The Banishment of the Poor From Public Space: Promoting and Contesting Neo-Liberalisation at the Municipal Level
| Author | Kevin J Brown |
| Published date | 01 August 2020 |
| Date | 01 August 2020 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/0964663919889104 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
The Banishment of the
Poor From Public Space:
Promoting and Contesting
Neo-Liberalisation
at the Municipal Level
Kevin J Brown
Queen’s University Belfast, UK
Abstract
With growing levels of homelessness, many municipalities in western jurisdictions are
increasing social control of public displays of poverty through criminalisation, margin-
alisation and banishment. This has recently been apparent in England with the intro-
duction of public spaces protection orders. Based on notions of localism, these grant
local government significantly enhanced powers to regulate public space. This article
uses the English example to provide a critical, empirically informed, exploration of how
populist neo-liberal rationalisations about the street poor are finding increasing favour
among local authorities. It charts how in a period of austerity, with municipalities
struggling to fulfil welfare obligations to the homeless and other poor, banishment
provides a cheaper solution to citizens’ concerns about visible displays of poverty in
public space. The article investigates the troubling ways in which municipalities endorse a
neo-liberal authoritarian approach to public consultations to claim legitimacy for
introducing measures that target vulnerable minorities. It also examines how opponents,
with limited success, have challenged such measures and the predominant neo-liberal–
populist narrative associated with them.
Keywords
Contestation, homelessness, localism, municipal, neo-liberalisation, PSPO, public con-
sultations, public space, vagrancy
Corresponding author:
Kevin J Brown, School of Law, Queen’s University Belfast, University Square, Belfast BT7 1NN, UK.
Email: k.brown@qub.ac.uk
Social & Legal Studies
2020, Vol. 29(4) 574–595
ªThe Author(s) 2019
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/0964663919889104
journals.sagepub.com/home/sls
Introduction
Homelessness is on the increase across much of the western world. A 2018 study found
that levels of homelessness are rising in all but one of the 28 European Union member
states (Abb´e Pierre Foundation and Feantsa, 2018). Recent reports have also found
increasing homelessness in Australia, New Zealand and United States (Barrett and
Greenfield, 2018; Homelessness Australia, 2016; Ruiz-Grossman, 2018). The United
Kingdom (UK) is no exception to this trend with levels of recorded homelessness
reaching new heights (Crisis, 2018). The growth in homelessness is associated with
rising levels of social inequality in these societies (Levitz, 2017; OECD, 2017). The
process of neo-liberalisation, which has intensified in reach and depth since its emer-
gence in the late 1970s, has been identified as the primary source of this rising inequality
(Harvey, 2005; O’Hara, 2015). Neo-liberalisation involves the ado ption by states of
policies which tend to combine ‘a commitment to the extension of markets and logics
of competitiveness with ...antipathy to ...Keynesian and/or collectivist strategies’
(Peck and Tickell, 2002: 381). The welfarist role of the state in alleviating social prob-
lems is rolled back, coupled with a rolling out of the coercive power of the state against
those who challenge the market by failing to play their role as ‘good consumer citizens’
(Peck et al., 2018).
There was some speculation in the aftermath of the economic crash of 2008 that there
would be a tide of popular left-wing uprisings against neo-liberalisation (Worth, 2018).
While this did occur in some countries for a time (e.g. the election of a leftist populist
government in Greece in 2015 and the Occupy Wall Street Movement in 2011) (Worth,
2018), we are now witnessing the resurgence of the politics of the right, which increas-
ingly promotes a neo-liberal authoritarian populism (Bruff, 2014; Dean, 2010; Guardino,
2018). It is exemplified by Trump in America, the rise of the United Kingdom Indepen-
dence Party and then the Brexit Party in the UK, and the election of far-right populist
governments in Italy and Brazil (Kennett and Dukelow, 2018). This manifestation of
neo-liberalisation is sceptical or hostile towards elements of the neo-liberal project of
globalisation such as immigration, while maintaining support for an authoritarian neo-
liberal understanding of societal management (Dean, 2010; Worth, 2018). It demonises
left or liberal ‘elites’ and unpopular, often vulnerable minorities, ‘with mythical appeals
to ‘the people’...draw[ing] outside that perimeter anyone conceived as unwilling or
unable to enact or promote an imagined individualist market subjectivity’ (Guardino,
2018: 459). This is accompanied by a newfound commitment to populist punitive law
and order rhetoric, which until recently had appeared to have been somewhat in abey-
ance (O’Malley, 2018). This rise in neo-liberal authoritarian populism leads to displays
of poverty such as rough sleeping, begging and loitering becoming subjects of often-
enhanced coercive control (Beckett and Herbert, 2009; Dum et al., 2017; Sanders and
Albanese, 2017). This study critically examines, through a sociolegal, empirically
informed analysis, the recent manifestation of this in England. In doing so, it provides
original insights into the regulation of the poor in public space in contemporary, author-
itarian neo-liberal society.
In 2014, the British Government introduced new powers to regulate public spaces
through Public Spaces Protection Orders (PSPOs) to England and Wales.
1
These provide
Brown 575
To continue reading
Request your trial