichotomy falls short of representing the complex reality of public and private spheres. In making the argument of home as a complex concept and reality, it can be concluded that home is no singular space or state of being but rather a multiplicity (79). This more complex definition of home does not define home as necessarily part of the private sphere. It includes a multiplicity of forms of dwelling and being in the world into the notion of home and simultaneously opens up questions of privacy and publicness.

1.3 Public Space For this research it was crucial and most obvious to investigate the questions of publicness within the city, in this case the city of Bern. Don Mitchell (2003) addresses the question of why the city is particu- larly interesting in terms of questions of publicness:

[Publicness] demands heterogeneity and the space of the city […] assured a thick fabric of heterogeneity, one in which encounters with difference were guaranteed. But for the encounter with difference to really succeed, then, […] the right to inhabit the city – by different people and different groups – had always to be struggled for. This is the second issue. The city is the place where difference lives. And finally, in the city, different people with different projects must necessarily struggle with one another over the shape of the city, the terms of access to the public realm, and even the rights of citizenship. Out of this struggle the city as a work […] emerges, and new modes of living, new modes of inhabiting, are invented. (18)

Within the landscape of the city, public spaces are the spaces to which all people have or should have legal access. Amster (2008) considers “streets, parks, sidewalks, as well as places of public accommodation” to be part of the public sphere. He notes that public spaces have often been important sites for communication, contestation, and community building (44). According to Mitchell (2003), public spaces are often not perceived as public owing to their preordained ‘publicness’, but because of the actions of the groups inhabiting the space and thereby creating space (35). If public space is seen as a source of unrestricted access, it stands at the core of pluralism, political participation, and personal freedom. But it has simultaneously always been a space of exclusion, therefore raising the question whether public space has ever been truly public (Mitchell 2003, 45). Has not the assumption of an all-inclusive space always been and still is an ideological tool of the few who are allowed to participate? Public space is defined by its appearance of open access and the impossibility of it. For every conceivable city space there exists a set of rules and regulations concerning its access. These rules and regulations are imposed by and reflective of the interests of the ones who own such spaces. If the space is owned by a private institution or an individual, the in- or exclusion of people has

11 to take place according to the rules of the state. That being said, questions of in- and exclusion within urban space are ultimately always a question of state power (Belina 2003, 51-52). But public spaces are rarely defined by a dichotomy of in- and exclusion or singular, monolithic scripts. They are spaces determined by multiple modes of inhabitation and varying responses to diversity and heterogeneity. The ad hoc intersections of the different layers of the social, political, symbolic, material, and bodily create new ways of constructing and inhabiting publicness. Qian (2020) defines public space as situated and lived, meaning that every public space has its own rhythm of use and regulations (81). He stresses that the produced and inhabited spaces are often very different from the theorized ones. Public spaces are characterized by being spaces of contestation, therefore constituting and negotiating urban processes and politics. He sees much value in characterizing publicness as contingent, indeterminate, and amorphous. The value of doing so lies in characterizing public space by its co-temporality. This includes a functioning and exchange between heterogenous rhythms of activities. Additionally, it lets us appreciate a formation and existence of various publics at once. Pro- cesses of exchange, interaction, and practice are not geared towards an invariably inclusive space. Furthermore, it helps us to accept that a public space is not something easily measurable and quanti- tatively capturable. Instead, we need to construct nuanced, individual, often incomplete biographies of public spaces as products of human agency, labor, and affect. Last but not least, Qian stresses that this perception of public space sits more easily with a diverse configuration of public space in urban contexts beyond the West. It allows for an expansion of knowledge on how publicness is designed and practiced in different contexts. Such a situated approach promises a more conceptual inclusive- ness and nuances instead of discarding the concept of public space all at once (81-83). If the idea of public space and its crucial role in the urban everyday needs to be maintained, and a rethinking of the city is what is desired, then a continuing struggle over and for public space has to take place. Mitchell (2003) sees the need to search for design alternatives and a radical rethinking of exclusions resulting from outdated ideas of zoning, real estate values, and private ownership (5). Litscher (2017) perceives the public realm as a space of opportunity. The opportunity for encounters with different people and experiencing a variety of facets of our society. These diverse engagements also bring with it the need to be prepared to encounter the unexpected in the urban landscapes, and not immediately associate it with danger and a demand for control. Currently, many of the experiences with the unexpected are perceived as being unpleasant, a nuisance, or incalculable. Such associations inevitably influence the politics or policies of space in a way that asks for control and regulation (129). Mitchell (2003) claims that over the past decades, a combination of environmental changes, behavior modification, and stringent policing has been applied as a solution to the perceived ills of urban public space (2). Therein pursuing a desire to make sure that public space stays public, whilst simultaneously making sure that it is not used by the undesirable or unexpected user.

1.4 Criminalization of Public Space In recent years cities have established a variety of tactics to control public spaces. Measures such as security guards, surveillance cameras, regulations monitoring the behavior and access, and a growing reliance on increased policing have established a state power to control who is desired in such spaces (Amster 2008, 46). According to Belina (1999), the ideological legitimation of such policies in achieved through the filling of certain spaces with meaning. This includes the connotation of a space with criminality, even

12 though it is quite obvious that a space itself cannot be criminal (60-61). Belina (2011) notes, with this, a space is either seen as being related to criminal activity or made the starting point of intensified police work. Both of these practices often concurrently criminalize the subjects inhabiting such spaces, as this spatially selective police work is often also socially selective. Through it, a space-specific nor- mality is established. This can manifest itself in various ways. Either the space and the people within it are associated with danger and nuisance, so the space’s normal state is a reason to police it. Or there is a subject that is abnormal to a certain space and therefore worth being policed (211, 216). Addition- ally, the power of the owner has to be significant enough to take this connotation as a legitimate reason for increased policing of such spaces and its subjects (Belina 2017, 30). Belina (2017) notes that the areas identified as criminal spaces are mostly quite similar ones. It is either the areas where poor people live or endangered spaces. Endangered spaces are spaces where poverty is visible but not desirable, because it does not belong there. They are mostly situated within areas that are under the pressure of being upgraded and in need of cleansing. It can also be spaces of extensive consumption, political representation, or where the well-being of the rich is bothered by the visible presence of poverty (30). Politics as well as economics have clear interests in the spatialization of a security and cleanliness discourse in their enterprise called city. This is done using spatial categories to abstract social issues. Many of their interests can be summarized under the two points of firstly, the accumulation of symbolic capital for the global competition, and secondly, the intensification of social control (Belina 1999, 60). In order to achieve their first interest, a physically and socially adequate imagery of the city is needed. Therefore, visible poverty has no space within the city and needs to be evicted (Belina 2017, 34). Mitchell (2003) adds that movements like the eviction of undesired people in order to regulate public space lead to a very specific and highly constricted sort of public sphere. He speaks of a highly sani- tized city and a fully deracinated politics – a politics that puts aesthetics above the simple need of some people to survive. They tend towards the notion of a security state through the elimination of a class of people who have nowhere to be but in public (9).

1.5 Criminalization of Public Subjects Unhoused people or people who use public space as an extended living room are nowadays and have throughout history quite literally been defined as people without a right place to be (Amster 2008, 6). There is an increased control of unhoused people’s mundane actions in public space, such as sleeping, eating, sitting, or begging. At the same time, they are increasingly being banished from private properties. As the landscape of contemporary cities is made up of public and private space, there is no place to be for unhoused people. Kawash (1998) adds that being without a permanent residence means to be without that private space where subjects within our society are supposed to conduct certain activities in, withdrawn from the public sphere (326). According to Pospech (2020), this creates an ideological discrepancy within the strongly rooted notion of a free, voluntary public space. Activities that are unproblematic in themselves, like sleeping or sitting, become morally polluted through being misplaced on the public-private space axis (3). Being constrained to exist in public space means to be a constant target of stigmatization, regulations, criminalization, and expulsion. Kawash (1998) states that “the question of homelessness is therefore necessarily always also a question of public space – of who the public is, of who may inhabit public space, and of how such space will be constituted and controlled” (325).

The public practices of people who use public space as an extended living room are where poverty becomes visible, public, and therefore open to judgement and action. Gerrard and Farrugia (2015) state that the sight and scene of unhousedness remains central to the social responses to unhousedness, poverty, and inequality in a more general sense. The multiple experiences and forms of living without a permanent residency are by no means limited to rough sleeping. Nonetheless, the popular understanding and representation of it still typically draws on the visible forms as a symbolic marker of poverty and destitution (2220-21). The sight of poverty is something everyone sees and encounters. In various fashions everyone also responds to it: some stare, some look away, some ignore it, some give money, buy food or street magazines, some smile or talk, and some stay silent. Nevertheless, the visibility of poverty is still viewed as a disturbance of our regular everyday life in public spaces. Gerrard and Farrugia (2015) add that for most people the street and public spaces are still generally perceived as spaces to travel through or consume, and not as places to linger or be at home (2223). In our everyday lives, unhoused people have become exceedingly obvious and transparent, whilst also visible and invisible at the same time (Miller 1991, 164 in Amster 2008, 40). According to Gerrard and Farrugia (2015), it is this ghostly presence of poverty that reminds us of our own privilege in an uncomfortable way (2223). Through this, people who use public spaces as a part of their home become problematic. Not because of their complex situations, but because their physical presence and moral visibility imply a certain concern for safety, cleanliness, and the visual attractiveness of a public space (Pospech 2020, 11). The need for order therefore trumps individual or collective liberty. It is the right of the housed residents or the visitors to move through the city without any sight that might trouble them, that needs to be guaranteed (Mitchell 2003,15). There exists a common governing mentality that is one of ‘preventative exclusion’. The act of exclusion is pursued at the expense of inclusion, and vice versa (Pospech 2020, 2). Pospech (2020) adds that this increasing concern for safety, cleanliness, and order has resulted in the development of an increasing intolerance towards small scale deviances in public space. A shift is observable, whereby criminalization moves from actual criminal conduct towards sub-criminal incivility and nuisance. He states that “the new legal moralism of these policies […] contributes to the readiness to demand legal solutions to problems where subjective feeling(s) of harm may result from aesthetic rather than moral concerns” (2). Even though these incivility policies are not officially aimed at certain groups, they subtly refer to them. Many of these policies use a language of inclusion in order to exclude the ones that do not have any other space to go than the public sphere. According to Litscher (2017), such space affecting policies that are designed to prevent and exclude the unpleasant, nuisance, and unexpected, are increasingly accompanied by changing legal frame- works, measures of control by the police force, and changing perceptions of the society. Through this variety of transformations, the spatial practice of different actors is gradually disciplined and controlled. Litscher adds that the possibilities of appropriation and use, as well as the perception and design of urban space are thus changing (129).

1.6 Inclusion as Exclusion in Public Space An end to this movement of discipline and control is not really in sight and is noticeably becoming the norm of urban life. The in- and excluding processes are and have always been one of the typical fea- tures of the public realm and inherently render the city a fragmented and unequal space. What has changed on the other hand, is the way such policies are formulated. In many instances a terminology

14 of inclusion is used to manifest processes of subtle exclusion. There is a need to reconceptualize the concept of public space in order to get away from dichotomies such as inclusion and exclusion being mutually exclusive. In his recent article Qian (2020) notes that we live in a time where rampant urbanization and urban transition re-shape the physical and social textures of cities. More and more, societies are entering a phase of super-diversity and hypermobility. For people to navigate the exposure to bewildering diver- sities and difference requires more reflexivity, coordination, and techniques. With these developments, the regulation of public space is increasingly concerned with the active shaping of seemingly inclusive spaces and the implementation of a situated code of conduct. These processes replace the apparent displacement of people disturbing the order, cleanliness, or safety of public spaces (77-78). Qian (2020) argues for an understanding of publicness as contingent, fluid, and amorphous. An understanding that presence in public space is an ongoing unfolding that is waiting to be unpacked by situated and nuanced empirical work, rather than an end-state. That inclusion and exclusion are shaped by relations of co-constitution and co-evolution (79). He therefore problematizes the dichotomy of in- and exclusion by stating that it can be challenged and transgressed. This starting position is important to appreciate the fluidity and complexity of the public sphere. He observes that recently, the state’s disciplinary and punitive power has focused on the creation and management of publics, rather than the mere imposition of power. They have implemented a sight of inclusion and participation to achieve a mobilization of exclusion. Through these measures, the state subtly excludes the behaviors and subjects that do not fit into this inclusionary definition of public space (87). Qian notices “discourses of inclusion, participation, and the creation of unthreatening, empowered publics that justify the exercise of exclusionary power” (88). These textures of power are also induced by everyday politics and cultural norms. Specific behaviors believed to disrupt the order and normalness of public space are targeted. Thereby, regulations do not have to directly criminalize or de-legitimize the social or political status of certain people. Many then see these regulations of public space not as an abrupt and unexpected exclusion, but as a set of standardized and negotiated conditions to be included in the public sphere (89). Qian notes that adding to the above, some degree of exclusion can ironically also open spaces to differences and mutual respect even if it is at odds with the accessibility of public space for everyone. He mentions the example of a women’s bath, where men are excluded. In this context a public free from masculine intervention and the formation of a subaltern counterpublic is granted. So, it is possible that in some instances exclusion might be justifiable, but only if it enables value and identity formation (90). As value and identity formation are difficult to measure, it is also hard to say in which instances exclusion could be valuable. Additionally, this argument could easily be hijacked by any group of people to justify their exclusive right to a certain public space. Therefore, it is important to take a closer look at the inclusionary measures fostering a subtle exclusion of certain groups of people in contemporary cities. This is done in Chapter 2.3, using the example of the norm of expulsion in Bern.

2. Contextualizing Unhousedness in Bern, Switzerland

To be able to grasp the general situation of precarity in housing and unhousedness in Switzerland, this chapter first discusses the situation of Basel as an exemplary situation for the whole country. This is done as the paper, “Obdachlosigkeit, Wohnungslosigkeit und prekäres Wohnen. Ausmass, Profil und Bedarf in der Region Basel” (“Homelessness, unhousedness, and precarious housing. Extent, profile, and demand in the Basel region”) by Drilling, Dittmann, and Bischoff (2019) is one of the only attempts to capture the topic of unhousedness in all of Switzerland. As the research to my thesis is based in the city of Bern, the housing market in Switzerland and Bern, as well as the document “Assistance for Unhoused People: Goals and Measures” containing the ‘Concept Shelter’ by the city of Bern (2009), are discussed. The following section is taking a closer look at the formulation and functioning of policies regulating public space in Bern. Even though the norm of expulsion was not specifically mentioned in the interviews, it serves as a powerful example of the inclusionary wording of such policies. These formulations are used to subtly exclude certain people from public spaces, a fact that was closely examined in Chapter 1.6. To additionally gain a more hopeful perspective regarding the diversification of public space in Bern, the strategies of Ursula Wyss, the manager of the Direktion für Tiefbau, Verkehr und Stadtgrün (TVS) (Directorate of Civil Engineering, Traffic, and Green Urban Spaces) of Bern, are discussed by means of her position paper (2018). To further contextualize my thesis, the final section discusses the current (2020) coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic. Therefore, the local newspapers of Bern have been analyzed on their reporting about unhousedness in combination with the pandemic.

2.1 Hidden Forms and Figures of Unhousedness As Switzerland is a relatively small country and the conditions in its major cities are quite comparable, the paper that is discussed in the following section can be regarded as relevant to the context of the whole country. Drilling, Dittmann, and Bischoff’s (2019) paper is one of the only scholarly works looking at and analyzing unhousedness in Switzerland. The authors interviewed 469 unhoused people within twelve institutions for unhoused people and several experts during a period of almost two years in the region of Basel. From these people, 81 percent identify as male and only 19 percent as female. Over 80 percent of the interviewed people are between the age of 25 and 65. Approximately half of the people who are unhoused do not have a Swiss passport. The researchers define unhousedness according to the European Typology in Homelessness and Housing Exclusion (ETHOS). This typology differentiates between roofless, houseless, and insecure living. People sleeping on the street, living in emergency shelters, women’s shelters, refugee centers, temporarily living with friends or family, and many more are included in the definition of either roofless, houseless, or insecure living. This is very important, as 206 people (43.9 percent) are stated to currently live within these ETHOS categories. Another 156 people have been living within these categories in the past. From these 206 people who are currently unhoused, a third is reported as staying at a friend or family member’s place. Around 18 percent are living in an institution for people affected by housing exclusion, another 14 percent live in an emergency shelter for unhoused people, and 13 percent are sleeping outside in public spaces. The remaining 25 percent are either living in an asylum center, a provisional living situation like a caravan, or an emergency apartment provided by the city of Basel (16). It can be seen that it is very important to include the ETHOS categories in a thesis discussing themes related to unhousedness in Switzerland.

There are many different forms of unhousedness in Switzerland; the most well-known form of sleeping rough within public space is by far not the most common one. To be able to grasp the dimension of unhousedness in Switzerland, the more hidden forms have to be considered as well.

Figure 3: Figures and Forms of Unhousedness in Switzerland

Concerning the reasons that led to people’s unhousedness, most of the respondents mentioned multidimensional situations that led to their current living situation. The most frequently mentioned are financial issues, mostly due to the loss of a job, making the termination of a lease of an apartment more likely. Health issues and relationship problems were other factors that were mentioned quite frequently. Other issues that led to people’s current living situation were the experience of coming to Switzerland as a refugee, problems with the residency status, and imprisonment. Many of these issues when combined are part of the reason of losing fixed domicile, leading to a downwards spiral of financial and various other challenges (Drilling, Dittmann, and Bischoff 2019, 7). The authors mention the tremendous importance of the topic of unhousedness in the context of Switzerland. It is therefore surprising how little empirical research has been done and is available. This results in a shockingly small explanatory power on behalf of the state to defend certain social policies. The state, as well as professional actors within this field, are lacking scientifically grounded positions to fight certain imagery and stereotypes about unhousedness within politics and society (Drilling, Dittmann, and Bischoff 2019, 9).

2.2 Bern’s Housing Market When looking at the city of Bern, where the research for this thesis took place, there is little to no data available regarding the unhoused population living here. There are various factors that need to be included when trying to contextualize precarity in housing. In Switzerland, the average median income was 4’917 francs of net wage per month in the year 2016 (Egli 2019). In August 2020, the unemployment rate in Switzerland was at 3.3 percent and in Bern a little lower at 2.6 percent. This is a fairly low percentage in comparison with other European countries (Statista 2020). It can be said that in Switzerland home ownership is not the norm. Around 65 percent of the Swiss population are private renters. About 58 percent of these properties are privately owned and let by individual landlords. The rest is let by either non-profit providers (14 percent), staff pension funds (seven percent), or construction companies (five percent). The non-profit sector comprises around 1’500 organizations, primarily co-operatives, but also public authorities, associations, and foundations (Lawson 2009, 47). The federal government regards this well-established non-profit social rental sector as a vehicle for the provision of housing for socially and economically disadvantaged households (55). There is no explicit national system of demand subsidies for social housing in Switzerland, despite the very high housing costs. The provision of subsidized housing varies between cantons and municipali- ties. Throughout Switzerland, only three percent of all dwellings are state owned social housing that are part of the non-profit housing sector. The eligibility for social housing is broadly defined, and there are waiting lists due to the limited supply (Lawson 2009, 49-54). In the city of Bern there are 77’332 apartments. Only 1.5 percent counts as ‘affordable housing’ according to the state (Stadt Bern September 2020, and Gemeinderat Stadt Bern 2019). Municipal apartments count as ‘affordable housing’ with monthly rents for a one-bedroom apartment up to 500 francs and a four-bedroom apartment up to 1’100 francs. In order to be approved for such an apartment, a person needs to be registered with the city of Bern for at least two years, and there are several other restrictions in terms of rooms per person and income (Stadt Bern June 2020). Useful for comparison is the average monthly rent of an apartment on the regular housing market in the city of Bern in November 2019: a one-bedroom apartment cost 717 francs (947 francs in the inner city) and a four- bedroom apartment cost 1’534 francs (2’160 in the inner city). Since 2003, the rent prices in the city of Bern have risen by 20.9 percent (Stadt Bern March 2020). This rise can partly be explained by a shortage of apartments and the challenging economic situation. Additionally, not enough apartments have been built in comparison to the increase of people moving to the major cities of Switzerland (Wiget and Lutz 2020). According to predictions, the growth of the city of Bern will be 12 percent until 2030, meaning an additional 17’000 inhabitants moving to the city (Wyss 2018, 14). For people who are currently unhoused, this makes it even more difficult to find housing.

The Concept Shelter

In Bern, there is a section of the city council called Wohn- und Obdachlosenhilfe (Assistance for Un- housed People). According to their website, this department of social services prevents homelessness. They support and council people who do not have a fixed domicile or are in danger of losing their apartment (Stadt Bern 2009). In trying to find out more about their goals and measures, the only document found on their website is the “Wohn- und Obdachlosenhilfe: Ziele und Massnahmen” (Assis- tance for Unhoused People: Goals and Measures; published on September 2, 2009).

Taking a closer look at what they call the ‘Concept Shelter’ (Stadt Bern 2009), the first thing that’s apparent is the vagueness of the document. In defining the term ‘unhoused’ they write that “[it includes] people that temporarily or permanently do not have a reasonable space to live or sleep” (4). What follows is an explanation of the housing market in Bern and what they call “the normal case of the free housing market” (5). This section also includes social housing working with the principles of subsidiarity as a support measure from the state. Then, there is affordable housing (Günstiger Wohnraum), which was discussed earlier (see Chapter 2.2). Additionally, the concept of emergency apartments (Notwohnungskonzept) has been implemented since January 2006. These apartments are rented to either families, individuals, or institutions for unhoused people for a limited amount of time. In Bern, there are currently four of these apartments available (5-6). The strategy of the city tries to target a prevention of homelessness, goal oriented living support, and support of living competencies (7). To realize their goals, the city of Bern signed service contracts with four private institutions. All operative responsibility has been delegated to these institutions. They provide emergency shelter for unhoused people, women, and people with substance addictions. Their offerings range from emergency beds, support of people’s daily structures to consulting functions. From the institutions who work on a contract basis with the city there is a total of 200 places to live and/or sleep available. The emergency shelter (Passantenheim Bern), that has a very low threshold to access, offers 43 places to sleep. In 2008, this shelter counted 15’713 overnight stays (Stadt Bern 2009, 12-15), meaning that the emergency shelter was full every night of the year. It is not impossible to assume that there could have been more people who needed a bed to sleep in. This cooperation on a contract basis between the city of Bern and non-governmental institutions can surely be very productive. Nonetheless, the last report on the goals and measures of the city concerning unhousedness in Bern was published more than ten years ago from now (September 2020). Assessing the planned measures of the ‘Concept Shelter’ (Stadt Bern 2009) a few major rifts could be identified. The first of the listed measures is to prevent homelessness. This formulation is very vague and therefore hard to implement. Additionally, what is set as a goal is affordable housing in the city center, controlled release of cheap apartments to those in need, stronger cooperation with private real estate companies, a higher degree of inclusion of the institutions working in fields of unhousedness and housing support, and information of the public about the said measures (17). Most of these measures have been mentioned as demands to the state by the interview partners and can therefore be identified as relevant (see Chapter 4 and 5). Nonetheless, the formulation of the goals throughout the document is far too vague and does not hold the city accountable enough. Something else that is quite striking is the terminology used in the document. To describe unhoused people and their environments, terms like ‘socially depraved’ (sozial verwahrlost) and ghettoization are used. In 2020, this seems like a very outdated and inadequate terminology to describe people who are full members of our society and city.

2.3 Exemplifying Regulation and Creation of Public Space in Bern As many of the research participants have described public space as their second home, it makes sense to look at measures concerning said spaces and the way they are formulated and implemented within the city of Bern. This will be done with the example of the norm of expulsion in Bern. Afterwards, the

19 perception and conceptualization of public space in Bern is presented by examining the position paper by Ursula Wyss (2018).

The Norm of Expulsion

Even though the following example has not been specifically mentioned in any of the conducted interviews, it serves as a very enlightening example of how current policies are formulated and executed. Like in various other cities, there are many measures and instruments of spatial politics to regulate public space in the city of Bern. Most of them refer to a seemingly normal regime of control character- istic to many urban landscapes. These measures of security, regulation, and cleanliness are mostly defined on a cantonal level and loosely formulated, leaving space for interpretation. One of these measures is the norm of expulsion. The first legal norm of expulsion in Bern was formulated in 1998 and makes it possible to expel a group of at least 3 people from a previously defined, central urban space. The expulsion is usually valid for three months and linked to a fine that is raised in the case of a breach of the expulsion. Until today, valid reasons for an expulsion are a justified suspicion of disruption or endangerment of the public security, order, and cleanliness. This suspicion can be expressed by either a private person or by police patrolling the area. People can also be expelled form a public space if they disturb other people or if other people are hindered from using the public space for its intended use. This norm is mostly enforced in very central or upgraded urban spaces that are also touristic, made for consumption, or must maintain an image (Litscher 2017, 131- 32). None of these reasons are actual crimes, and it can be seen that the values and norms of a proper city image are increasingly influencing the spatial policies. The expelled often times neither committed a crime nor did they intend to do so. It is rather a trespassing of a social norm, through which legal actions are sanctioned to maintain the entrepreneurial city. Ultimately, this norm exemplifies how people can be expelled from public spaces in the name of the public interest, if it happens to save the ‘orderly’ users of public spaces from appearances that could seem threatening or a nuisance (133-34). Additionally, the norm of expulsion is a societal expression of how to deal with the social other. It is referring to structural power relations, different values and norms concerning for example safety, order, cleanliness, and consumption and therefore the substance of society (Litscher et al. 2012, 6). To be able to grasp such measures, a multidimensional, relational, and interactive understanding of in- and exclusion is crucial. Even though this measure might sound like a quite direct form of exclusion, it is remarkably subtle in its formulation and implementation. If people can be expelled from being in a public space in the case that they hinder others from using it in its intended use, the use of a space of some is accepted as the norm. A public space should be a process of interactions and thereby achieve its publicness. If some of the modes of using such a space are excluded from the norm, this phrase becomes inclusionary only for the ‘orderly’ users of such a space. Litscher (2017) adds that this spatial practice of in- and exclusion is hardly registered by city inhabitants nor by people using the public space in an ‘orderly’ manner. The actual practice of cleansing public spaces takes place in a very subtle way. In the everyday landscape of the city, certain people and practices are disappearing because they seemed threatening and disturbing (139). Exclusion takes place under the guise of including everyone in public spaces and making everyone feel safe and sound – except this everyone only includes some. According to Litscher, the remaining included encounter disturbance- and irritation-free urban realities. This, in turn, influences social norms and ideals of what a city should look, feel, and be like. Nowadays, alcoholics, drug addicts, and poor people are only

20 visible in certain designated areas of Swiss cities, and even here they are barely tolerated. So, a con- frontation with the unexpected or undesirable is happening less and less in or through the urban anymore (140). There are other measures being taken in the name of security, order, and cleanliness within Swiss cities. Many of them take shape in the form of mostly professional actors who are equipped with a restricted and goal-oriented power to sanction. They receive a specific order of education and order from the city level that mostly includes patrolling the local, urban hotspots. There, situations should be de-escalated through mediation and strategies of communication. In the city of Bern these actors are called PINTO (Prevention, Intervention, and Tolerance) and have been introduced in 2005 as a side measure of the norm of expulsion. They ensure that public spaces are accessible for everyone, enable a peaceful coexistence of various groups of society in public spaces, and increase the feeling of security in Bern through information and mediation (Litscher 2017, 140-41). This is another wonderful example of the formulation of such measures with a vocabulary of inclusion. Even if their connection to the norm of expulsion can seem marginal, their presence in urban hotspots in Bern is crucial. For everyone to feel safe, and guarantee cleanliness and order, PINTO’s presence and mediation reminds the ‘disorderly’ people of the threat of being excluded from their right to be in a public space. To conclude, Litscher (2017) adds that all of the above disciplining, ordering, and educational measures do not have any crime, criminal intention, or a measurable feeling of insecurity as a base of legitimation. It is private sensitivity and individual or state interest that serves as a justification for these interferences. But especially in urban spaces that should be legally and politically accessible to everyone, the normative ideals and norms in the name of public interest should be questioned and critically reflected (145). This machinery of measures is counting on a good and right integration and adapta- tion, and an attempt to discipline the urban society. What is needed is an increased understanding and ways of dealing with the divergent ways of using public space, without implementing measures of exclusion or seeming inclusion for certain participants (Litscher et al. 2012, 9).

Perception and Conceptualization of Public Space

Often, these disciplining measures are also accompanied by built, creative interventions that are created to invite some and repulse others who are perceived as being disruptive. These measures often target the acts of some to remain in one place in central spaces of the city. One of the ever-present burning questions about built, creative interventions in Bern is where and where not to place benches. The benches in the area surrounding the main train station of Bern have repeatedly led to heated tempers. The area around the train station includes the space in front of the Heiliggeistkirche (Holy Ghost Church), where many people who see public spaces as a part of their home spend their entire days. For a long time, the attempt was to create as little opportunities as possible to linger in the inner city of Bern. Many of the options to sit down in public spaces have been removed and the train station only included two emergency chairs. In August 2019, the city installed round benches on the station square right next to the Heiliggeistkirche. On this occasion, Radio RaBe conducted an interview with Ursula Wyss (August 30, 2019). Wyss says that by not providing any seating, certain people are automatically excluded from public space. So, she perceives it as a very fundamental tool the state can provide. Wyss sees these benches as an instrument to allow for this space to be used by both people passing by and people

21 who stay there the whole day. In general, Wyss regards a train station as one of the most urban spaces that exist in a city. It is a space where a variety of diverse people spend time and pass through. She thinks that it is one of the essences of a city to encounter people who are different from oneself. The station’s square is exactly such a space where some have to tolerate others, and for the ones who appreciate it, encounters are made possible (RaBe-Info 2019). In her position paper (June 2018), Ursula Wyss presents her vision of an inclusive public space in Bern. In general, the TVS3 is responsible for the planning, construction, and maintenance of public spaces in Bern. Wyss is convinced that there is a great potential of attractive spaces to linger and use in a diverse manner in the inner city. According to Wyss (2018), the central question is: “How do we create an attractive public space for everyone and what does attractive mean to whom?” (3). Addition- ally, she argues that questions regarding public space in Bern become increasingly important in the present day. The more people are aggregated in the city center as a space of habitation, leisure, and work, the more they use the public space surrounding their environments. With ever-rising rent prices in the city of Bern, the amount of private space an individual expects to inhabit is shrinking. As a way of compensation for smaller living spaces, public space is increasingly used as an extended living room. More and more private activities are carried out in public space (3-4). Throughout her argument of an intensified use of public space for private activities, it can be seen that she more often talks of the nuclear family or middle-class individual, than people without permanent residency. Nonetheless, she makes a plea for a social mixing and opportunities of participation for everyone when it comes to streets, squares, greeneries, and other public spaces. To achieve such a diverse and lively public space, Wyss (2018) establishes certain elements that are required. First and foremost, people need to feel safe in the space. It also needs to be clean, provide ample opportunities for sitting as well as something to look at. Additionally, there could be an opportunity to eat and drink something (4-5). The direction of Wyss’s thoughts sounds very nice and progressive. Despite this, she tends to fall back into the vocabulary used in policies, that through the notion of inclusion foster a subtle exclusion of certain people. This is a city image of a productive and entrepreneurial public space. Most people will probably respond well to this, however some are left out. It is still a generalization of all public spaces being the same. Wyss (2018) stresses encouraging the social function of public space, focusing on individuals and their perceptions of it. To promote an appropriation of public spaces through citizens enhances an identification with these said spaces. So, according to her, it is essential that these possibilities of appropriation are low-threshold and accessible to everyone. It needs to be considered that if public space is only thought of as built environment, there is a high risk of creating an aesthetically impressive but socially dysfunctional space. Wyss’ aim is to achieve that people spend more time in public spaces. So, what needs to be addressed throughout the whole process is the requirements of the current participants of a space (6-7). The position paper repeatedly emphasizes that the current understanding of public space should be linked to the term ‘city by the people’. A public space that takes into account the emotional and social aspects, needs to be thought by the people from the beginning. Wyss admits that this requires increased and new modes of participation. Currently, the participants are those who can verbally express themselves, have enough leisure time, and know about their options regarding participation. But to include the needs and creativity of everyone, the modes of participation need to

3 Direktion für Tiefbau, Verkehr und Stadtgrün (Directorate of Civil Engineering, Traffic, and Green Urban Spaces of Bern)

22 focus on the lived experiences, testing, and taking part. The easiest way of doing this is through easy and low-threshold appropriation of public space (19-23). This rethinking of participation is quite praiseworthy. Even if people without permanent residence have not been mentioned in this position paper, they could be included in these new forms of participation with some additional effort. Wyss takes into consideration that to actually participate in the creation of public space, one has to be aware of the options to do so. One measure that has resulted from this position paper and the efforts of Ursula Wyss is the Kom- petenzzentrum öffentlicher Raum KORA (Center of Competence for Public Space). On their website, it is stated that they promote interdisciplinary collaboration between various departments of the city of Bern and the society. The center should serve as a platform to realize and test innovation measures at short-notice and help realize non-commercial projects in public space. As a constant process of learning, the findings and realizations from temporary and short-term projects are supposed to flow into long-term projects. The work of KORA is public, meaning they visit the places they deal with to co- work with various partners such as citizens, neighborhood committees, and external partners. Through these innovative processes and an open exchange with many actors of public spaces, KORA aims at a socially sustainable design in Bern (Stadt Bern 2020). KORA might take an exemplary function for other interdisciplinary centers, aiming at a sustainable design of many fields in the city of Bern and Switzer- land in general.

2.4 Local Struggles in a Pandemic To further situate this thesis in the current situation of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic, the local newspapers of Bern have been analyzed on their portrayal of unhousedness during the Swiss- wide lockdown between March 16 and May 11, 2020. The following articles are mainly written from the point of view of the institutions trying to help the unhoused. However, the point of view of people affected by unhousedness is once again absent. One article states that the social distancing rules the state enacted in the middle of March 2020 had serious consequences for unhoused people and the institutions providing places to sleep. In order to be able to adhere to these rules, many of the emergency shelters in Switzerland had to reduce their capacity. In the Sleeper in Bern, for example, that usually offers 20 places to sleep, only one person was allowed to sleep in a four-bed room (Petrus 2020). Another problem was that the Sleeper, which serves as an emergency shelter and a soup kitchen, was financially struggling due to the Swiss-wide lockdown. The Sleeper incorporates a nightclub that usually generates most of the income used for the shelter. The nightclub had to close its doors due to the implemented measures. The owner Ueli Schürch is cited as saying that with their current savings they would only survive for two more months (Kobel 2020). To help relieve the Passantenheim of the Salvation Army and the Sleeper’s burden, which in total provide 70 places to sleep, the city of Bern made available 29 single rooms in a building close to the city center for unhoused people with symptoms of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) (Petrus 2020). It is quite striking that the city of Bern was able to provide so many rooms for unhoused people in such a short amount of time. This can either be regarded as a very prompt and productive reaction or as proof that the city could actually provide at least 29 single rooms to people who do not have a fixed domicile, be it in times of a crisis or not. Additionally, the provision of food was very much restricted due to the coronavirus-induced measures. The soup kitchen Tischlein deck dich (The Wishing Table) that provides food for 20’000 people in Switzerland on a weekly basis, had to close its doors because

23 they could not comply with the social distancing rules. The Streetwork Bern and the Medina Collective have been making efforts to close this gap in the city of Bern. They collected food from institutions as well as private people, making it available for collection in public fridges or distributing it in public places (Petrus 2020). In our conversation, Nora from the Streetwork Bern, says that many of the institutions that are volunteer-based had to close down during the lockdown, because most of the volun- teers were part of an at-risk group (pers. comm.). Another article highlights the fact that you cannot follow the call to stay at home if you do not have a fixed domicile. As a reaction to this difficulty, the Sleeper and the Passantenheim changed their opening hours and were temporarily open the whole day instead of only during the night. Nonetheless, they were fully booked every single night (Rall 2020).

In summary, it can be said that in Bern housing is getting more expensive and more and more people are moving to the cities. Despite the fact that many of the common forms of unhousedness are rather invisible, it does exist. For many people who have part of their home in public space, the increasing regulation and policing of such spaces is problematic. In many of the policies regarding public spaces a very inclusionary language is used in order to guarantee safe, orderly, and clean environments. Through these policies many people not perceived as being desirable in such spaces are subtly but effectively excluded (see Chapter 1.5 and 1.6). The coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic made the issue of not having a place to live and retreat to, much more visible in a Swiss context. While the city’s last publication on the prevention of unhousedness dates back to 2019, they seemed to have finally realized that at least 29 single rooms were needed. Hereby, they are owing to the fact that there are people in Bern who do not have a place to live. Many of the organizations supporting people without a fixed domicile during these difficult times were not supported by the government. They did a magnificent job despite this by providing what was needed. Lastly, it can be noted that unhousedness and precarity in housing are very current, pressing, and under-researched topics in Switzerland.

3. The Research Process

In order to address the methodology used for the research of this thesis, a little detour is needed. When starting to think about a topic for this thesis, I first wanted to address encounters of unhoused people with state authorities in Cape Town, South Africa. I lived in Cape Town for eight months in 2019, where myself and four friends started a weekly soup kitchen for unhoused people. I got to know the people who had dinner with us once a week on a very personal basis, and wanted to include these conversations and stories in my academic work. Upon returning to Switzerland I realized that it did not make sense to me, as a white Swiss woman, to go back to Cape Town and do research in this context. There would have been too many structural and ethical barriers that could not have been overcome. Instead, I decided to address unhousedness in Bern, Switzerland as it is the city I grew up in and a place where many forms of unhousedness are very much invisible and scarcely addressed in public discourses. I realized that even in a context like Switzerland, this topic was a very sensitive one that needs to be addressed and researched very carefully. This is when I realized that the choice of methodology would be crucial to my thesis. If I wanted to fully engage with unhousedness in Bern, I might need to find a way to change my point of view, to find new ways of collecting my data and engage with it. To do research in one’s own city and society brings with it the need to recognize the unfamiliarity in the familiar. It is not about forgetting what we know, but to be conscious about the relativity of one’s own perception of the world we live in. When the subject of investigation are other people’s experiences and realities, it becomes methodologically crucial to find ways to see the world through the other person’s eyes and to recreate the subjective sense of their experiences (Honer 2000, 195-97). The research must be regarded as a process instead of a product, whereby the human response is conditional and the human circumstances are contingent. The research is thus transformed by the inputs of those who were previously only constructed as the researched, and the researcher is inherently part of the research setting (Cloke et al. 2000, 136). The first part of this chapter therefore elaborates on the aim to make this research process participative and describes the process of discovering the method of photovoice and photo elicitation interviews (PEI). Then, additional steps of the research process, such as the transcription and the coding of the interviews and the process of writing the narratives are addressed. Furthermore, it is important to reconstruct the reality in the way the research partners experience it, instead of what the researcher thinks it should look like. This needs to include a process of self- reflection about the point of view of the researcher as a participant of social happenings. The researcher needs to engage with unexpected experiences, the possibility to be confused, and to recognize and drop certain assumptions (Honer 2000, 199-203). This process of discovering my own positionality and questioning my assumptions will form the last part of this chapter.

3.1 Participation and its Limitations In this process of finding the right methodology, the first point that was clear was the need to work with an organization in order to approach unhoused people. Thereby, it was possible to have a person they trust, make the initial contact and for the research partners to feel more comfortable getting on board. Additionally, I made sure that only people that show interest in working with me would participate in the first steps of the project. The institution I chose is the Kirchliche Gassenarbeit Bern (Street- work Bern). The Streetwork Bern was founded in 1988 in reaction to the impact of the open drug scene in Bern. They do outreach and stationary street work to advise and accompany unhoused people with

25 the goal of finding individual and sustainable solutions. Their core values are based on the principles of acceptance, voluntariness, low-threshold access, and partiality. Apart from funding and their value of charity, they are not related to the church and do not have a missionary background or goals. I admire their work and was therefore very glad when they agreed to work with me. From the beginning, my idea was to co-create this research project. Therefore, it was clear to use a qualitative method to be able to explore the lifeworlds of unhoused people from the inside, in order to understand the point of view of a person and represent it. Within the frame of a qualitative method it is important to think about the form and degree of participation of my research partners (Prinz 2016, 12). Participative research can be understood as an umbrella term for research that tries to capture social realities in a partner-like way with the research participants. Full participative research means to include the research partners in every step of the research design: Planning, implementation, and evaluation. In a smaller frame it is possible to limit these capacities and only have participation in some steps of the research process (Weitzig 2016, 134). I knew that due to time constraints it would not be possible for me to include my research partners in every step of the research process. I decided to include them in the process of revising the general themes of the project, the data collection, and the creation of collaborative output. The first steps of exploring the theoretical field and coming up with a method of data collection as well as the part of analyzing the material would be done by me. The most important part for me was to see this collaboration as a process where I am the person who is about to learn things and let myself be surprised. To place importance on the ability to revise and adapt the project throughout every step and put the emphasis on the research process rather than the outcomes. This means to be prepared to expect the unexpected and welcome it into the research, as a research process is subject to human processes (Chatfield et al. 2018, 20). My initial plan was to start with two introductory sessions at the office of the Streetwork Bern. During the opening hours the street workers would announce that I would drop by afterwards and whoever was interested could stay. We would have a round of discussion, where people could give their input and ideas on what needs to be changed about the general idea of my project. Afterwards, everyone who was still interested in working with me could sign up. A week later I would bring the disposable cameras to start the project and they would take the photographs. They would be instructed to bring back the cameras within a week, and I would then develop the photographs. But exactly on Tuesday March 17, 2020, the day of my first introductory session, a national state of emergency was called due to the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic. By reason of the measures implemented by the state, the Streetwork Bern had to close its doors. During this time, the Streetwork Bern distributed food and continued with the outreach street work. Their offices, however, stayed closed until the middle of August 2020 due to rules of social distancing. At current (September 2020), they are constantly checking what needs arise on the part of their clients. During the lockdown, food was a central topic that needed to be addressed. Now, as it gets colder, consultation around clothing and housing gain importance. Nora describes their momentary way of working as constantly reacting (Nora, pers. comm.).

3.2 Reflexive Photographs as Valid Data As I wanted to continue with the project according to the original idea, the research process had to be rethought. I wanted to continue using the method of reflexive photography, also referred to as photo voice. Photo voice is an innovative participatory method based on the theoretical literature on

26 education for critical consciousness, feminist theory, and community-based approaches to documen- tary photography (Wang, Cash, and Powers 2000, 81). The research partners are asked to answer a question or depict a previously discussed theme through photography. Livingston, Bailey, and Kearns (2008) explain that in the process of taking the pictures the researcher herself is absent, rendering these photographs rather autonomous. They stress that even if the process of taking these photos limits the partners in some ways, the interpretation of how to go about this exercise is very individual. The research partners autonomously examine the research question or theme assigned to them and can later talk to the researcher as experts themselves (112). Since the 1960’s the popularity of using photography as a research tool in qualitative research has grown (Schulze 2007, 538). Nonetheless, Schulze emphasizes the fact of this form of image-based research still being undervalued, under-applied, and very much peripheral to popular research methods. This methodology can make a valuable contribution to research practices and the presentation thereof. Schulze points out that this is especially true in a context of researching meanings humans attach to their everyday lives in a continuously changing environment and their adjustment to or appropriation of it (538-39). What Harper (2000) regards as interesting about using imagery as a data collection tool is that photographs seem to capture the world before any interpretation is even possible. Nonetheless, he says they do so with a subjective bias turning a caption of an object or subject at a certain point of time, in a certain place, into an accumulation of an almost infinite quantity of information (403). Harper offers the valuable insight that reality is fundamentally ambiguous and that a photograph is a subjective, socially constructed representation rather than an objective document. It is socially constructed in the sense that every detail about the photographer as well as the photographed object or subject is influencing the process of caption, he explains. A photograph can be seen as an object trying to capture subjective realities such as identities, personal relationships, and stories of the photographer or the photographed (406). Often, participants use photographs as symbols to depict the subjective meaning of the things surrounding them (Schulze 2007, 539). In the case of this thesis, it is used as a tool to try and capture unhoused people’s understanding of home and their perception of themselves within the city of Bern. Instead of the researcher, the research participants take the photographs themselves to highlight their knowledge, perspectives, relationships, and stories, thus adding depth to those place-based identities by which they are so often limited. Photographs can serve as a reminder to acknowledge the experiences and perspectives of the photographer as inherently valuable, and not to be ignored in the service of limiting stereotypes (Miller 2006, 126-28). Historical power dynamics between researcher and research participants have the potential to be altered through the partners being able to define what is important. The researcher’s bias embedded in the selection of specific images and subjects used in research is slightly reduced. Copes et al. (2018) discuss that participant driven images and the resulting narratives can reveal agency, resistance, and resilience, instead of generating a picture of passive victimization. They see it as an opportunity for the research partners to literally show and tell their lives (477). Another strength of the method of photo voice articulated by Copes et al. is a multi-dimensional visual representation of the participants that is typically absent from the public image. They emphasize that encouraging research partners to influence or even generate their own portrayal in public images additionally breaks with the traditional power dynamics (482).

3.3 Getting to Know the Research Participants On a more practical level, I decided to use disposable cameras for the project. They have a very easy technical functionality and the ubiquity of them increases the probability that everyone is familiar with its technology. The people working at the Streetwork Bern, were kind enough to distribute the cameras for me, as their office was still closed. So, I handed over the 14 cameras and information sheets, with basic information about the research and photo project to Nora and let her and her two colleagues introduce the participants to the photo project. It felt very strange to hand over the responsibility of a project I planned for several months to people I barely knew. It was also a process of learning to be prepared to expect the unexpected and to welcome it into the research can really be productive. In the following weeks only five cameras actually got back to me. Two people returned the camera with a phone number attached to it. I called them and set up an interview. Two other participants called me from the office of the Streetwork Bern to set a date for the interview. The last camera belonged to a man who is currently not able to participate in this project due to mental health issues and problems with drug addiction. The four people that participated in this research are between 39 and 62 years old, whereof the oldest person is female. All of the participants are white, and except for the female participant, are Swiss citizens. All of them have had experiences with drug addiction in the past or the present. There- fore, the composition of my sample is rather random. I started with the assumption that all of the clients of the Streetwork Bern must be unhoused. But the variety of people that participated in the photo project show that it is far more complex, and actual unhousedness does not apply to all of them. This being the case, the themes of housing and the notion of home are still very central to their lives. Additionally, all of the research participants mentioned public spaces as part of their home either in the present or past. To me it was the first realization of this process, that it is impossible to measure people by categories and that every one of them is a complex individual. The inherent challenge is to speak of the larger questions without diminishing the significance of the complexity of an individual and the places they call home.

3.4 Elicit Conversation Through Photographs To be able to meaningfully incorporate the photographs into the interviews, I chose the method of photo elicitation interviews (PEI). Photo elicitation is based on the simple idea to include photos into a research interview (Harper 2002: 13). As photos do not have intrinsic meaning, it is important for the participants to be able to fill them with content during the interviews. The photographs are used to invoke comments, memory, and discussion. This photographic feedback should create a state of self- initiative and evoke emotional feelings that lead the interview into the heart of the research. Photo- graphs can sharpen the memory, give interviews an immediate character, and serve as an aid to stay focused. Additionally, this form of interview is perceived as less threatening because the participants express themselves through an interpersonal and socially acceptable medium of communication. Sen- sitive information may be tapped in more easily this way. The pressure felt by the interviewee of being put on the spot, silences, and permanent eye-contact can be reduced through the presence of photographs (Schulze 2007, 540). A particular challenge of in-depth interviews is establishing communication between two people who rarely share a taken-for-granted cultural background. A photo might be a way to bridge this gap, as it is understood, at least partly, by both parties (Harper 2002, 20).

I started the interviews with a discussion of the form of consent and a brief overview of my research. The form of consent included a declaration of the interview being undertaken on a voluntary basis, the option of anonymity, that there are no costs arising for my research partners, and the permission to use the recording of the interview and the photographs in my thesis. The point of anonymity was raised because it is very important to be able to guarantee that no statement would influence the interviewee in a negative way (Prinz 2016, 16). It is easy to assume that the use of anonymity provides a clear ethical ground for researchers. However, the decision about how far to prompt an interviewee, as well as later choices of what to include in the thesis, are still key to maintaining the ethics of privacy (Cloke et al. 2000, 145). Following this introduction, we shortly reflected on the process of taking the photos. To additionally reduce my bias as a researcher, I started with letting the participants choose three to six of their favorite photos they wanted to discuss. During the reflection of the photos, a guidance of the conversation through the researcher was avoided and only supported through comments that enhance the flow of the conversation. The researcher needs to be careful that the supporting comments will not lead the conversation or suggest approval or disapproval of certain statements. Another difficulty was to listen carefully and be able to immediately ask the right follow-up questions (Hopf 2000, 350). The second part of the interview was set up as a semi-structured interview, meaning that the interview itself should be like a conversation. This form of interview contains a guideline. The guideline is a tool to visualize the guiding questions and themes, and to make sure that in the end all relevant topics have been discussed during the interview. The guideline needs to have a clear and easy structure for it to only serve as an orientation, and the focus of the interviewer to be with the interviewee. The wording of the questions needs to be chosen carefully, and there should not be any suggestive or closed questions. The vocabulary needs to be comprehensible to the research partner, as few as possible foreign, technical or abstract terms should be used (Manz 2016, 37-38). This second part was divided into four themes that did not have a rigid order. I wanted to keep the structure of the interview flexible, in order to be able to react to the interviewee or unexpected accounts. The four themes were: The Notion of Home, the Political System of Switzerland, General, and Coronavirus. These themes proved to be quite relevant, as many of the planned questions were already answered during the preceding conversation. I concluded the interviews with some basic information, like stating their name again, their age, and a short overview of their living situation for the past ten years. I did not put these questions at the beginning of the interview, in order not to generate a very traditional interviewer versus interviewee situation. I wanted to keep the flow of the conversation as natural as possible and for the interviewees to feel comfortable. Right after the interview, I took notes about special situations during the interview, conversations before or after recording, my own behavior or of the participants, and some general themes that came up. I hoped for these notes to help me embed the interview in the actual thesis. A second conversation with the same person would have been of great help, but the research was limited by time constraints.

3.5 Transcription, Coding, and Composing Narratives During the transcription process, I was very careful to capture every word and non-verbal expression relevant for the transcript, and later the narratives. In transcribing an interview, the researcher is already reducing the rich information of the primary and secondary data. As the transcript is created by a human being with its specific goals, abilities, and restrictions, it is always a selective construction. This

29 is then transferred into the analysis and the interpretation of the transcript (Kowal and O’Connell 2000, 439-40). To be able to sort and analyze the collected material, and later structure and write the narratives, it was important to work with codes. The codes were established by engaging closely with the transcripts. I started by intensively and repeatedly reading through the interviews. My own theoretical knowledge and the research question inevitably guided the reading of the material. In the beginning, the transcripts should not be read comparatively but as singular documents. The goal was to note occurring themes and aspects of every single interview transcript and thus establish individual codes. It is important to not simply repeat the vocabulary used in the questions, but actually pay attention to if these words were used by the interviewees and what meaning they attach to them. Not trying to find answers to one’s already existing assumptions is crucial, in order not to miss new aspects and themes mentioned by the interview partners (Schmidt 2000, 449). Once I established and sorted the codes, the narratives slowly started to fall into place. In prepara- tion for writing the narratives, I first summarized all of the details I still had in mind and noted in my research diary about my first impressions of the research participants, be it physical or interpersonal. I soon realized that I would structure each narrative as the story of one person. Therein, the red thread would be each participant’s personal notion of home. I mapped out the plot of each narrative and made a sketch of the events of the person’s life in chronological order. I started with writing an introduction of my first impressions of the respective person, so the reader would get an idea of who the story is about. Then, I wrote down the events they told me about in a more or less chronological order (Academic Help 2020). My biggest concern was how to write down these people’s lives in a way that does not represent them as subjects without agency and without breaking their trust (Kiesinger 1998, 72). I tried to leave out my own assumptions and thematical preferences and look for alternative explanations on issues my partners were giving me. I thereby wanted to try and explain their worlds from within (77). The decision to incorporate the photographs into the narratives was one attempt of letting the participants tell their own stories. Even though, the photographs do not make arguments in themselves they further visualize the narrative from the points of view of the participants. As the photographs were a substantial methodological tool for the participants to be able to tell their stories it is seen as crucial to include them into the narratives. To add direct speech was a decision based on the desire to invite the readers to participate and feel the scene taking place (85). According to Sellerberg and Leppänen (2012), “narratives are explicitly or implicitly told whenever people reflect on their own circumstances or meet and interact” (3). So, it is important to note that every storyteller draws upon their cultural and personal resources in constructing their stories. Through the presence of both the storyteller and the listener, a discursive space is constructed in which the narrative is co-constructed (Esin 2017, 3). So, it is crucial to keep in mind the subjectivity and haphaz- ardness deeply woven into the narratives. I had to find a way to maintain the integrity towards my interview partners by writing a story that did not deny my own participation in the interview. Therefore, I decided to describe them from a narrator’s perspective in the introduction. I attempted to do so in a way that the reader could sense my personal touch. I also did not want to include my own perspective any further, for the stories to be the ones the people told me. It could be said that I am writing these narratives “with the conscious intention of making it clear that what I offer readers is an account based on my understandings of [that person’s] experience and that my understanding is rooted in my own emotional experience” (Kiesinger 1998, 87).

A noteworthy challenge was that the interviews were conducted in Swiss-German. In order to best preserve the gathered information and emotions, the transcripts were written in Swiss-German as well. Only when creating the narratives was the content translated into English. I paid as much detail as possible to a verbatim translation of the narratives, as well as the respective quotes. Nonetheless, it could not be avoided that some of the information was altered in its original character through the translation. This is especially true for the quotes. In these, a small portion of the wit and charm of the original quotes is lost. After finishing the interviews with my research participants, I additionally conducted an interview with Nora, one of the three managers of the Streetwork Bern. Her interview was a semi-structured interview that eventually was more of a casual discussion about the themes that emerged from my previous interviews. Due to time constraints and the excursive nature of our conversation, this interview was only partly transcribed. I transcribed the parts that were directly related and relevant to my thesis. I then created memos indicating which part of the conversation supports and complements which section of my thesis.

3.6 Situating my own Positionalities As the theme of unhousedness and the notion of home is quite a sensitive and personal one, I invested much thought to the question of my own positionality and role within this research process. Is it appropriate for me, as a white middle-class woman with a Swiss passport, to be asking questions and interrogating people who do sometimes not have a permanent domicile? Is the inherent power imbalance in this research process not insurmountable? I came to the conclusion that with enough effort invested in creating an inclusive and participative process, it would be feasible. Nonetheless, it was important to keep in mind that bridging the power imbalance between a researcher and a participant needs more than what the current methods have to offer. There are real, structural barriers that make it impossible to act as a true co-collaborator in this setting. The state of being unhoused and having experienced what my research partners have, inevitably, though not irreversibly, alters one’s relationship with their environment in a way that cannot be overcome by methodology alone in a research experience (Packard 2008, 74). So, an additional part was to question myself and my role in this research process and include this in every step of it. One thing I noticed, was that even though I tried not to, I started this process with assumptions about the people I was about to meet. For example, I expected the people to be late or not to show up at all to our appointments. This never actually happened with any of my research participants, everyone was on time or even early. I also had to admit that I did not think enough about the different realities we face when moving through the city. I was supposed to meet Mischu at the Grosse Schanze, a public park in Bern. There is an elevator coming from the train station and its entry is next to a little restaurant. This is where we were supposed to meet. I waited for 30 minutes before I started strolling the park to look for him. He was waiting somewhere under a tree in his deckchair. He told me that he showed up exactly at the time we were supposed to meet. He did not feel comfortable waiting in front of the restaurant because people started staring at him and wondering what he was doing there. While I waited for 30 minutes, nobody even seemed to notice me. So, my own reality kept me from even thinking about the fact that this meeting point could be a space of discomfort for someone.

The interview situation itself felt more like I was talking to a friend. The four people I talked to really opened up and shared a lot of their personal life with me. Beforehand, I assumed that there might exist a gap in terms of knowledge between me and my participants. This gap might be existent in some form, but certainly not on opposite ends of extremes. The people I talked to acquired a very different kind of knowledge suited to their way of living and the situations they find themselves in. My partners know so much about their fields of work, survival strategies, the social welfare system, and much more. So, it is not a greater amount of knowledge I possess, probably even the opposite. During the interview, everything I thought I knew about their circumstances and living situations due to reading academic articles did not matter anymore. I became the person who is learning, and the interview partner the one who is teaching me things. This felt very natural as I was the one listening to their stories. Some of the interview partners got very emotional during the interview and that is the only part I felt a little uncomfortable. But only until I realized that I can simply react like I would with anyone else, by showing empathy. Some of my interview partners also confronted me with my privilege. For example, when Beat was talking about the regular citizen who can move through the city freely, he looked at me and said, ‘like you’. Or when Nadine found out that she is about the same age as my mother. She told me that she assumes that I am comparing her to my mother now and how different their stories must be. These confrontations made me feel uncomfortable in my position. But simultaneously I knew that this was a necessary feeling because they are right about the fact that I have a very privi- leged background. Another very important question for me was, how can I give something back to the participants in exchange for their time and effort? When talking about the fairness of a research process, it should include opportunities and the allocation of benefits from the research process for all parties (Chatfield et al. 2018, 11). In my case, the benefit of the interviews is my data. In order to provide a benefit for the participants, I proposed to collaboratively organize a photo-exhibition. When I talked to the participants about organizing the exhibition at the end of the whole research process, they were all very excited and enthusiastic about it. The exhibition would be designed and planned by the photographers and I would only jump in when I am needed for administrative or organizational details. Beat mentioned that he loves to write poems, which could go with the photographs. Nadine likes to paint and draw and would be ready to contribute some of her works to the exhibition. This way we can conclude this project as a group and also address the themes of unhousedness and the notion of home in a public context. After conducting the interviews, I felt great pressure to write an adequate thesis. Not as part of the pressure to perform, but because I felt like I owe it to my research participants to create meaningful narratives from the stories they have told me. How can I adequately represent the emotional details, their pain, their joy, in a way that does not represent them as passive subjects without agency? How will I not break their trust? How is it fair to write about them in English, when they will not be able to read it, because they do not speak English? I came to the conclusion that through these narratives and my thesis I would do my best to give my research partners an opportunity to tell their own stories and show people the many different realities that co-exist in the city of Bern. I had to realize that I had been blind to the fact that so many people experience this city that I was born and raised in much differently than I do. Maybe their experiences will encourage new understandings and create new conversations about unhousedness, the notion of home and public space.

4. Narratives

The following narratives tell the stories of four people’s lives, or rather extracts from them. All of the narratives are based on interviews conducted between July 7 and September 2, 2020. There is no claim that the told events and stories are the absolute truth, only a true representation of what I have been told. A singular narrative includes the story of one research participant and the primary question of what home means to them. The introductory quotes each narrative contains, mirror the diversity and multiplicity when it comes to the notions of home expressed by the participants. It was my intention to capture the people the way I encountered them: complex, funny, diverse, individual, multi-facetted, wise, impish, insecure, self-confident, angry, emotional, suspicious, praising, critical, intelligent, sarcastic, serious, kind, interested, interesting, reflected, and fierce. I hope this is the way you will perceive them as well.

4.1 Mischu

“I am not homeless; I live in a tent.”

Mischu is an almost delicate man with bruises all over his arm that turn out to be wasp stings. His friendly and polite nature makes you feel comfortable around him. When he laughs his smoky laugh, you can see that almost all of his teeth are missing. He has a very proper way of dressing and attaches a lot of important to the cleanliness of his clothes. His kind eyes fill with tears when he talks about the emotional details of his life, mostly when he talks about his mother. When he tells a story, he does so in a very lively way and adds a lot of details and gesticulation to it. His faithful companion is his dog. Her name is some term for something very positive, in a Native American language. I really wanted to remember, but then forgot. When I meet him in a public park in Bern, he is sitting on his deckchair and has just finished lunch that he has prepared with his gas cooker. There is a huge backpack, a pan, the gas cooker, a mini bottle of vodka, and an empty beer lying next to him.

“I just want to tell you my story,” he says, “because you are talking about home and what home means to me. My story is a long story, endless. So, that is how it started.” Mischu just turned 46 years old and he has lived in 42 different places in his life so far. He was born in Herisau, a small town in the Canton of Appenzell. Soon after he was born, his parents got a divorce. He then moved to St. Gallen with his mother. As she was working as a waitress, he spent a lot of time either at the day care center or with his childminder. The next thing he remembers is that they moved to Basel, when he was about five years old. His mother worked as a waitress in a restaurant close to Claraplatz. He spent the days from Sunday evening until Saturday morning in a day center, so he did not get to see his mother much. One Saturday morning in 1981, he was waiting for his mother to pick him up. She was late. Suddenly, one of the guardians came to him and took him for a walk. This is the day that his life ended, Mischu says. Two days prior, his mother had been raped and strangled. His father did not get custody of him because he was still working as a DJ and also somewhat involved in the red-light district. The director of the home he was in, said she knew Mischu best. So, she took him under her wing as a foster child. He never really felt like he could fit into his newfound family. Simultaneously there was a dispute going on between the official guardian of the city of Basel, his father, the foster parents, and child psychiatry services. “So, it was four people who wanted to tell me what my home should be. Yes, and that is how I was torn at that time.”

His youth was spent moving from one apartment to another. At age 20, he spent four years in an educational work training institution because of a minor criminal offence, where he was able to do an apprenticeship as a carpenter. Then he had had enough. He came to the canton of Bern because he felt he needed a fresh start. He called a farm in Emmental, where he spent some weeks of holidays more than 20 years before and asked them if he could come and work there for a while. So, he went to work on the farm for two and a half years, and it had worked, he says. But then he got to know some people in Langnau, a small town close to the farm. He remembers that “they were party animals and drank beer. So, I spent more and more time with them and then it escalated a little. The farmers terminated the contract and I realized that I needed human contact and not the farm anymore.” Because he was registered with social services, he was able to move into an apartment at another farmers place. But the farmer was insidious and only out for the money from the social services. So,

34 the next thing he knew, he was living at the Ilfis, a small river that flows through the Entlebuch and Emmental. He lived at the river all summer long. One morning the police arrived and told him he could not sleep outside anymore. They organized a room in a hotel in Perrau for him and his two dogs. The owner of this hotel was after the money of social services as well. He claimed that Mischu brought in bed bugs. Due to this, he was able to renovate a huge part of the hotel with the money from social services. The owner of the hotel got away with it but Mischu filed a complaint. As a result, social services terminated the contract with the hotel and were not going to place anyone in this hotel again. Another thing that bothered him in Langnau was that the people were always annoyed by his juggling. They called the police on him and every time they had to come, they reduced his social benefits by 50 francs. “It did not matter if I was right or the people who called the police,” he says, “if the police had to come twice it meant 100 francs less for me to buy food.” While still living in the hotel, Mischu inherited 12’000 francs, and with that money he bought a car. He says, the people in Langnau were staring at him and asking him if he was even allowed to drive a car. Then one morning, right after a Goa party, when he still had some alcohol and amphetamine in his blood, he got stopped by the police. His driver’s license was gone. One night he decided that he had had enough of Emmental and drove all the way to the canton of Tessin in the middle of the night. He stayed there for three months and drove over 5’000 kilometers without a license. But as soon as he got back to Emmental, he got stopped by the same police officer who took away his license some months before. The officer said that this was enough, and if he would see him driving this car one more time, he would be sent to prison. So, Mischu parked his car in a public parking space and that is where he was living for the next six months – an entire winter. He explains, “I had my two dogs, so I was never cold – and I could shower at a friend’s place.” But then his license plate expired, and it is forbidden to park in a public parking space without a valid license plate. He found out that there is an empty parking space next to a closed restaurant in Wichtrach. He parked his car, and a little further down the road, right next to the Aare river, he set up his tent. For the next seven months this tent was his home. He made bonfires and went swimming. He says it was a home for him when he could close his tent and breathe. In the meantime, he signed up with CON- TACT, a foundation for addiction care in Bern, and they found him a temporary apartment in Zollikofen, close to Bern, for two months. But then, on the 23rd of December 2014 he was woken up by two police officers. They said they would not file a complaint if he left the space clean and did not litter. In January 2015, he moved into his temporary apartment. The next apartment he got from the CONTACT foundation was in Münsingen, a town about 20 kilometers from Bern. He and his neighbor did not get along, though. The neighbor always complained about his Goa music and did not let Mischu use the small garden in front of the house. So, Mischu built a little platform on the roof, where he could install his fire bowl. The neighbor was not really happy about this and his landlord gave him his first warning. Then, there was another complaint about him, and he had to leave the apartment within two weeks. He always felt like a thorn in the side of society in this small town. He says, “I was the only one who inline skated, juggled, who was fooling around and the whole day like lölölö. Yes, I was the only one. And I could feel it, when I went to the supermarket to get a coffee, people said, oh no it is him again. So, then I had enough.” But the CONTACT foundation gave him another chance and another apartment in Ostermundigen, a town very close to the city of Bern. “There I got tyrannized,” he says, “my neighbors were basers,

35 real basers.4” There were always a lot of people at the neighbor’s apartment and the ambulance had to come because they overdosed. Mischu remembers that “it was just a lot.” One night, it was too much for Mischu. So, he went over there with an axe, smashed in the door, and screamed at them. When he woke up the next morning, he thought to himself, “uh-oh, what did I do yesterday?” The CONTACT foundation called, he had to leave the apartment within two weeks. He could stay with his ex-girlfriend for a while. He started to work as a carpenter at Triva, a work integration program. As he is a professionally trained carpenter, he was given a lot of responsibilities from the beginning. “And then they wanted more and more,” he explains, “but I only got 100 francs of integration allowance, no matter if I worked one day or five days a week. That is what they pay, so you get up in the morning.” But then his dog fell ill, and he had to take him to the hospital. When he realized that he could not even pay the medical bill of 500 francs with his income as a carpenter, he quit his job. Soon after that, it did not work out with his ex-girlfriend anymore and he moved out. He went to sleep in a public park in Bern. In the morning he woke up with “two mobile phones gone, 870 francs gone, public transport season ticket gone, the whole fanny pack gone. But my dog was sleeping in my sleeping bag, yes.”

So, he needed a fresh start again. A friend asked, “why don’t you come and stay in the forest with us? Here, your things won’t get stolen. And that is how I became a forest dweller on July 17, 2016.” And this is home to him now. He has been living in the forest for four years now. He says, “I don’t have to take care of anything, neither if my contract gets cancelled, nor if I paid my rent. I can come home whenever I want and that is a home to me. Before, it was always like, oh did I work enough, oh no another letter, a threat of termination, oh no. And that pressure is gone now. And that is why now, I arrived home” (see Figure 4). They are seven men living in the forest together. Each one of them has his own tent. Mischu says some of them cook with a fire but he does not. His gas stove is what he uses to cook. He doesn’t like to smell like fire, thinks there is too much risk of getting burned, and in winter it is hard to find dry wood. There are floor elements around his tent covered with artificial turf. Soon he wants to get iso- lated walls and a little oven. He decorated his tent nicely; he has a glass table and a leather armchair. This armchair is really important to him. In the morning, he appreciates being able to sit in a chair and cook his coffee; in the evening, he likes to relax in that chair. “You can clean it. The dog can pee on it and you can still clean it” (see Figure 5). In winter it can get cold, he says, “but I’ll take it as cool as it gets.” The most important thing is to have a proper sleeping bag. Then he covers himself with a fleece blanket, then a cuddly blanket, and finally the wool blanket. “Then it is like a bathtub,” he enthuses, “zack, boom, you just fall asleep. You can even go inside only wearing your underwear, that works.” Something that really says you are home is feeling happy where you live, and Mischu says he does. About one year ago, in 2019, they had to leave their previous residence because camping in public spaces is illegal in the canton of Bern. The piece of land they currently live on belongs to the city of Bern. They came to an agreement with the city, and they can stay in their current location without paying anything as long as they keep order. And since then the city and the police leave them alone. Mischu affirms that they “also get along with the people. Hikers, joggers, the ones that go for a walk.”

4 A baser is a person who consumes base. Base is formed by cooking cocaine with ammoniac and is then usually smoked in a pipe.

But there are some challenges to living in the forest as well. For example, the police wanted to take away his dog because she bit someone. After keeping her in an animal shelter for 7 weeks and Mischu paying 2’000 francs to his lawyer, he got her back. Now he has to go to dog school with her, which costs him 140 francs per month. This is a lot for him. Additionally, he was ordered to muzzle his dog in public space (see Figure 6). “But I live public,” Mischu says. “Does my dog have to wear a muzzle now 24 hours a day? If something happens, they are going to take her away from me. That’s that, I live publicly. And maybe therefore it is not a home, but yes, it is my home, but I live on public land. And that is maybe the point that makes me feel insecure a little.” This is quite stressful for Mischu, because to him, his dog means comfort and safety. She is his family and home.

Another challenge of living in a non-conventional dwelling is that he is registered with social services in Langnau, even though he has been living in Bern for years now. As he does not have an official postal address, he is not able to change his registration to Bern. But now he has gotten a new social worker who is responsible for his case. He lives in Bern, so Mischu does not always have to travel to Langnau and pay the train ticket. It makes a difference to him that his new social worker is young, flexible, empathetic, and they have a good relationship. His momentary situation in terms of social benefits is okay to Mischu. He has got a free pass, meaning he does not have the obligation to work, as he lives in the forest. If he would live in an apartment and refuse to work, he would get his social benefits cut by 50 percent. He says,

And look, if I would start to work now at 46 years old, I would not have the time to keep my dog. And if I have a job I would get as much as I get from social services now. But I could still not afford a car or holidays. If the others would say three weeks in Mallorca or go diving in the Maldives, I would still just relax on my balcony. And if I am lucky, I’ll manage to get out of dept until my pension, but then I’ll have physical weaknesses that no one will pay for. I’ll be at zero dept, but my life is over, how does that help?

One thing he would like to change about social services is for them to help people get an apartment. He thinks that “they could have my back a little more, say okay he needs an apartment, so we are going to vouch for him. Until now, social services just say that’s none of our business, you have to take care of it yourself.” Even though Mischu says he is happy in the forest, he would love to live in an apartment. A two-bedroom apartment on the ground floor with a bathtub, to be specific. He would pay for the space he lives in and he could lock the door. Especially now, as he has to fix his teeth and have a hernia operation. He would be glad to be able to leave his dog at home, when he goes to the dentist and be able to recover from the hernia operation in a bed instead of a tent. He thinks it is just getting worse in terms of “people from his group” being able to find an apartment. The ones that don’t really care are living in an institution for assisted living, in the psychiatric clinic, or are in and out of prison. But Mischu would like to have a nice apartment. A solution to him would be to “create affordable housing for marginalized people. Not marginalized, because that also does not make sense. A friend of mine is living in a block full of social apartments and he is back to consuming drugs. Why? Because he lives in a block full of junkies.” It should also not be an obstacle to have a dog or two, when looking for an apartment, he adds. But a home to him is a place where he can sit down, put up his feet, and turn on the TV. Where he can make his coffee and relax, and where he does not have to watch his dog. “In my case, I can say

37 that I do have a home. I do have a good home and my dog feels comfortable there. But others who live on the street, there you can say homeless. I do not feel homeless, but I know that I am from the state’s and society’s point of view. I fit into that grid. Nice to meet you, that’s your name, you’re un- employed, okay. You are not acting to support our society, so you’re marginalized.”

Another place he calls his second home are public spaces in Bern, especially the space in front of the Heiliggeistkirche. Other public spaces that he regularly goes to are the Grosse Schanze, the Eichholz, and a squat close to the Aare river in the city of Bern. Even though he calls the Heiliggeistkirche his second home, he says, “I start to dissociate myself from the space. I always have to stare at the police, it’s always the same discussions you have, it is always about drugs there, and drinking, and somehow spending the day.” Sometimes, when he is in a good mood he also gets along with the passers-by. But mostly, he feels exposed (see Figure 7). Especially around noon when people go and have lunch. He feels like “everyone is staring at us; we are a blot on the city. And yes, we are a blot. And I am part of it because I sit there. But where should we go?” There are no spaces in Bern where you can just linger and spend the day without being stared at. Mischu knows that there are places like this in other Swiss cities. He thinks that society points a finger at the people in front of the Heiliggeistkirche. There are many people who still say, “you are society’s scum, I go to work, I have two children, and what do you do? And maybe they are right. But I don’t want to fall back into that routine. I cannot do it anymore.”

During the lockdown due to the coronavirus disease (COVID-19), many of the public spaces Mischu usually goes to were closed. So, when he left the forest, he had to go to other places than he usually goes to. Only the Heiliggeistkirche was still accessible. But there was a lot of police there, distributing fines and warnings. What he noticed, is that there were many more people spending time in the forest than usual. That is why he often came to the city with his dog. A positive aspect was that the city was almost empty and the people who were still outside were walking around much more attentively, without staring into their smartphones all the time. Nonetheless, he never felt so dirty as during the lockdown. The laundry service where he normally goes twice a week to do his laundry was closed. That was quite difficult for him, as clean clothes are of great importance to Mischu. “The Streetwork Bern was doing a great job,” he says, “and they were always there for us, always.” He hopes that the pandemic is going to bring at least some change to our society. That people start to watch out for one another, to watch out for those who do not have as much as others. He reflects that “this was the beautiful thing about corona. It hit everyone. The rich ones who wanted to go to the Caribbean, the dealers, the junkies. It just hit everyone, and no one could escape, everyone had to deal with it. And this is why I hope that watching out for each other is a quality that stays.”

Figure 4: The Forest Close to Mischu’s Tent

39 Figure 5: The Red Leather Chair in Mischu’s Tent

Figure 6: Mischu’s Dog Wearing a Muzzle in Public Space

Figure 7: Mischu’s View from the Heiliggeistkirche Bern Towards the Train Station

40 4.2 Beat

“Home is a place where I feel comfortable. Right now it is my apartment but it can also be a park or my family.”

Beat is 51 years old. He is a petite man and wears a red shirt with a yellow star on it. The first thing you would notice about him are his beautiful, clear blue eyes. They sparkle when he talks, especially when it is about his new apartment or his family. He is a person who seems very self-reflected because lots of the questions I ask him, he has either encountered in therapy or had a discussion about the topic with a friend. He is very welcoming and proud of his apartment.

Beat was born in a village close to Bern, where his parents were the owners of a grocery store. He and his father did not always get along very well. His father disapproved of his long hair, and they became even more estranged when Beat started consuming drugs at a young age. He got married and had two sons with his wife. In 2007, after not living together for a while, he and his wife got a divorce. After the divorce, there was a time when he spent some nights in the emergency shelter Sleeper, lived on the street for half a year and spent his nights at the Passantenheim of the Salvation Army in Bern for almost a year. He remembers that he “never really felt comfortable there, so you could call it homeless.” In 2013, Beat started to look for an apartment on the regular housing market. He went to see more than 10 apartments but got rejected by all of them. At that time, he made many efforts to become clean and spent quite some time in and out of the psychiatric clinic of Bern. One day, when he was in treatment, he got a call from the CONTACT foundation saying they have found an apartment for him in Ostermundigen. He gladly accepted the offer. During the two years he lived in this apartment he never really felt comfortable there. Thus, he spent a lot of time in public places, mostly at the Heiliggeistkirche. Beat notes that ”you can also be homeless if you don’t feel comfortable in your apartment. Or at least for me it was like that. That’s when I went outside and spent days hanging out in front of the Heiliggeistkirche, at Chlyni Schanze or the drug contact point. And back then, that was my home.” Eventually, he decided to go to Klinik Südhang, a clinic that accompanies and supports people with addictions. So, in 2017 Beat managed to get sober and has not had a sip of alcohol ever since. From time to time he treats himself to an alcohol-free beer, but only because he thinks that a beer after finishing work is a wonderful ritual. When he got sober, social services proposed many different housing programs to him. From the beginning, Beat preferred the WEGE Weierbühl. This institution offers ten rooms for men and women in the form of assisted living. Every person has their own room, and the bathroom, kitchen, and living room are shared spaces. Each resident has a contact person in order to set and accomplish one’s own personal goals. Beat liked living there and he says that it really helped him to move forward. After three years of living in the WEGE Weierbühl, the social services started to pressure him to look for another solution because the assisted living got too expensive. First, Beat was afraid that he had to find an apartment on the regular housing market and if he would not find one, he would end up living on the street. But luckily, another service the WEGE offers is accompanied housing for people with advanced living competencies. In one of these apartments, the two people living there fell out with one another and the apartment became available.

On February 26, 2020, Beat could move into his new apartment. He moved there with Dani, a friend he knew from the WEGE and was very happy to live with. He says that they are communicating very openly when it comes to the chores that need to be done around the apartment and that they com- plement each other perfectly. They each have a contact person, who comes by every or every other week. Beat loves to live in a space where it is only the two of them and he is only responsible for his own dirt and his own food. The cooking was one of his biggest fears. He has never really cooked for himself before. Mostly because the last couple of years he has lived in institutions where the cooking was done by someone else. And when he was living alone, he did not really care about his nutrition because he was either on drugs or drunk. Now he has realized that he actually likes to cook. Addition- ally, he thinks that it had something to do with his lack of self-esteem – he was never confident enough to cook for ten people while living in the WEGE. Currently, he is working on improving his self-esteem and repeatedly tells himself what he has already accomplished and how far he has come. His current apartment really feels like home to him. To Beat, a condition to feeling at home is that he has to feel comfortable and safe in a space. At the moment, it is his apartment. He emphasizes, “I have never lived as nicely as I do now and after this, I will probably never live like this again” (see Figure 8). It is very difficult for him to find an apartment on his own, he says. People who only have as much as an entry in the debt collection register will have a very hard time finding a place to live. There is not enough affordable housing available, Beat adds. “There would be affordable apartments,” he says, “but not in or close to Bern. Yes, but maybe you have to compromise a little, and go live somewhere else.” Many of the apartments available to economically disadvantaged people are still very expensive, especially considering their condition and equipment. And according to Beat, that would be something the state could enhance to improve the possibilities of finding adequate housing at an adequate price.

For two years now, Beat is working at a job creation scheme of the Blue Cross called Azzurro. He works one and a half days per week and says that this is enough for him. If he would go back to work at a regular job he would also like to get more money. But with his wage garnishment it will be very difficult for him to even find a job. In the meantime, he really likes working at the Azzurro. They do a lot of different things, but mostly, they pack shipments (see Figure 9). At the moment he is producing com- ponents for insect hotels. He really enjoys the appreciation he receives for his work from his bosses and his colleagues. “You know, last time he said well done,” Beat remarks, “and if you make a mistake, they will not rip your head off. And well, I also got some more responsibilities now.” As a salary, he gets 100 francs of integration allowance a month. Someone who works in a job creation scheme full- time, only gets 100 francs a month as well. Beat remembers that some time ago the full-time worker would have gotten 300 francs. “But the state abolished that, due to saving measures and I think that is saving in the wrong place,” he says. Money is an incentive to work, he is sure about that. Even the 100 francs of integration allowance have a huge impact on his monthly budget. So, an opportunity to improve social services would be for the state to save somewhere else. “Ra- ther save a little more in another place, I like to mention the example of the military, and invest a little more in social services. And not even for me, I get enough. I mean I would take an extra 100 francs a month, but there are people who are way worse off than me.” Just recently he had a status review with social services, and that is the first time he heard the words cost minimization in connection with his case. Due to high costs, they expressed that they wanted to slowly reduce his personal care and granted him half a year at the Azzurro and another year in his apartment. He says, “the apartment is

42 also more important to me. I know I could go work at another place, but if I don’t have to, I would really really like to stay at the Azzurro.”

A public space he calls his second home is the Liebefeld Park in Köniz. Including the years at the WEGE Weierbühl and where he lives now, he has been living in Köniz for four years now. But only one year ago he really noticed this beautiful park. So, he started to go there almost every day. He took his towel with him and laid down in the shade of the trees. “It is incredible what you see in such a park if you just sit there for two hours. I could tell you stories about the park for hours,” he says happily. During the lockdown he went to the park every morning. He started to recognize the people, many of them went for a walk with their dogs and with some of them he even had a conversation about the fish in the pond. He also realized, that when he did not go to the park for a week due to the bad weather, he really started to miss it. Sometimes, when he plays football by himself in the park, he gets the feeling of being perceived in a negative way. As if he would not really fit into the norm. He knows that this feeling is mostly in his head, and in reality he does not really stand out. Until now, if someone approached him, it has always been a positive encounter (see Figure 10). Another space he feels really comfortable in, which is publicly accessible, is the Voodoo Rhythm record store. He got to know about this store because one of the employees of the WEGE Weierbühl works there. Now he goes there almost once a week. He loves to go to concerts there, talk to the people, listen to music or look through the books they have. It is this combination of the people, the ambiance and the store itself that make him feel at home. “It is a real smorgasbord, you know.” Otherwise, Beat does not really have a huge network of social contacts. There is Dani his flatmate, some people from work, and that is it. “You know I don’t need 100 good friends, but two or three would be nice. Well, I am working on it, to expand my social network.” But what was always very important to him is his family. He says, “I talk to my mother on the phone almost every day. I really enjoy this. I enjoy the weekends when I go visit her and see my children. Family is home to me.” He says he has two great sons, one of them is 28 and the other is 24 years old. The contact to his mother increased when his father got sick and his brother died five years ago. Now, he goes to visit his family at least once a month.

When the lockdown began in the middle of March 2020, at first he really enjoyed it. This was mostly because there was much more space when taking public transport, because everyone was staying at home. But then it started to get worse. He felt restricted by all of the rules and prohibitions the state implemented. “I do not care if the nightclubs are open. In my opinion, all of the nightclubs could close. But well, you could not go to any park anymore, they closed all of them. After two months that really started to get under my skin,” Beat says. Even though he has a prescribed substitute, he started to consume more and different drugs during the lockdown. He says it was because he got really restless and agitated. The pandemic scared him. Another thing Beat noticed during the lockdown is that he felt more stigmatized than ever when sitting in front of the Heiliggeistkirche or in other public spaces (Figure 11). He remembers that one of his friends was begging at the Heiliggeistkirche when a man in a suit came up to him. Even though Beat was simply sitting there, the man said to him that he should rather go to work than just sit here and hang around. Beat says, “I am not an aggressive person, but this really made me angry. And I told him, but he did not even listen to me. Actually, I only wanted to say that I also work a little, but he didn’t want to engage in discussion with me. The stigmatization that already existed anyway seemed to increase during this time.” Also, when he had to stand in line to get

43 food at the office of the Streetwork Bern, he felt very stigmatized. He thought to himself, “hopefully no one I know drives by, nobody who would recognize me.” But once he reflected upon this situation, he realized that it might have been in his head, rather than people actually judging him. One thing he hopes society realizes through this pandemic is that nature is stronger than us. During the pandemic everything else, like the climate crisis, had to pause for a minute. Now he hopes that people can take some of this solidarity and carry it on to the other fights that need to be fought.

Figure 8: The Window in Beat’s Room

Figure 9: Beat at the Azzurro Packing a Shipment

45 Figure 10: The Liebefeld Park

Figure 11: Empty Public Spaces During the Swiss-wide Lockdown

46 4.3 Nadine

“Home is wherever I go.”

Nadine looks way younger than 62. She is quite short, has colored red hair, and beautiful, sparkly blue- green eyes. She is very talkative and the expression on her face is warm and calm. Only when she talks about the more personal and emotional details of her life, does she get more silent and you can see it in her eyes that she has seen a lot. She says, “so, it is complicated […] I was raised here, I speak Swiss-German, I went to school here and everything. But I only have the residence permit C, meaning I am a foreigner. And actually, Greece isn’t my home either. When I go there they say, ‘oh the foreigner is coming.’ So, I decided that my home is wherever I go.” Nadine comes from a good family, as she says. Her family moved from Greece to Switzerland when she was eight years old. After the mandatory nine years of school she managed to go to high school in Zurich. “You know, I am very intelligent,” she says and there is no doubt about it. When she was 16, she first got into drugs and dropped out of high school. Her father was angry about that. Instead, she decided to make an apprenticeship as a hotel management assistant. After working in a bar in Zurich, she got an offer to work in a well-known hotel in Grindelwald, a beautiful region in the Swiss mountains where a lot of wealthy people go during the holiday season. This hotel is where she got to know her ex-boyfriend, a person she says it would have been better not to trust so much. He asked her to come to Bern with him, and she did. She worked in the nightclub Babalou. “You are working day and night, you don’t earn anything, this isn’t for you,” he said. He gradually convinced her to join his business.

Nadine started to work as a sex worker when she was 22 years old. The first few years she worked on the street. During this time, her car was her home. Even though she had an apartment at that time, she spent most of her days and nights in the car. She decorated it, installed curtains, and a green and a red light. When she was not in her car, she was at the Heiliggeistkirche, another kind of home for her at that time. “I went there, sat down, and knew that Sybille is coming, and Eva and all the others are coming too. We talked, we waited for clients together, then one of us disappeared and one came back home. That was a home, because we were looking out for each other.” When she had to leave her apartment it was very challenging for her to find a new one. So, she went to live on a camping site close to Bern. She went swimming in the river, had barbecues with friends, and felt home in that space. A little later Nadine got pregnant and had a beautiful baby daughter. She knew that from then on she could not work on the streets anymore. As there is more discretion, and she wanted to avoid someone recognizing her standing next to the road, she started working in various brothels.

When she was about 30 years old Nadine met a client who was intrigued by her ability to speak Spanish and Portuguese. He took her on trips to Brazil, and in exchange she earned 10’000 francs per trip. When she was 32 years old, she took her last trip to Brazil. On her way back, she got off of the airplane in Amsterdam, and the police stopped and searched her. What they found was 12.5 kilograms of cocaine in her luggage. She did not know how it got there, nor who it was from. “I thought that my baggage was heavy, but who would think of this, right? I mean I bought shoes and clothes. You would just never expect this.” She was sent to prison for three and a half years. She served her time in one

47 of the newest prisons in the Netherlands, because she was afraid that the punishment would be even worse in Switzerland. Until today, she thinks that it was the professor who invited her to join him on these trips who planted the drugs in her luggage. “It has to be,” she says. When she was in prison, a lawyer approached her and tried to bail her out. When she asked who paid him, he said his contract forbid disclosing any information about his payment. Each month she spent in prison there was money payed to her account. She never found out where it came from. Nadine says, that she was not the only one. There were many other women just like her who were serving time in prison for something they did not do. Every morning, they had to wake up at seven o’clock, and work half a day to produce mats for either BMW or Mercedes. The rest of the day they were off work. Nadine feels like during this time she really learned how to defend herself. But she is glad that she was in this particular prison and not one that would have been worse. What concerns her until today, is that she will never know if she had been trafficking drugs all the other times she joined him on his trips. ”Every time we returned to Switzerland someone came to pick us up, a chauffeur. The professor would say that since we arrived late the baggage would only be returned to me on the next day. And you know, I had a lot of time to think during these three and a half years.”

For many years now, she has been living in a room in a brothel on a vibrant street in the city center of Bern. This room, where she works, eats, and sleeps, is what she calls home. She set it up nicely, has a television, and many books to read. When the doorbell rings she knows that a client is there, and she’ll open the door to let him into her home. She tries to see the good in people and in her job. “Most of my clients are very nice, and we grew old together. I always get the ones that rather want to talk than have sex.” But then there are also challenges. Nadine can sometimes feel the stigmatization that is attached to her work domain. She says, “Sometimes when you get out of the brothel, a woman says, ‘oh that is a whore.’ But they never thought about how we got here, why we got here, and that we might also have a heart and a home.” Even though the room is her home, she works for about nine hours a day – mostly until midnight. She does not work later than that anymore. But then she also sleeps, eats, and watches TV there. She is in this room practically 24/7. Nadine says, that once you have started this work, you don’t get away from it very easily. You always have to pay it off. The landlord gets 150 francs a day. This is more than most people pay for a four-bedroom apartment in Bern. Then she has to pay an additional 2’500 to 3’000 francs a month to the procurer. In Switzerland, sex work is legal but procuring is not. Rather than doing something to improve the conditions for sex workers, the government acts like this system is working. It is, but only on a formal, superficial level, Nadine says. But she thinks that in the last couple of years nothing has changed. When a young woman needs a residency permit to work as a sex worker, she has to confirm that she is working independently. Nadine knows, “the girl says yes, I am working independently. But which 18-year-old girl from the Ukraine, Slovakia, or Romania is independent? I can guarantee that there is always someone behind her.” Nadine thinks these structures could be disrupted by implementing measures of state control. “Because if they have it under control there would be no more procurers abusing their power. But now it is just the same as it was eight years ago. They say it is legal what we do, but things just find their way in the underground. The invisible structures got way more illegal.” If the domain of sex work would be more controlled, then Bern would not be interesting for procurers anymore. “But Bern is the capital and here we don’t need that, we push it

48 aside. But do you know how much money I made in front of the parliament? And yes, it is allowed to stand there, how wonderful is this,” she adds with a sarcastic undertone. In the past, she tried to look for an apartment for about three years. But if you have to pay that much to your boss, you cannot afford an apartment that costs as much as the ones on the market, Nadine remarks. If you add your job description on the application form, they are not interested anymore. She says that there are a few property managements that would accept you anyway. But you have to sign a contract that you are not going to work in the apartment. Nadine thinks, “there should be a change initiated by the government. The state should have more apartments that are affordable and given to the people who need it.”

So, currently she still lives in her room in the vibrant, buzzling street in the middle of Bern. “It is a different home than others might know, but it is our home,” she says. Home is where she is with her girls, as she calls them. “We all live in an illusion. The older ones have got it, but the younger ones keep on living in that illusion.” She also thought that she was going to do this job until she was 30 and then she would have made enough money to quit. This was until she realized that she had trusted the wrong people and everything was gone.

In March 2020 the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic started. Nadine considered the Swiss- wide lockdown and the social distancing measures a blessing and a well-deserved holiday. “Oh, I could finally spend my days outside. I was always home. Now I could finally discover Switzerland. These months felt like holidays to me.” The procurer could not force her to work and the clients could not be mad at her. They could not forbid her to go outside. “What should we do inside? Go crazy?” (see Figure 12). So, she decided to hop on a train and go discover Switzerland, the home she has been living in since she was eight years old. “I have never really gotten to know Switzerland. I have always been home – I mean in the brothel.” She says, she felt free during this experience of travelling Switzerland and taking pictures. She thinks that even the air felt different, cleaner. The one thing that fascinated her the most was an old gigantic mansion in Thun. She thought it might be a museum. Later she saw some people coming out of this house, a young family. When she asked them where the entry to this museum is, they answered that it is their new family home. Nadine says, a mansion like the one she saw in Thun would be her ideal home (see Figure 13). The financial aspect of the lockdown was a little more complicated. Xenia, the specialized sex work center of Bern, helped to cover her rent, pay her medical insurance, and much more. Nadine stated that she felt a lot of solidarity from other organizations, like the Streetwork Bern. Otherwise, she did not really feel like it was a time of solidarity. “If you think about the beggars, they could not get any money anymore. It was a tough time for some, and once again the upper class only fought for themselves.” For her it is currently not possible to make the amount of money she owes to the procurer and the landlord on a monthly or even daily basis. She does have a lot of wealthy and influential clients, but they are exactly the type of client who are afraid to get infected at the moment. So, Nadine decided that it is time to quit. She is currently arranging everything, in collaboration with Xenia, so she will get her pension and will be able to afford a living. Her procurer does not accept her decision though. He goes through her phone and threatens her. Nadine even went to the police and filed a complaint. “But come on, you are only a whore to them. You would think they will do something, but no!” She decided

49 to not let this get in her way this time. And she is not afraid of her boss anymore. She feels like “the only thing he could do is kill me, but that would look way too suspicious and they would know that there is something weird going on. So, that is not worth the risk for him.” So, she and Pepino will move on. Pepino is her very cute, black, playful dog that she takes everywhere. She adopted him about five years ago when she found him on the streets in Greece (see Figure 14). She says,

He is my one great home. He is everything to me. He listens to me, he gives me love, he gives me support, I have to go outside with him. With him I am not going crazy because of thinking too much. He just gives me everything. He is a friend that never lets me down. The others might say that they are always there for you, but he actually is. And now we are sitting in the sun, and this is our home – yours and mine – for the moment.

Figure 12: Snippets from Nadine’s Journey of Discovering Switzerland

51 Figure 13: Nadine’s Ideal Home Hidden Behind Trees

Figure 14: Pepino

52 4.4 Raphael

“I want to spend my time on the streets, you know. This is my home – my family and everything.”

Raphael is 39 years old, quite tall, has blue eyes, and long braids. He has no teeth – except for two, and lot of tattoos. He wears several bracelets and necklaces. Even though he has quite a rough appearance he has a very quiet and gentle personality. He does not really like to talk about himself, and he only opened up in some brief moments during the interview. He was very polite and patient with me when I had to skim through the questions to look for the important ones, because he only had 45 minutes for the conversation. Luckily, he was very clear in his answers and able to tell me his story in a nutshell.

Raphael’s one big home is the city of Bern. He says, “I mean, I grew up in Bern. When I was 14, I thought I’ll keep my friends forever, but that’s not it. But somehow, I never wanted to leave. Even if I made some other friends and met other people, this is my home, just Bern you know?” Raphael grew up in Wabern, a suburb of Bern. Once he finished school he started and finished his apprenticeship as a plumber. When he first moved out, he moved into a nice little apartment in Kehrsatz, close to Bern. He remembers that the furthest he has ever gotten is Niedermuhlern, a small town about 15 kilometers away from Bern. He also had an apartment in Toffen for a short while, which is right next to the small town he lived in before. In 2007 he and his girlfriend moved to Kaufdorf, which is again quite close to where he used to live previous to this. His girlfriend rented a studio and Raphael lived in his mobile home on the meadow right behind the house. A farmer had this mobile home outside his farm, with a ‘for sale’ sign. Raphael bought the mobile home that is four times 14 meters large. “It is really big, it is huge,” he says, “there is a bedroom, a bathroom and a real roof. I even built in a wood-fired heating. (…) It is really nice. On a Tuesday evening we built in a parquet floor, me and my girlfriend, we really had a good time.” The meadow he parked it on is as big as a football field, he explains. There is a beehive, cherry trees, apple trees, and biotope that he made by hand. When he lived in the mobile home for four years, he could go shower and do his laundry at the studio. He and his girlfriend spent most of the time together anyway.

In 2012, Raphael left his job as an in-house technician and plumber in a big hotel in Bern. He says, he wanted to go back to his old job and had already signed the contract. But then their branch office in Bern closed down and he could not start his job. Since then, he feels comfortable with the way he lives. He gets his monthly social benefits and has some supplementary incomes. One of these incomes is mixing5, as it is called. He says, “I cannot just talk to people and ask them for money. So, sometimes I just sit there, put the cup in front of me, and some people throw in some money.” He mostly does this to observe the people, “there really are a lot of nice people.” Once an old lady went to buy a brand-new, expensive blanket for him, so he would not get cold. It is mostly the regular people that give him money, the ones that look rich hardly ever give him anything, Raphael notices. There are also

5 As a verbatim translation of the Swiss-German word ‘Mischle’, used by the research participants to describe the action of sitting in the streets with some kind of container in front of you, waiting for people to spare some change.

53 some negative encounters from time to time. “But those are the ones that just walk past me. No one ever says anything to your face. They just throw some insults at you while walking by and then they disappear. It’s rather weak people who do this” (see Figure 15).

Four years ago, in 2016, his girlfriend left him and their studio in Kaufdorf. She said that she wanted to move and then there was an incident between the two of them, and she left. For some time, Raphael hoped that she would come back to him, but she did not. “Since then everything is standing still a little,” he adds. He thinks that somehow he gave up on his life a little since she left. Even the apartment looks exactly like when they were living there together. An additional factor that makes him want to leave this apartment is his neighbor. He moved into the apartment above him, about four years after Raphael moved there. The situation between the two of them is slowly but surely getting worse. For example, as soon as his neighbor realizes that Raphael is coming home, he gets out on his balcony and starts swearing at him. He cannot cook at home anymore, because the neighbor says he can smell the odors and see the light through the massive wooden floors. He cannot invite friends anymore because his neighbor says he brings people into his home with no residency permit. The neighbor even threatened him with a machete. Once the police showed up at Raphael’s door at four o’clock in the morning. They wanted to search his apartment because his neighbor has called them, saying he had to tape off his baseboards because he could smell that Raphael was working with chemical products. “But he is my big test, this person. I mean 15 years ago I would have dealt with him by myself,” he adds. He went to speak to the landlord several times. But since the neighbor pays more for his apartment than Raphael does, the landlord is afraid that he would lose his more lucrative tenant. Raphael knows that it is time to look for another apartment. The only thing that is hindering him is the fact that his mobile home is parked behind the building and finding a new parking space would be difficult. Before their fights, Raphael used to have candles and flowers on his balcony, he really felt home there. Now he does not feel home at all anymore. And he says that he definitely is “a home person”. He thinks that “an apartment is crucial. A home is the place where you can retreat. I’ve always had an apartment and I’ve never lived on the street.” If he could wish for any apartment it would be something that is a little bigger than where he lives now, a two-bedroom apartment. Either in the center of Bern or close to it. According to Raphael, “in Switzerland, you don’t have to live on the street. I mean, it is possible that you lose an apartment and you live on the street for a week, but that’s it.” It might be difficult to find an apartment that meets all of his criteria. But he thinks, that if he would lose his apartment, he could immediately get a new one.

Because he does not feel at home in his own apartment, he spends a lot of his time outside, in public spaces in the city of Bern. He spends time in the Aarbergergasse. With his own people he gets along great. The ones that bother him a little more are the youngsters, spending their weekend nights out in the many clubs that are located on the same street. He says that many people point a finger at people who use drugs, but today’s youth is more aggressive than ever. He sees a lot of fist fights and young people who get really wasted. Another place he spends a lot of time, mostly on weekends, is the Reitschule and the space around it. The Reitschule is an autonomous culture center. Raphael likes the bustling atmosphere of this space, especially the soup kitchen and the skate park. “It is a very lively place and there are nice people. People really mix there,” he says. About feeling at home in public spaces he adds, “I really want this, being on the streets, you know. And I don’t have to. When we were

54 young we went outside and met friends in the villages or neighborhoods we lived in. And what do you do when you are grown up? You go to the city, the streets, and you’ll meet the ones that also just want to be outside and meet people. I am not forced to be outside on the street; I want it. And I like it.” He adds that these places really are his home, and that this is where his friends are (see Figure 16). Raphael mentions that soon he has to go to prison for 58 days because of fines in the amount of 5’800 francs, meaning that 100 francs of fines are equal to one day in prison. He got his fines for various things like fare evasion, drug trafficking, and drug use. Here in Bern you have to go to prison for consuming drugs. He says, “If they catch you consuming anything you will get a fine of 350 francs. You cannot pay it because you are registered with social services, then you go to prison for three and a half days.” His earlier fines he could pay off by working 900 hours of community service at a recycling station. This time, when he realized that he could do community service, it was already too late, and the judgment was already pronounced. “They say, we are the ones that cost [the state money]. But we go to jail [for those fines], and that is what costs [the state money]. If they would legalize drugs, they could close all of the prisons. That’s a real business,” he adds.

During the Swiss-wide lockdown, he spent every day in public spaces in Bern. He noticed that the police are outstandingly present in the spaces he frequents regularly. “At the moment, the police are going crazy, it’s really extreme. Many people just had to go to prison recently. […] They had to mark their presence. Had to give fines to people who don’t have any money anyway.” Another thing that changed for Raphael during the lockdown were the changes in the KODA, the heroine supported treatment office in Bern. They had to close down for a while, meaning he could only go by once a day. And then all of the stores were closed and there was scaremongering. Nonetheless, Raphael still trusts in the news from the state and keeps wearing his mask when taking public transport. He does not think that the lockdown was a time of solidarity. “People are not in solidarity with one another, not at all.” According to Raphael, people just want to demonstrate that they can be kind and present themselves in the best light. “They don’t do things because of the ones they give something to, they do this for themselves, you know. It’s a form of self-praise. And that is my opinion.”

Figure 15: Mixing in the Streets of Bern

56 Figure 16: Raphael’s Perception of Public Spaces

57 5. Analysis

This chapter is an attempt to closely interweave the theoretical and methodological discourse presented in this thesis with the narratives of Mischu, Beat, Nadine, and Raphael. Rather than laying any claim to comprehensiveness, this chapter aims to provide depth and detail, taking seriously the respondents’ individual lived experiences against the backdrop of broader structural issues in Bern. Firstly, how the variety of notions of home brings with it the need to stop putting people in rigid categories is discussed in Chapter 5.1. The accounts on unhousedness need to be much more individual and allow for people’s identities to be complex. Furthermore, in Chapter 5.2 the theories on criminalization and policing of people who call public spaces their second home are brought together with the narratives. Afterwards, an approach to destigmatize and participatively involve these people in the creation of public space is proposed. As the role of the state repeatedly came up in the interviews, it is closely discussed in Chapter 5.3. What are the problematics for the research participants when trying to find an apartment? How are social services perceived and what needs to be done to improve them? How could a change in terminology affect the way policies are formulated? This chapter is an approach to partly answer these questions. Following this, Chapter 5.4 is a short examination of the ways the global pandemic has affected the participants’ lives. Lastly, an analysis of what I have learned from the research process as a whole, and how the methods of photo voice and PEI were a valuable tool in structuring the research process is presented in Chapter 5.5.

5.1 Diverse Notions of Home In Chapter 1.2 the diversity of notions of home was established. According to these notions, the understanding of a home is not only linked to the physical structure of a house or an apartment anymore. It is an important expression of place but not limited to it. The notion of home consists of a complex interplay of people’s relations with one another, and with different places, spaces, things, or emotions (Mallett 2004, 84). According to the ETHOS light (FEANTSA, n.d.), Mischu would fall in the category “people living in non-conventional dwellings due to lack of housing,” and would therefore be designated as homeless. But he says, “I do not feel homeless, but I know that I am from the state’s and society’s point of view.” For four years now he has been living in his tent in the forest. This is where his dog feels at home, where his friends are, and most importantly where he feels at home. It is where he put his leather chair and his glass table, where he can put up his feet, relax, and make himself a coffee in the morning. His second home is the public space in front of the Heiliggeistkirche. Even though it gets to be too much sometimes, he has spent a lot of time there. It is where he meets his friends (Mischu, pers. comm.). According to Springer’s definition of ‘inadequate shelter’, Beat and Nadine would probably both fit into the category of ‘at risk of houselessness’. This category includes the people in threat of eviction (Springer 2000 in Kellett and Moore 2003, 126). Beat lives in an apartment that is part of the accompanied housing scheme of the WEGE Weierbühl. Due to the social service’s financial restrictions, they only granted him one more year of living in this apartment. He has also been living on the streets and in emergency accommodations in the past. Despite this, he says that he has never identified as homeless. He emphasizes that this apartment is where he feels comfortable, safe, and at home. Additionally, he mentions his family, a record store, and a public park as being part of his home. In the past he would have also mentioned the Heiliggeistkirche as his second home, but not since he has been sober (Beat, pers. comm.).

Nadine, on the other hand, says that to her home is wherever she goes. This partly comes from an absence of an affiliation with a certain nationality. She mentions her room as a home that she has carefully decorated and spends a lot of time in. Her dog Pepino is her one great home, she says. “A friend who never lets me down” is how she describes her relationship to him (Nadine, pers. comm.). Lastly, Raphael does not fit into any description or category of homeless, because he lives in a regular apartment. At the same time, he is the only one who says that he does not feel at home in the place in which he lives. This is a result of various complications with his neighbor, and the fact that the steadiest social relationship he had connected to this space was with his ex-girlfriend who does not live there anymore (Raphael, pers. comm.). Papadopoulos (2018) remarks, that the experience of home only emerges within a context of a particular space, once relationships are established over a period of time (55). It is possible that this lack of a sense of home in his apartment results from the absence of constant and positively connotated relationships within it. It is made visible that the physical structure alone does not constitute a home and is merely a structure that can be used to make a home. Raphael says that he calls Bern his home. “I mean I grew up in Bern. […] This is my home – just Bern you know.” Additionally, he also calls various public spaces in the city of Bern home. Mostly due to social relationships and the amount of time he spends there. This variety of notions of home makes it obvious that home can indeed not only be thought of as a physical structure. The notions of home of the four research participants are not exhaustive at all, but rather some facets of an impossibly large definition of home. It is an assemblage of social relations and emotional attachment towards people, things, animals, or spaces, established over a certain period of time that express themselves as a notion of home. Often it is the emotions of comfort and security that transform the physical space into a home and allow for the participants to appropriate the said space. It therefore becomes visible that in relation to homemaking and housing, a wide range of different needs within different levels exist. One thing all of the participants have in common is that they have a home. So, to use the term ‘homeless’ for people without permanent residency might indeed be somewhat of a misnomer. It is proposed to use the conceptualization of unhoused, presented in Chap- ter 1.1 and Figure 2, for further research and policy purposes. The importance of housing should thereby not be denied, quite the opposite. It is fascinating that when talking to the research participants about their ideal home, all of them have a very clear idea of a desired physical structure. Raphael would like to live in a two-bedroom apartment in the inner city. Mischu a two-bedroom apartment on the ground floor, with a bathtub. Nadine would like to live in a mansion, like the one she saw when she was taking the photographs for the research. Beat thinks it cannot get any better than it is in his current apartment (pers. comm.). They all live with a certain idea of an ideal home which is a personal desire to be inspired by, and aspire to. On the other hand, it can also be seen as an idea imposed by certain societal and political norms that can constrain people from arriving (Kellett and Moore 2003, 128). Generally speaking, there is a need for much more detailed accounts of individual housing situations to gain a deeper understanding of what being unhoused means. All of the interview partners have a very complicated housing history, and some of them still live in inadequate or non-conventional housing situations. So, even though they are not homeless, some of them are still unhoused and this needs to be investigated more closely. The term ‘unhoused’ plays an important role in the general framing of unhousedness and additionally is an attempt to give back the responsibility to house people to the state. This is further discussed in Chapter 5.3.

5.2 Having Private Sphere in Public Another theme all of the four interview partners have in common is that they named one or multiple public spaces as part of their home, either in the present or past. This includes various challenges, especially for Mischu, who lives on public land. He and his friends came to an agreement with the city that they can stay in their current location as long as they keep order. That is, if they restrain from littering or making too much noise. So far, this has worked out very well. However, they do not know for how long this agreement will last. Additionally, he was ordered to always muzzle his dog in public space. “But I live in public,” Mischu says. So, even when Mischu is home, his dog has to wear the muzzle. If something happens, for example, if a passer-by trespasses in his private space and gets bitten, the state will say it is Mischu’s fault because it happened on public ground (Mischu, pers. comm.). This situation is exemplary, in terms of the difficulties of having one’s private sphere within the public realm. When being forced to conduct many of the daily activities, that ought to be done in private, in public, people find themselves subject to pervasive criminalization and stigmatization (Am- ster 2008, 40).

Everyday Encounters with Passers-By

Another topic that was mentioned by all of the interviewees is the stigmatization they encounter in public spaces by passers-by. Nadine remembers instances of standing in public spaces and random people pointing her out as a sex worker. She wonders whether “they never thought about how we got here, […] and that we might also have a heart and a home” (pers. comm.). Beat on the other hand, remembers a situation when he was sitting in front of the Heiliggeistkirche and someone told him he should rather look for a job than lingering around. He got angry at the wrongful accusation of him not having a job. When waiting in line to get food at the office of the Streetwork Bern Beat felt very stigmatized as well (pers. comm.). Mischu felt like a thorn in the side of society while living in a small town close to Bern. He says he could hear people saying, “Oh no, not him again,” when he went to the supermarket or was juggling on the streets (pers. comm.). So, it can be said that most of the accounts about feeling stigmatized happened when the interviewees either got associated with the space they are in or their role in society. Therefore, Gerrard and Farrugia’s (2015) assumption that the visibility of poverty is still viewed as a disturbance of our regular everyday lives in public space bears a lot of truth (2223). As Pospech (2020) states, people who use public spaces as a part of their home become problematic and open to social judgement. Their physical visibility and moral presence imply a certain concern for safety and cleanliness (11). What is needed is a destigmatization of poverty, and in this case visible poverty in public spaces. There is a need to foster a public and political discourse about the structural barriers underlying these problematics. Nora from the Streetwork Bern thinks that in Switzerland the common perception that poverty is self-inflicted still prevails. She says, “[Some people think] you just have to make an effort and if you don’t, it is one’s own responsibility. If you fall through the cracks, it is neither the state’s fault, nor your boss’ fault, it is nobody’s problem but yours.” She assumes that for people to say, “in Switzerland you do not have to be poor,” is very beneficial for the ones who want to stay on top of society. To give back the responsibility to the citizens to care for themselves, is guided by the intent to keep a welfare state’s costs at a minimum (Nora, pers. comm.). While a destigmatization of poverty is needed, at the same time the generalization of individual cases also needs to be interrogated. This brings to mind a very powerful quote from a public speech

60 by Kübra Gümüşay (2020): “Those who deviate from our perceptions of the norm, are denied individ- uality. Within their identity, complexity becomes a privilege.” So, we need to stop putting people in rigid categories and be open to a person being a human being with all their facets. There are also more positive accounts of conducting private, everyday activities in public spaces. Beat, who spends a lot of time in a public park, gets to talk to a lot of different people and is reminded that his fear of being stigmatized is partly happening inside his head (pers. comm.). Raphael remembers several occasions where his mixing in public spaces led to very friendly encounters. Either people giving him money, talking to him, or even buying him a blanket (Raphael, pers. comm.). What matters most to all of my interviewees is the feeling of community in public spaces. Raphael says, “I want to spend my time on the streets, you know. This is my home, my friends, my everything.” In his example it becomes evident that to exist in public space can also be a choice. All of the interview partners possess the agency to decide where they want to spend most of their time. It is true that these choices might sometimes be constrained through structural barriers, but they are still choices.

Criminalization and Policing by the State

Another barrier the interviewees have to overcome on an almost daily basis is the fact of being criminalized and policed by state authorities. There are some instances where actual crimes have been committed and subsequently sanctioned. These situations are not perceived as unfair by the interview partners. It is rather an increased policing of the criminalized spaces and the active stigmatization by the police that is seen as unjust. According to Nora, the public spaces where many of the people who make their home on the streets reside, are intensely policed. For example, in the Casa Marcello where Raphael spends a lot of time, there is an ongoing police presence. Multiple times a day they go in and search and arrest people. In Switzerland, an identity check by the police needs a valid reason. But spaces like the Casa Marcello are considered a grey zone. One’s presence in such a space is reason enough for a legal identity check (Nora, pers. comm.). The Casa Marcello is a prime example of a space that is associated with illegal activities and thereby made the starting point of intensified police work. By virtue of using the space, the subjects are associated with criminality as well (Belina 2011, 211). Another thing Nora observes is how discriminatory the police treat people who inhabit public spaces as part of their home. Some people are accompanied by their dogs. If the dog is a little loud, either private citizens or the police patrolling the area issue a report. What follows can be either the police taking the animal away from its owner, a prohibition to own a dog in general, or a criminal charge (Nora, pers. comm.). This is an observable shift in criminalizing not only actual criminal activity, but sub-criminal incivility and nuisance (Pospech 2020, 2). This exaggerated policing also happens to people with obvious mental health issues or people who look like drug addicts (Nora, pers. comm.). This list of people who are exposed to intensified policing is not at all exhaustive, but rather what came up in the interview with Nora and in relation to the accounts of the research participants. In taking this into consideration, it becomes clear that the state has a vested interest in the spatialization of a security and cleanliness discourse. The need for order trumps the individual or collective liberty to move freely (Belina 1999, 40; Mitchell 2003, 15). One possible consequence of this are large fines. Within this research this was mainly true for the male interview partners. All three of them have already encountered the situation of receiving large fines for either minor or sub-criminal activities like camping, consumption of drugs, or fare evasion.

Raphael states, “They just had to give huge fines to people who don’t have money anyways. And then they say, we are the ones that cost [the state money]. But we go to jail [for those fines], and that is what costs [the state money]” (pers. comm.). This is a problem Raphael as well as Mischu have encountered before. Their financial restrictions do not allow them to pay these fines, then they go to jail. This entry in the police record does not make it easier for them to either avoid stigmatization or find a place to work or live. Many of the regulations applied to public spaces do not directly criminalize or de-legitimize the social or political status of certain people. They subtly exclude the behaviors and subjects that do not fit into this inclusionary definition of what an orderly, clean, and safe public space should look like (Qian 2020, 87). Many then see these regulations of public space not as an abrupt and unexpected exclusion, but as a set of standardized and negotiated conditions to be included in the public sphere (89). Even some of the interview partners internalize such points of view. Mischu, for example, says that in front of the Heiliggeistkirche, “everybody is staring at us, like we are an eyesore. And yes, we are an eyesore. […] But where should we go” (pers. comm.)? Mischu internalized the fact that he should not be part of public space because he and his friends do not fit into the desired city image. Qian (2020) reminds us that it needs to be kept in mind, especially when it is about people who are subject to marginalization, that inclusion is not only a political rhetoric but a lived perception. There is a possibility that people who do not brand these spaces as inclusive are somewhat comfortable with their exclusivity (90). All of the interview partners who spend a significant amount of time in public spaces have been exposed to active stigmatization. These encounters can be seen as acts of exclusion. Yet all of the interviewees name these public spaces as their second homes and feel comfortable there, be it in their in- or exclusivity. What is needed is decriminalization on state level of people using public space as their second home. To implement this, a more participatory approach in creating and maintaining public spaces is needed. In her position paper, Ursula Wyss (2018) is off to a good start. She stresses increasing the social function of public spaces and a focus on individuals and the requirements of participants in a space (6-7). A public space, considering the emotional and social aspects, needs to be thought and curated by the people from the beginning (19). There need to be new and increased modes of participation. They need to be built with very low threshold for participation and an acceptance that certain spaces are appropriated by certain people. Nora says that it does not help to create continually inclusive spaces if they are always only designed for the desired and orderly people. It is an illusion to create public spaces of total inclusion and integration. Other than that, it is also quite authoritative to decide in which space what group of people is supposed to gather. People choose their spaces and will assemble where they feel comfortable (Nora, pers. comm.). So, the state should rather work with what already exists in a space, and trust that the people who already appropriated this space will best know what requirements there are in order to make it more inhabitable. Qian (2020) stresses that he sees much value in characterizing public space by its co-temporality that includes a functioning between heterogenous rhythms of activity. This approach lets us appreciate a formation of various publics at once (82).

5.3 Evaluating the Swiss Housing Market and Social Services Another theme that regularly emerged during the interviews was the problematic situation regarding the housing market, and therefore the support of social services in Switzerland. There is Raphael who

62 thinks that in Switzerland you do not have to be unhoused. He says, it is possible that you live unhoused for a short amount of time if your contract is terminated on short notice. Otherwise you would simply have to adapt your expectations of where you would like to live and how many rooms your apartment should have. He is also happy with the amount of social benefits he gets, and emphasizes that in order to get them, you simply have to adhere to the deadlines (Raphael, pers. comm.). Mischu, Nadine, and Beat see this a little differently. First of all, Nadine pays an exorbitant amount of rent to live and work in her room. The underlying illegal structures of her profession enable her rent to be this high, and the police simply ignore it. She thinks that on the regular housing market she would not easily find a place to live because of her profession and the increasing prices (Nadine, pers. comm.). To Mischu, his problem starts with having a dog. For many people, owning a dog lessens your chances of getting an apartment. He makes the critique that there is not enough affordable housing available. If there is an apartment available at a reasonable price, he would not stand a chance of getting it, because there are so many people who submit their applications. “Everywhere they always say we will let you know, oh sorry we decided to take the nice family instead,” Mischu adds (pers. comm.). Beat is happy with his current living situation. But the social services only granted him the budget to keep the apartment for another year. He is afraid of looking for housing on the regular market. As he has an entry in the debt collection register, he thinks it is going to be complicated for him to find an alternative solution. In general, Beat thinks that “systems like affordable housing, there’s just not enough of it” (pers. comm.). Nora adds that Bern’s housing market is very tight, and prices are increasing. It is well known that many people simply do not get the apartments they want, she says. If they manage to find something, it is either a housing project or an apartment on the outskirts of Bern. People who mainly spend their time in the public spaces in the inner city of Bern are being pushed to the peripheries of the city (Nora, pers. comm.). One of the institutions offering either assisted living or accompanied housing that was mentioned by both Mischu and Beat is the CONTACT foundation. The assisted living they offer consists of a low- threshold, shared accommodation with psycho-social assistance. The accompanied housing can either take place in an apartment that the client has rented on their own or an apartment rented by CONTACT Wohnen. Beat and Mischu both lived in apartments rented by the CONTACT Wohnen that supports people who either lost their apartment or have previously been living in an institution (CONTACT 2020). One thing Mischu criticizes about the CONTACT foundation is that the apartment belongs to them and he only lived there as a subtenant. Due to this, he could not even register with the social services in the city of Bern and is still registered in Langnau. The notice period, which is usually three months in Switzerland, is only two weeks in the apartments rented by CONTACT Wohnen. For Mischu, this caused a lot of pressure. When talking about the state’s role of creating affordable living space, Mischu adds that they should not do it like the CONTACT foundation. He laments that within the buildings of the CONTACT Wohnen, there are a lot of people with drug addictions and the diversity is relatively small. In the past, this has made it very difficult for Mischu to lead a healthier life and keep an apartment for a longer period of time (pers. comm.). All of the three male interviewees are registered with social services. As they currently all have a good relationship with their social workers, they speak highly of them. The only critiques they have are the integration allowance and support in terms of searching for an apartment. The integration allowance is 100 francs per month. It does not matter if you work one and a half or five days per week. Beat thinks that “this is saving in the wrong place” (pers. comm.). Mischu, on the other hand, thinks that the social services could support people a little more when it comes to looking for a place to live. He says,

“They could have your back, say he needs an apartment and we are vouching for him” (pers. comm.). Another difficulty Nora sees with social services is the constant need for people to prove that they are poor. There is a very high threshold of required documents, adherence to deadlines, and a constant need to account for your poverty if you want to register with social services (pers. comm.).

Increased Individualization and Needs-Orientation

What was also repeatedly mentioned by all respondents is that there should be more money invested in social services. Beat says, “This is not about the social workers. But the state would rather save a little more in areas like the military and a little less when it comes to social services” (pers. comm.). Even though Nadine is not registered with social services, she notices that the state prefers recipients to stay within the realm of their services, so they can also earn money (pers. comm.). It is the profit- oriented nature of the state that prevents social services from working in a more individualized, client- centered way. Nora says,

It depends a little in which social services you are working, who the manager is, but the pressure to save [money] is very high. To give as little as possible to the clients […] leads to the people’s situations worsening. And I think this would be a great start; to say each social worker works on less cases and is therefore able to invest more time in the analysis of a case, check what their individual situations and needs are. […] And more tools through which they can refer people to someone and financing options. (pers.comm.)

It is crucial to accept the various living situations of people, and through a process of individualization chances are lessened of wrongfully perceiving someone’s living situation as a purely voluntary state. According to Amster (2008), there is a risk of this rhetoric of voluntariness being misused by the state to deny the quest to secure more and better social services, because the housing situation was volun- tarily chosen (12). In the interview, Nora mentions one example of a client of hers, who is living in the forest. After one year of not having a fixed address, his housing situation will be marked as voluntary and his income support will be cut short. Here, having the ability to individualize such policies would be very beneficial (pers. comm.). In addition to individualizing the process of social services and the housing market, the state needs to work in a much more needs-oriented way. For example, the Streetwork Bern demanded to build a municipal emergency shelter. When the state eventually listened to their request, they built a shelter with a very high threshold to enter: dogs were not allowed, the entrance fee was very high, and people were not allowed to enter if they were on drugs. Consequently, nobody used the services of the municipal shelter. After a while, the city closed the shelter again on the grounds that the need of such a shelter is non-existent. But the provision of such a shelter will not be a real service until it is based on what people need (Nora, pers. comm.)

Reframing Terminology Needs to be Followed by Action

Another request to create a women’s only municipal emergency shelter by the Streetwork Bern was denied by the municipal council of Bern. PINTO was instructed to enumerate the unhoused women they encountered in Bern. They only counted four and reported that they would not use these services

64 due to mental health issues. However, they did not count the women staying in the Passantenheim nor the Sleeper who make up the majority of unhoused women in Bern (Nora, pers. comm.). It can be seen through this example, that on a policy level it can be crucial to have a much more detailed understanding of the definition of unhousedness, including the subcategories of, for example, ‘houseless’ and ‘inadequate shelter’ (Springer 2000). This could lead to a change of who is included in the definition of unhoused and who will eventually benefit from the financial and other state support. Additionally, it is an attempt to give back the responsibility to the state to house people and take away the passive notion of it being their own fault. It is not enough to reframe the vocabulary without questioning the underlying structures and taking the needed actions concurrently. Springer (2000) mentions the importance of raising a claim to policy makers to develop different forms of action for different groupings. She thinks that these should include emergency actions for the houseless, as well as more sustainable policies and measures for all categories of unhoused people. Therefore, we need new methods of enumeration and data-collection considerations, Springer stresses. Through these it should be made possible to develop a deep understanding of the causes, situations, and needs of these people (482). According to Drilling, Dittmann, and Bischoff (2019), the current lack of information on unhousedness in Switzerland has resulted in a shockingly small explanatory power of the state to defend certain social policies. The state, as well as professional actors within this field, are lacking scientifically grounded positions to fight certain imagery and stereotypes about unhousedness within politics and society (9). Nora reiterates the positions of Springer (2000) and Drilling, Dittmann, and Bischoff (2019) by saying that what is needed is a scientific enumeration of how many unhoused people there are and what they need. From this, services can be developed accordingly. Nora states,

An emergency shelter for women, one for youths, a mixed shelter, food services, recreation and common rooms, ensure a postal address is always a big issue. Just so you can register somewhere, because without a postal address you are no one in Switzerland. They could register with social services, democratic participation, open a bank account, that all relates to the postal address. I think there are many things that would result from such a scientific enumeration, services that could be established to meet the needs. (pers. comm.)

It becomes evident that a reframing and more detailed understanding of the term ‘homeless’ is not only necessary because it clashes with the diversity of notions of home (see 6.1). It plays an essential role in ensuring the ability of the state and private institutions to adequately enumerate unhoused people, their needs, and provide adequate services.

5.4 Navigating the Lockdown At the time of writing this thesis, the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic became an ubiquitous topic in popular media, politics, and in private conversation. The Swiss-wide lockdown and the various measures it entailed, such as social distancing, the rule of only five people being allowed to gather in one place, and the call to stay at home, influenced the lives of unhoused people to a great degree. When talking to the research participants about the pandemic and the lockdown, they perceived this situation in many different ways.

To Nadine, the lockdown was a blessing. She finally got to go outside and did not have to account for her absence at work, neither to her boss nor her clients. The financial difficulties were largely over- shadowed by her newfound freedom (pers. comm.). Mischu was irritated by the fact that the amount of people spending their time in the forest exponentially increased. It seemed like everyone suddenly went for a walk, jogging, or hiking and actively practiced social distancing where Mischu lives. It was a huge shock to Mischu when the launderette closed where he usually does his laundry. He says, “I never felt as dirty as during the lockdown.” He spent a lot of his time in public spaces, where he noticed an increased presence of the police (pers. comm.). Raphael mentioned the increased policing as well. He was irritated by the fact that the police distributed fines to people who do not have any money anyway during these difficult times (pers. comm.). Still doing street work, Nora noticed an increased police presence in public spaces where the people who visit the office of the Streetwork Bern often are. She says, “In the surrounding areas of office buildings, people were outside having lunch in large groups and nothing ever happened. At the station square the people got searched, fined, and expelled on a regular basis. That was really weird to observe” (pers. comm.). Having a history of mental health issues, this time was especially difficult for Beat. In the beginning he enjoyed the lockdown because he could go to the park and the public transportation was almost empty. Once some time had passed, he started to struggle with the situation. His drug consumption increased, all of the public parks were closed, and he felt more stigmatized than ever in the public spaces that were still accessible (Beat, pers. comm.). Nora also mentions that when they were doing street work during the lockdown, they only encountered their clients, or people who were doing errands such as grocery shopping. The people who were still outside were the ones who are struggling and could not go home for a certain reason (Nora, pers. comm.). On a more positive note, what all interview partners mentioned was the presence of the team from the Streetwork Bern. Mischu says, “The Streetwork Bern did an amazing job. They were there for us. Even if they could not open their office, they guaranteed that we had food” (pers. comm.). But apart from the non-governmental institutions supporting them and their private relations, none of the participants really felt any additional solidarity with other parts of society. All of the interviewees hope that something will remain from this situation. Perhaps some sort of affinity for the situation of those in our society who do not own as much as others.

5.5 Defamiliarizing the Familiar On a methodological level, it was very challenging to do the research in the city I grew up in and still live. It is harder to defamiliarize yourself if everything you encounter already seems familiar. I tried my best to follow Honer’s (2000) advice to not forget what I already know about the city of Bern, but to be conscious about the relativity of my own perception of the world I live in (195). I do think that an entire defamiliarization of what’s known will never be possible. I attempted to the best of my ability to recognize the unfamiliarity in the familiar. To do so, it was crucial for this thesis to be created in collaboration with or support of the Streetwork Bern. Throughout the whole process they have been really supportive and eager for the project to succeed. Even throughout the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic, they did not let me down and found ways for this thesis to work out. Another advantage of working with this office was their independent status. Through this, I was able to create a narrative much closer to the point of view of unhoused people, not affiliated with the state’s perspective.

Due to the global pandemic, I had to restructure my research process. In doing this, less research participants could be recruited, and the whole research process could not be done as participatively as was initially planned. By not being able to do a primary introduction to the project, and meeting with the participants, the whole familiarization phase was cancelled. I suppose I could have built a deeper level of trust with my participants if multiple meetings would have been possible. The methodology of photo voice or reflexive photography generated a very positive response. All of the participants really enjoyed the process of taking the photographs and invested a great amount of thoughts in it. As presumed, many of the participants used their photographs as symbols to depict the subjective meanings of the familiar things, people, built structures, and animals surrounding them (Schulze 2007, 539). Because of the fact that they invested much thought in these photographs, they already thought about many of the topics that would later be discussed in the interviews. Miller (2006) thinks that photographs can serve as reminders to acknowledge the perspectives of the photographer as inherently valuable (126). I realized that there is truth to this statement, when talking to Mischu. He said that he took the photographs of the Heiliggeistkirche from his perspective, because that is not what people see every day and he wanted me to look at it from another perspective (pers. comm.). Within the Photo Elicitation Interviews, the photographs themselves were very helpful. It is true that in these interview situations two people meet who do not share many facets of a taken-for-granted cultural background. The photo was a way to partly bridge this gap, because it is an object that is understood by both parties (Harper 2002, 20). Through the photos, my research participants and I were able to establish a very deep level of conversation and tap into emotional details quite quickly. Many of the events and situations they told me about were closely linked to something of which they took a photograph. Another more technical fact I noticed was the significance of knowing the guideline to my interview questions by heart. It enabled me to fully focus on the conversation and remain flexible when it came to the order of the discussed themes. With all four research participants, an additional interview would have made it possible to gain a deeper insight into their realities. The opportunity to ask follow-up questions would have added some valuable, missing information. Questions about how they would like to be involved in the creation of public spaces, or talking about the norm of expulsion, only came up after the interviews were already completed. Due to time constraints and the various measures implemented by the Swiss state due to the coronavirus disease (COVID-19), only the four interviews could be conducted. Within the rest of the process, which led up to writing the four narratives and analyzing them, what was most crucial was not trying to find answers to my already existing assumptions. Schmidt (2000) regards this as essential, in order not to miss new aspects and themes brought up by the interview partners (449). Throughout the whole research process, it was very important to keep in mind that all of my findings are subjective and not exhaustive at all. Esin (2017) remarks, through the presence of both the storyteller and the listener a discursive space is constructed in which the narrative is co-constructed (3). So, in writing this thesis, it was crucial to remember that I always tell the story from my point of view and that absolute objectivity cannot and does not have to be achieved.

Conclusion

When I lived in Cape Town for eight months in 2019, I got to talk to a lot of people with different experiences of housing and personal situations. I felt the urge to include what I had heard into my academic work. Back in Switzerland, it seemed impossible to be able to bridge the structural and ethical barriers attached to doing research in a context that is not deeply familiar to me. I realized that in Switzerland, unhousedness is largely absent from a public, political, and interpersonal discourse. When it is talked about, what is mostly relayed are vague notions about Switzerland’s general political system being too strong for its citizens to be able to fall through the cracks. Combining these experiences and the assumption of the term ‘homeless’ not being adequate to describe experiences of a lack of permanent residency, I began this research process. I started this thesis and the photo project conducted by the research participants with the question, what does home mean to unhoused people in Bern? The answers to this question can be summarized as to say that the notions of home are manifold, and every research participant confirms that they have a home. This led to a justified questioning of the term ‘homeless’ itself (see Chapter 1.1). To further deepen this argumentation, the notion of home was closely analyzed in Chapter 1.2. Except for the realization that there exists a variety of notions of home, Raphael’s experience added yet another valuable layer – not limiting a home to a built physical structure. He is the only participant who lives in an apartment with a ‘regular’ leasing relationship. Despite this, he does not feel at home within this space due to a variety of circumstances and prefers to stay in public spaces. This makes it evident that the notion of home is not limited to a house or apartment but consists of a variety of relationships to people, things, animals, places, or emotions. Throughout the conversations with the participants it became clear that all of them, either in present or in the past, regard one or different public spaces in Bern as a part of their home. When residing in public space they encounter a variety of challenges. There are various encounters with passers-by, wherein the participants felt stigmatized and judged. In Chapter 5.2 it was established that this happens because the moral and physical visibility of poverty is still viewed as a disturbance of everyday, regular lives in public space (Gerrard and Farrugia 2015, 2223) and implies a certain concern for safety and cleanliness (Pospech 2020, 11). Thus, the spaces where people have their second home in public become associated with criminal activity, and also become the starting point of intensified police work (Belina 2011, 211). It is this interrelation of the criminalization of spaces and the subjects within them, based on subjective feelings of harm resulting from aesthetic concerns, that legitimize problematic regulations and measures implemented to control such spaces (Pospech 2020, 2). Through these perceptions of society, measures of control by the police force, and a changing legal framework, the spatial practice of ‘disorderly’ actors is gradually disciplined and controlled (Litscher 2017, 129). In Chapter 1.6 it is illuminated how many of these spatial policies are formulated through a vocabulary of inclusion in order to subtly exclude certain people. In Chapter 2.3 the norm of expulsion in Bern is used to illustrate this development. On a more structural and bureaucratic level the research participants also encounter a variety of challenges. Both the housing market and the social services of Bern are very challenging institutions for Mischu, Beat, and Nadine. The participants offer suggestions of an increased supply of affordable housing, social services that show an enhanced interest in individual situations, and for the state to save in other areas than the social services and social housing (see Chapter 5.3).

In order to reframe the public perception of unhoused people and the measures taken by the state, more empirical research and its translation into implementable strategies is needed (see Chapter 5.3 Reframing Terminology Needs to be Followed by Action). A general enumeration of unhoused people, one that considers both individual and general needs, has been demanded by key actors working with the unhoused population in Bern. To be able to include the many forms of unhousedness in an enumeration and the actions resulting from it, the terminology and definition of unhousedness needs to be not only redefined but refined. Desired results from a refined definition of unhousedness and a categoric enumeration would be a public reframing of unhousedness and for the state to perform its duty to house people. Other areas where this newly generated knowledge could be implemented would be on a policy level, in social services, and the housing market. The structures need to be re- framed to gain a much deeper understanding of individuals and their needs. On a national or global level, the state needs to increasingly invest in social services and affordable housing. Generally speaking, capitalist states need to stop perceiving their cities and nations as enterprises and return to a state where the individual’s need to be housed and survive is placed above profit. On city level, public space, the second home to many of my interview partners, needs to be conceptualized by the people already inhabiting these spaces. To implement participatory methods to co-create public space that include the unhoused population, the approach of reflexive photography might be a valuable tool. According to Schulze (2007), participants often use photographs as symbols to depict the subjective meaning of the things surrounding them (539). This can be regarded as a productive start to create “a public space that takes into account the social and emotional aspects, and needs to be thought ‘by the people’ from the beginning” (Wyss 2018, 19). Additionally, reflexive photography can also foster a public discourse, whereby the photographers influence or even generate their own portrayal in public images (Copes et al. 2018, 482). Exemplary for this mode of generation of a public image is the exhibition accompanying this paper. The participants will plan the exhibition by themselves and therefore choose which images will be exhibited, where the exhibition is taking place, and what form of self-portrayal is generated. The aim of the exhibition is to show people the different realities co-existing in the city of Bern and to partly free people from being put in rigid categories of preconceptions. Even though throughout my research the photographs have played a key role in supporting the flow of the conversations, the basis of trust, and the exploration of the participants’ lifeworlds, there still are some limits to it. Future research needs to include ways in which the whole research process can become participatory or even participant-led. On a more theoretical level, I propose that a transformation of the definition and perception of unhousedness should be attempted in many different places around the world. Only then can a redefinition of unhousedness become truly situated and based on individual accounts and approaches. These understandings should then be further developed, compared, and complemented to identify global, structural deficiencies and develop adequate measures and services on different levels. On a national or city level next steps would be to refine the term ‘unhousedness’, carry out the proposed enumeration, and identify needs of unhoused people for a sustainable provision of services and public spaces. Hereby, the state needs to involve and collabo- rate with institutions supporting the unhoused population and independent researchers.

Bibliography

List of Figures Figure 1: ETHOS Light, by author (Data from FEANSTA, n.d.). 6

Figure 2: Definition of Unhoused, by author (Data from FEANTSA, n.d.; Springer 2000). 8

Figure 3: Figures and Forms of Unhousedness in Switzerland, by author (data from Drilling, Dittmann, and Bischoff (2019). 17

Figure 4: The Forest Close to Mischu’s Tent, by Mischu (2020). 39

Figure 5: The Red Leather Chair in Mischu’s Tent, by Mischu (2020). 40

Figure 6: Mischu’s Dog wearing a Muzzle in Public Space, by Mischu (2020). 40

Figure 7: Mischu’s View from the Heiliggeistkirche Bern Towards the Train Station, by Mischu (2020). 40

Figure 8: The Window in Beat’s Room, by Beat (2020). 45

Figure 9: Beat at the Azzurro Packing a Shipment, by Beat’s colleague (2020). 45

Figure 10: The Liebefeld Park, by Beat (2020). 46

Figure 11: Empty Public Spaces During the Swiss-wide Lockdown, by Beat (2020). 46

Figure 12: Snippets from Nadine’s Journey of Discovering Switzerland, by Nadine (2020). 51

Figure 13: Nadine’s Ideal Home Hidden Behind Trees, by Nadine (2020). 52

Figure 14: Pepino, by Nadine (2020). 52

Figure 15: Mixing in the Streets of Bern, by Raphael (2020). 56

Figure 16: Raphael’s Perception of Public Spaces, by Raphael (2020). 57

Conversations Beat. Interview by author. July 7, 2020. Bern, Switzerland.

Mischu. Interview by author. July 30, 2020. Bern, Switzerland.

Nadine. Interview by author, August 27, 2020. Bern, Switzerland.

Raphael. Interview by author. September 2, 2020. Bern, Switzerland.

Nora. Interview by author. September 11, 2020. Bern, Switzerland.

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Appendix

Interview Guideline Vorstellen, was ich mache und warum. Um was geht es mir, was habe ich für ein Ziel mit dieser Arbeit. Gibt nichts was ich speziell hören will, gibt kein richtig oder falsch, ich bin einfach sehr interessiert an den Hintergründen von dir und auch deinen Fotos. Du kannst einfach sprechen und sagen was dir in den Sinn kommt. Hast du bevor wir beginnen noch Fragen?

Fotos Einstieg - Lieblingsfoto? (auch mehrere) o Was sieht man auf diesem Foto? (In Notizen Fotos, über welche gesprochen wird num- merieren.) o Was bedeutet dieser Gegenstand/ Ort/ Person… für dich? In welcher Art und Weise würdest du dies als Zuhause (Dehei) bezeichnen?

Die folgenden Unterkapitel werden jeweils benutzt, wenn es sich auf den Fotos, welche gezeigt werden, um einen öffentlichen Raum bzw. eine Wohnung/ Tier/ Person(en)/ Gefühl oder eine Institution handelt.

Öffentlicher Raum als Zuhause – Gesellschaft - Erzähle mir ein bisschen über diesen Ort? (Oft dort, wann, mit wem, wieso, Gefühle…) - Wie fühlst du dich an diesem Ort von anderen Personen wahrgenommen und von wem? - Wie beeinflusst dies dein Verhalten an diesem Ort? - Wie wünschst du, dass Personen auf dich reagieren würden? - Wie wünschst du, dass sich andere Personen in diesem Raum verhalten würden?

Öffentlicher Raum als Zuhause – Staat - Was für Begegnungen gibt es an diesem Ort zwischen dir und staatlichen Autoritäten? Bei- spiele. - Zu welchem Grad fühlst du dich als vom Staat akzeptiertes Mitglied dieses öffentlichen Rau- mes/ der Stadt?

Wohnung/ Tier/ Person(en)/ Gefühl als Zuhause - Was oder wer ist das? Erzähl mir ein bisschen davon… - Wie lange begleitet dich diese Person/ Tier/ Ort schon? - Was hat sich für dich verändert seit du diese Person/ Tier/ Ort kennst? - Welche Gefühle hast du ihm oder ihr gegenüber? - Was ist für dich der Unterschied zwischen dieser Person/ Tier/ Ort zu einer anderen Person/ Tier/ Ort?

Institution als Zuhause - Was macht diese Institution, dass sie für dich ein Zuhause ist? - Wie lange beanspruchst du die Dienste dieser Institution schon? - Positive Seiten der Institution? - Negative Seiten der Institution?

Allgemeinere Fragen

Dies ist sozusagen der zweite Teil des Interviews, welchen ich in vier Unterkategorien eingeteilt habe. Es kann sein, dass wir einige der Fragen sowieso schon geklärt haben. Auch hier kannst du mir jederzeit sagen, wenn die Frage zu persönlich ist oder du nicht darüber sprechen möchtest.

Es Dehei - Was bedeutet ein Zuhause für dich? - Wenn Wohnung: Inwiefern ist ‘die Gasse’ immer noch ein Zuhause für dich? Was macht ‘die Gasse’ als Zuhause für dich aus? (Personen, Gefühle, Ort…) - Wenn du könntest, wie würdest du dir ein Zuhause erwünschen? (Wunschdehei)

System Schweiz - Was sind Gründe, die zu deiner jetzigen Wohnsituation geführt haben? - Wie denkst du werden diese allgemein in der Schweiz thematisiert? (Gesellschaftlich, Medien, Staat) - Wie wird deiner Meinung nach von staatlicher Seite etwas dagegen/ dafür unternommen? - Was denkst du über den aktuellen Stand der Wohnungssituation in Bern? - Wie wäre eine Verbesserung davon möglich? (Was wären deiner Meinung nach die Hand- lungsstrategien?) Von wem aus sollten diese kommen? - Was denkst du über die Sozialhilfe in der Schweiz (Bern)? - Wie wäre eine Verbesserung davon möglich?

Allgemein - Ich spreche über das Verständnis von einem Zuhause wegen dem englischen Begriff ‘homeless’, was ‘Ohne Zuhause’ bedeutet. Was denkst du darüber, dass dieser Begriff immer noch so verwendet wird? - Denkst du, du hast keinen fixen Wohnsitz, aber ein Zuhause oder gerade deshalb kein Zu- hause? (Würdest du von dir sagen, dass du kein Zuhause hast, weil du keinen fixen Wohnsitz hast oder dass du ein Zuhause hast?)

Corona - Was hat sich an einem normalen Tagesablauf (vor Corona) zu einem Tag während dem Lock- down verändert? - Was denkst du war für dich anders als für andere Personen in dieser Zeit? - Wie denkst du wurdest du von der Gesellschaft im öffentlichen Raum anders wahrgenommen als sonst? - Hast du dich an anderen Orten aufgehalten als sonst? Wieso (nicht)? Wo? - Denkst du diese Zeit war eine Zeit der Solidarität? Inwiefern hast du das (nicht) gespürt? - Hast du dich mehr oder weniger abgesondert vom Rest der Gesellschaft gefühlt als sonst? Wieso? - Hast du dich mehr oder weniger abgesondert gefühlt von Menschen, die sich in einer ähnli- chen Situation wie du befinden? - Was hoffst du wird sich nach Corona verändern?

Basic Info - Name? - Wie alt? - Kurzer Überblick über Wohnsituation der letzten zehn Jahre? - Würdest du dich momentan oder in der Vergangenheit als obdachlos identifizieren? - Jobsituation? - Sozialhilfe?

Declarations of Consent

The transcripts of the conversations with the research participants can be made available on request.

Erklärung zur wissenschaftlichen Redlichkeit

Hiermit erkläre ich, dass ich ausser der angegebenen Literatur keine weiteren Hilfsmittel benutzt habe und dass mir bei der Zusammenstellung des Materials und der Abfassung der Arbeit von niemandem geholfen wurde. Ich bestätige hiermit, dass ich vertraut bin mit den Regelungen zum Plagiat der «Ordnung der Philosophisch-Historischen Fakultät der Universität Basel für das Masterstudium vom 25. Oktober 2018» (§25) und die Regeln der wissenschaftlichen Integrität gewissenhaft befolgt habe. Die vorliegende Arbeit ist ausserdem weder ganz noch teilweise an einer anderen Fakultät oder Universität zur Begutachtung eingereicht und/oder als Studienleistung z.B. in Form von Kreditpunkten verbucht worden. Ich bezeuge mit meiner Unterschrift, dass meine Angaben über die bei der Erstellung meiner Masterarbeit benutzten Hilfsmittel, über die mir zuteil gewordene Hilfe sowie über die frühere Begutachtung meiner Masterarbeit in jeder Hinsicht der Wahrheit entsprechen und vollständig sind.

Datum: November 11, 2020 Unterschrift: