Compliant resistance: How the homeless negotiate visibility and agency in the neoliberal city

Abstract

This paper examines how homeless individuals organize to face the many challenges (e.g. accessing food, fostering social connections, and securing emotional support) of systemic oppression. Through a spatial ethnographic case study of a grassroots organization operated by the homeless in Melbourne's City Square, we introduce the notion of compliant resistance: the creative, playful, non-confrontational, temporary, and norm-abiding form of spatial appropriation that enables marginalized groups to assert visibility and agency within hostile urban environments. Compliant resistance involves place-making and place-maintenance tactics, reflecting the fluid and overlapping interplay of Katz “Three Rs”—resilience, resistance, and reworking. We demonstrate how the combination of these three types of responses, often treated in isolation by extant literature, leverages their transformative potential while mitigating the limitations of each in isolation. In the context of this study, compliant resistance enabled the homeless to agentically cater to their needs while securing tolerance from mainstream actors in a neoliberal city. This paper contributes simultaneously to homelessness and resistance scholarships, encouraging urban scholars to rethink dynamic relationships between marginalized groups and mainstream actors and fostering a vision of more inclusive and equitable urban interactions.