Navigating the Homeless City

Bosse, Ben Friedrich

4. semester

International Relations, MSc.

2024

2024-05-31

In this thesis, I investigate the manifestations of homelessness and home in the everyday practices of homeless people in Copenhagen. Contributing to an empirically grounded understanding of urban homelessness in the field of human geography, I look at the spatiotemporal navigation of my informants within the shifting geographies of homelessness, tracing varying notions of home emergent in their rhythms and routines. Set against the backdrop of legal and institutional regulation of homelessness, this research acknowledges the restrictions put upon people living in homelessness. In Denmark, limited night shelter availability, hostile design and restrictive legislation of public space pose significant challenges to life on the streets. But while recognizing the importance of work scrutinizing punitive measures towards the urban homeless, this thesis wishes to move beyond the documentation of repressions and instead focus on the homeless themselves, exploring their use of the city. The perspective of the homeless holds valuable lessons for city planners and politicians alike. Thus, an in-depth exploration of spatiotemporal practices on the city margins offers the possibility of developing alternative and more inclusive urban spaces. Drawing on 6 months of ethnographic research among homeless men in Copenhagen, including 9 in-depth interviews, I lay out their various strategies of getting by in their everyday life, with a marked focus on the spatial, temporal, and normative implications of their daily practices. This perspective allows a detailed understanding of the varying spatiotemporal rhythms and routines manifesting in the lives of my informants. Following their various everyday trajectories, this reveals the potentials for isorhythmia and the risk of arrhythmia, as the homeless can be seen fall in and out of sync with the pulse of the city. Implementing the concept of social navigation (Vigh, 2006), I show how homeless people exhibit remarkable resourcefulness and creativity in the face of recurring adversities. Moreover, a focus on homemaking reveals complex and unexpected iterations of home within homelessness, showing the potential for home in the territorial claim to public space and in the enactment of spatiotemporal routines. Arriving at an many-layered and open-ended position of home(lessness) (Lancione, 2023), this thesis points to new directions for developing the notions of home within homelessness.

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