Citizens without property: Informality and political agency in a Seattle,Washington homeless encampment

Abstract

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.