On visible homelessness and the micro-aesthetics of public space

AuthorAlison Young,James Petty
Published date01 December 2019
DOI10.1177/0004865818823945
Date01 December 2019
Subject MatterArticles
Article
On visible homelessness
and the micro-aesthetics
of public space
Alison Young and James Petty
University of Melbourne, Australia
Abstract
In this article, we investigate the circumstances that have produced the current municipal
regulatory approach to homelessness in the City of Melbourne, Victoria, and the ways in
which visibly homeless people are policed through a micro-aesthetics of their presence in
public space, which involves the monitoring of their bodily demeanour and their physical
possessions. Our study contributes to and draws from a range of debates, including studies of
the governmental conjunction of poverty and crime, analysis of the co-implication of law and
spatiality, research on the criminalisation of homelessness and homeless people, and the
burgeoning criminological interest in the significance of the visual field for our understandings
of crime and criminality. This article recounts how homelessness, public space and questions
of aesthetics have recently coalesced in debates about the regulation of homelessness in the
public space of Melbourne’s city centre. It approaches the issues through comparative con-
sideration of genres of municipal management frameworks in other jurisdictions, detailed
textual consideration of the Protocol on Homelessness in the City of Melbourne and an
empirical study of visible homelessness in the public places of central Melbourne.
Keywords
Aesthetics, criminalisation, homelessness, municipal regulation, public space, visual criminology
Date received: 17 December 2017; accepted: 29 November 2018
Introduction: Appearing homeless in the city
A young man is sitting outside a department store in the centre of Melbourne. There are
many individuals nearby, also seated. They are sitting on metal seats, part of the
Corresponding author:
Alison Young, Francine V. McNiff Professor of Criminology, School of Social & Political Sciences, The University of
Melbourne, John Medley Building, Parkville VIC 3010, Australia, and School of Law, City University of London, UK.
Email: ayoung@unimelb.edu.au
Australian & New Zealand Journal of
Criminology
2019, Vol. 52(4) 444–461
!The Author(s) 2019
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DOI: 10.1177/0004865818823945
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municipal street furniture provided as amenity for members of the public. The man is
not sitting on these; instead, he sits on the ground, with his back against the wall of the
department store. He sits on a blanket folded to a square just big enough to provide
some cushioning against the hard concrete. His legs are drawn up in front, and a dog
curls up with its head in his lap. In front of him there is a plastic cup; beside it, a sign
states ‘Homeless, need food and tram fare’.
This individual occupies a position of great uncertainty. His posture, actions and
location mean he might be infringing the criminal law (begging is an offence in Victoria
under the Summary Offences Act 1966); he is vulnerable to being moved on by the
police or city off‌icers; and he could be contravening the City of Melbourne’s Protocol
on homelessness. In this article, the focus of our investigation is not the substantive
experiences, causes and narratives of homelessness detailed by numerous researchers
(Amster, 2008; Carlen, 1996; Fitzpatrick, Bramley, & Johnsen, 2013; Snow & Anderson,
1993) but rather the evolution of a current municipal approach to homelessness, with a
focus on the monitoring of homeless people’s bodily demeanour and physical posses-
sions as components of the municipal streetscape.
We draw upon three substantial and intersecting strands of research with respect to
regulatory responses to homelessness. First, much has been written on how poverty in
general and homelessness specif‌ically have been targeted by governmental condemna-
tion: advancing consumer capitalism has been intertwined with the criminalisation of
poverty and disadvantage (see, e.g., Desjarlais, 1997; Ferrell, 2001, 2018; Standing,
2011; Wacquant, 2009; Willse, 2015). In the 1990s and 2000s, a focus developed
around the effects of the so-called ‘quality of life’ paradigm, ‘a way of reorienting the
efforts of city government away from directly improving the lives of the disenfranchised
and toward restoring social order in the city’s public spaces’ (Vitale, 2009, p. 1) and a
by-product of the widespread adoption of the ‘broken windows’ model of city gover-
nance. Wilson and Kelling (1982), the originators of this model, had reframed the
‘minor incivilities of urban life’ (vandalism of buildings including the titular broken
windows, begging, street litter and public urination or drunkenness) as the primary
causes (as opposed to symptoms) of urban disorder (Gibson, 2003, p. 162). In conse-
quence, policing tactics were recalibrated such that low-level disorder became a high
priority. Although most prevalent in the United States, the associated policing
tactics have been adopted in many jurisdictions, resulting in the isolation, exclusion
and incapacitation of the homeless and other disadvantaged groups.
Just as capital and the condemnation of poverty are co-implicated, a comparably
intimate entanglement can be found between law and spatiality, in the second strand
inf‌luencing our analysis. Gibson (2003) showed the impact of Seattle’s redevelopment
(2003) upon that city’s homeless population; Valverde (2012) analysed everyday nego-
tiation and regulation in Toronto, from management of signage to control of street
vendors; and Iveson (2007) showed how public spaces are both shrinking and hyper-
regulated. Perhaps the most extensive analyses of the law-space inter-relation have been
by Mitchell, from the large-scale changes of gentrif‌ication to the minutiae of local
‘buffer’ zones (1997, 2005).
The f‌inal body of work from which our analysis builds is the more nascent strand
regarding the role of the aesthetic in revanchist development or harsh social policies
regarding homelessness. The domain of the aesthetic has sometimes been considered
Young and Petty 445

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