Over the past decade there has been a proliferation of work on homelessness by geographers. Much of this has been framed by the desire to connect discussions of homelessness to wider debates around gentrification, urban restructuring and the politics of public space. Though such work has been helpful in shifting discussions of homelessness into the mainstream geographical literature, too much of it remains narrowly framed within a US metric of knowledge and too closely focused upon the recent punitive turn in urban social policy. Here we advance instead a framework that recognizes the growing multiplicy of homeless geographies in recent years under policies that are better understood as multifaceted and ambivalent rather than only punitive.

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This paper is a sympathetic critique of mainstream grammars of urban injustice, arguing that they are frequently too one-sided and selective to adequately grasp the full complexity of urban realities. Most prominently, I contend that urban injustice and punitiveness co-exist with, if not sometimes depend upon, more supportive responses within urban space. I therefore counterbalance the spectacular logics of punitive urbanism and the everyday logics of control with a tripartite approach to logics assembled within the urban voluntary sector (abeyance, care and survival) as a way to reconnect to a broader set of practices. Two case studies are used to illustrate these contentions.

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