Cleansing public nature: landscapes of homelessness, health, and displacement

Abstract

This article engages directly with a group of individuals who reside in and among the margins of an urban municipal park, through a 16-month critical ethnography. Facing abject poverty, threats from law enforcement, and trials of living outdoors, these 'Hillside residents' cite the local health department as a primary source of potential displacement from the place they call home. 'Health', in this context, references three interconnected features of contemporary urban homelessness: the material interactions associated with living outdoors, the litter that occasionally accumulates in the area, and human solid waste. Health also has specific discursive constructions on the Hillside, where the individuals living there are presented as unclean, particularly vis-à-vis the 'natural' unbuilt world in which they live. A logic of sanitizing the unclean means that 'cleaning' moves beyond the material imposition of humans on nature, or nature on humans. Instead, cleaning speaks to a societal problem: a need to cleanse society of unwanted social detritus, to create a healthy society. 'Cleanliness' creates an optimum, healthy urban experience to facilitate the transactions of contemporary consumer and financial capitalism, providing a new and central facet of global neoliberal restructuring, having particularly devastating effects for the lowest classes. Political ecology is leveraged to consider the roles of material and discursive cleanliness as an agent of health in the social reproduction of capitalism, creating natures and subjects that further support it. Key words: urban homelessness, cleanliness, political ecology of health RésuméCet article s'adresse directement à un groupe d'individus qui résident dans et dans les marges d'un parc municipal urbain, à travers une étude ethnographique de 16 mois. Face à la pauvreté abjecte, aux menaces de l'application de la loi et aux procès de vivre à l'extérieur, ces «résidents de Hillside» citent le département de santé de la commune comme l'agence principale chargée de les déplacer de leur domicile dans le parc. Dans ce contexte, la «santé» se présente sous trois aspects interreliés de l'itinérance urbaine contemporaine: les interactions matérielles associées à la vie à l'extérieur, les ordures qui s'accumulent parfois dans la région et les déchets solides humains. La santé est également représentée d'une certaine manière sur la Colline, où les individus qui y vivent sont présentés comme sales, en particulier vis-à-vis du monde «naturel» non construit dans lequel ils vivent. Une logique de désinfection de l'impur signifie que le «nettoyage» se déplace au-delà de l'imposition matérielle des humains sur la nature, ou la nature sur les humains. Au lieu de cela, le nettoyage parle d'un problème sociétal: le besoin de nettoyer la société des détritus sociaux indésirables, de créer une société saine. «Propreté» crée une expérience urbaine optimale et saine pour faciliter les transactions du capitalisme contemporain des consommateurs et du capital financier, apportant une nouv...

Tracing narratives and perceptions in the political ecologies of health and disease

“…24, 2017 6 2017) or the individualization and moralization of disease as a tool of health dispossession and governance (Kotsila 2017;Rose 2017). These types of analyses supplement work on the health geography literature, which King (2010: 39) has criticized for " [providing] less rigorous attention to the role of political economy in producing disease and shaping health decision-making."…”

“…Two of the articles in this section use landscape as a form of inquiry for addressing political ecologies of disease (Connolly 2017;Rose 2017). In doing so, the authors place the landscape as the focus of analysis, while illustrating the mediating role of landscape in health disputes.…”

“…For instance, Iengo and Armiero (2017) speak of place-based struggles and how people inhabit their bodies in relation to their environments. Connolly (2017) and Rose (2017) (both in this section) show further how the landscape concept can be utilized in seeing disease as not only determined through biophysical factors, but also constructed out of a particular set of social relations and lived experiences mediated through the landscape.…”

“…Recent writing on the political ecology of health has advanced alongside groundbreaking contributions in the environmental justice literature (see: Baer and Singer 2009;King and Crews 2013;Martinez-Alier et al 2014;Nash 2006;Parizeau 2015;Singer 2014). These studies bring vernacular knowledge to the forefront of scientific discourse, while highlighting the crucial role of environmental conditions for human health, and representing struggles against health related injustices (see in this Section, D 'Alisa et al 2017;Rose 2017).…”

Air Pollution-Related Health Impacts on Individuals Experiencing Homelessness: Environmental Justice and Health Vulnerability in Salt Lake County, Utah

“…The specific aim for this study was to test for disparities in exposure to air pollution among the population of individuals experiencing both sheltered and unsheltered homelessness in Salt Lake County, and to understand how the duration of homelessness affected a criminalization, eviction, stigmatization, and marginalization) are often antecedent causal factors in IEH's spatial displacement and being pushed further into toxic spaces [23]. More pointedly, IEHs are often positioned as an environmental problem to be solved, in turn dehumanizing individuals themselves as a supposed environmental disamenity [26,30]. Resistance to such measures may lead to further threat of eviction and displacement, fueling an iterative cycle of political marginalization, criminalization, and hazard exposure, which ultimately leads to both increased municipal costs and frustrations from housed and unhoused residents alike [31].…”