Counting the countless: Statistics on homelessness and the spatial ontology of political numbers

Abstract

This paper focuses on the controversy over nationwide homeless statistics in Germany and uses the conflict as a window through which to explore the spatial and historical ontology of political numbers. Since the 1980s, the German national government's refusal to collect statistical data on homelessness has pushed homeless advocates to fight for quantitative assessments of homelessness as a crucial form of recognition. The conflict has produced a series of studies concerned with the practicability of homeless statistics. These studies offer an insight into the critical relations between space and calculation and the governmental problematizations of calculable territory and populations. Problematizations of space in feasibility studies reflect how the phenomenon of homelessness is not only a social issue ignored by governmental knowledge production, but a real obstacle to conventional ways of data collection on the population. To analyse the controversy and the difficulties of establishing homeless statistics, the paper combines theoretical reflections on the relations between numbers and politics and on spaces of calculation with more recent attempts to highlight the political nature of ignorance. The paper argues that the difficulties to count homeless people represent a case of ‘ontological ignorance’ connected to modern sedentariness.