Re-imagining Cities as Spaces of Care – A Perspective from Street Homelessness

Since the 1980s, and on a global scale, cities have played a critical role in the political/economic imaginary, and, most critically, by those in power, have been simultaneously constructed as spaces for economic development and as spaces of insecurity. Our starting point is to examine the consequences of this for homeless people by comparing and contrasting the experiences of the homeless in London and Canterbury in the United Kingdom, and Belo Horizonte in Brazil. Th ese street sleepers have been required to position themselves as entrepreneurs, selling for instance the Big Issue, or organising car parking for restaurants, and at the same time are made subject to sanitary and security regimes which seek to remove them from the streets. What we note here is a shift from welfare politics, which sought to deliver a particular, paternalistic and non-inclusive programme of care for the vulnerable, to a neoliberal and urban politics, which requires the reformation of the subject via entrepreneurialism. However, recent political events have arguably destabilised urban entrepreneurialism, and it is this destabilisation which provides the main argument of our chapter. Whilst many commentators fear the consequences of a politics of retrenchment and despair, this chapter takes the suggestion of Rose (2017) that it is important to explore the progressive possibilities provided by the language of liberty, security and control that have fuelled populist rejections of neoliberalism, seriously.