Often referred to as “tent cities”, tent encampments have, in the last 10 years, proliferated within and around US cities on a scale unprecedented since the Great Depression. Accounts of these informal dwellings tend to focus on the symbolism of the camp, the function of the camp as safe zone, or the camp as a site of apolitical or prepolitical identity formation. This article attempts to broaden and deepen the conversation on informal dwellings in the US by focusing on the tent encampment as a site of creative political agency and experimentation. Drawing upon a body of work referred to by some as “subaltern urbanism”, I examine how everyday practices of camp management produce localized forms of citizenship and governmentality through which “homeless” residents resist stereotypes of pathology and dependence, reclaim their rational autonomy, and recast deviance as negotiable difference in the production of governmental knowledge. Consideration of these practices, I argue, opens up the possibility of a of a view of encampments that foregrounds the agency of the homeless in the production of new political spaces and subjectivities.

Under the influence of the discourses and practices of global neoliberal urbanism, municipal administrations worldwide aspire to make their cities world class spaces, where informality is an anachronism and poverty can be made history. In this essay, drawing on fieldwork conducted in Jakarta, Indonesia, San Francisco (California), and Seattle (Washington), we address the question of how a geographic relational poverty approach can help us understand, or at least expand ways of thinking about these processes by attending to urban informality and the politics of poverty. Informality, a pervasive feature of the global South and North, functions as a survival strategy whereby the monetarily poor can compensate for their lack of income through commoning. Market-driven, state underwritten urban development initiatives for housing those with wealth is limiting the conditions of possibility for the monetarily poor, and informality. This is compounded by emergent political discourses rendering informality as inappropriate, and the monetarily poor as undeserving of a right to the city. Yet long-standing more-than-capitalist and communal informal practices pursued by the urban poor remain effective and necessary survival strategies, supporting residents whose presence is necessary to the city and whose practices challenge capitalist norms.

In 2001, President Bush announced his intention to "end chronic homeless by the year 2012" as part of his broad "Compassion Agenda". Since then, departmental consolidation, changes in funding allocation, and continued decentralization of services provision have dramatically reshaped the landscape of homeless service provision in the US. In this paper I examine how these roll-out policies reify and re-entrench liberal equations of property with rational self-governance at the local scale. Particularly, I illustrate how tropes of homeless otherness work alongside and through federal neoliberal roll-out policies to exclude homeless voices from the formation of local social policy. In doing so, I attempt to call attention to the mutually constitutive relationship between the spatial management of homeless bodies, tropes of homeless deviance and dependence, and limits to citizenship in the context of neoliberal urban governance.

Though much critical urban scholarship is devoted to the struggles of the homeless and their advocates to become "visible" to the state and the "public," little attention has been paid to efforts made by the homeless to escape the public gaze. This study draws on media reports, press releases, and ethnographic research conducted in a Seattle homeless encampment to highlight the ways in which members of this collective mobilized the discourse of rights, and in particular the right to privacy, in their battle against the Safe Harbors homeless management information system. In doing so, it is argued that the concept of privacy functions as an important lens through which to view both the spatial underpinnings of social and political exclusion and the strategies through which the homeless resist these exclusions. [

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