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Governing Poor Spaces. Homeless Encampments and the New Management of Housing Insecurity in the US

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Governing Poor Spaces. Homeless Encampments and the New Management of Housing Insecurity in the US Governing Poor Spaces. Homeless encampments and the new management of housing insecurity in the US Dissertation zur Erlangung des Grades eines Doktor der Philosophie im Fach Politikwissenschaft am Fachbereich Politik- und Sozialwissenschaften der Freien Universität Berlin Vorgelegt von: Manuel Lutz Berlin, 20.04.2018 Erstgutachterin (supervisor): Prof. Dr. Margit Mayer John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies, Department of Political Science, Freie Universität Berlin Zweitgutachter (second assessor): Prof. Dr. Christian Lammert John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies, Department of Political Science, Freie Universität Berlin Tag der Disputation: 25.10.2018 Table of Contents List of Figures ................................................................................................................ v List of Tables ............................................................................................................... vii Preface ……. .................................................................................................................. 9 Chapter I: Introduction ........................................................................................... 12 1. Homeless tent cities and American crises ............................................................... 12 2. Research agenda for the analysis of governing camps .......................................... 13 3. Structure of the work ............................................................................................... 16 Chapter II: The research context of governing urban marginality and homelessness in the 21st century ....................................................................... 21 1. Introduction .............................................................................................................. 21 Governing the poor between punitive coercion, supportive care and grey-spacing ....... 22 2. Re-visiting the penal state and the revanchist city: homeless camps as spaces of repression and resistance? ........................................................................................... 24 The penal turn in governing urban marginality: camps as target of urban revanchism . 25 The penal state as a hegemonic strategy ......................................................................... 26 Inventing and policing homelessness to secure society ................................................. 27 Criminalizing the homeless as the deviant other ............................................................ 30 The “messy ground” of post-revanchist policing ........................................................... 31 Homeless camps as sites of repression and resistance to urban revanchism .................. 33 Conclusion: the pervasive performativity of penality .................................................... 36 3. Re-visiting welfare and care: supportive spaces between care and control ........ 38 Supportive spaces as “urge to care”? .............................................................................. 38 Understanding neoliberal poverty governance beyond the binary of care and coercion: from regulating to punishing to disciplining the poor .......................................... 41 The roll-out of federal homelessness assistance as a neoliberal paternalist project to discipline the homeless poor ................................................................................. 44 Three phases of federal homeless assistance .................................................................. 48 Neoliberal and paternalist logics of homeless care: medicalization determines deservingness ........................................................................................................ 50 Institutions of homeless assistance as spaces of discipline ............................................ 54 Homeless camps as resistance to paternalist shelter discipline ...................................... 56 Conclusion: accounting for ambiguities of care ............................................................. 58 4. Governing the informal city: camps as grey spaces of housing insecurity .......... 61 The dark side of the American Dream: informal housing and hidden homelessness as complementary to visible homelessness ............................................................... 62 Informality as a tool of governing: (state) managed persistence of illegality and grey- spacing .................................................................................................................. 63 Governing housing poverty and homelessness through selective informalization and toleration ............................................................................................................... 66 Camps as managed sites of informal survival ................................................................ 67 Different grades of grey in US housing: formal and informal spaces of abeyance ........ 68 Conclusion: top-down and bottom-up grey-spacing in the shadows of the state ........... 70 i Chapter III: Conceptualizing the contours of homeless management ................... 74 1. Introduction .............................................................................................................. 74 2. Homeless management to achieve the neutralizing of homelessness ................... 75 Neutralizing homelessness ............................................................................................. 75 Neutralizing homelessness as a hegemonic project ........................................................ 78 What is a hegemonic project? ......................................................................................... 79 The national hegemonic project of homeless assistance ................................................ 82 Ideology and consent: neutralizing housing insecurity through othering the homeless . 84 What´s in a term? Poverty governance and homeless/ness management ....................... 87 Analyzing the hegemony of neutralizing homelessness: not whether but how homelessness is managed ...................................................................................... 89 Addressing research gaps in homeless camp research: explanations of local governing rather than appeals to local government ............................................................... 94 3. Critical policy analysis: examining local struggle over camps as a struggle for re- stabilizing (local) hegemony ........................................................................................ 96 The production of space and hegemony: “urbanizing Gramsci” .................................... 97 Local hegemony and the stabilization of socio-spatial order ....................................... 100 Unpacking the (local) state: key lessons from debates about the “gov-complex” ....... 102 The local integral state .................................................................................................. 108 Conceptualizing homeless camps: hegemonic challenge and tool to re-stabilize local hegemony ............................................................................................................ 112 Grasping the political: the discursive constructedness of social actors and political struggles .............................................................................................................. 117 Towards a conjunctural analysis of the political in local struggle ............................... 119 Chapter IV: Research design ................................................................................... 122 1. Introduction ............................................................................................................ 122 Developing the research question ............................................................................. 122 2. Case study selection ................................................................................................ 125 Mapping the camps phenomenon in the North West region ........................................ 125 Selecting the critical cases of Ontario, Fresno and Seattle ........................................... 127 Excluding the cases of Sacramento, Venice, and Portland .......................................... 133 3. Elements of policy analysis .................................................................................... 135 Comparing critical cases, searching for a paradigmatic case ....................................... 135 Process-tracing of articulated claims for local hegemony ............................................ 137 4. Interviews, observations and embedded research ............................................... 139 Qualitative interviews ................................................................................................... 140 Document analysis ........................................................................................................ 146 Participatory observations and embedded research in camps ...................................... 148 Why not ethnography? ................................................................................................. 151 Omissions of race and gender ....................................................................................... 153 The role of the researcher ............................................................................................. 154 Chapter V: Managing homeless camps to govern local crises:
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