Current Postdoctoral research [paris/vancouver | 2023/2024]

If “crisis” is a word for the various ways that unequal and unjust power relations and economic conditions are articulated in cities, “crisis urbanism” are the various legal, policy and practical innovations, interventions and shortcuts to encounter crisis - and their justifications. I demonstrate these tendencies through the lens of recent histories of unhoused peoples’ street encampments in Paris, France that have both focused perceptions of various interconnected crises including so-called “migration crises”, drug policy crises, and the ongoing, ever-present generalized housing affordability crisis. They are also understood, through their affective, material, and discursive politics, to be the effects of these crises. Over the last several years of ethnographic engagement and reporting on the phenomenon of encampments in Paris, I have documented various “crisis urbanisms”: Rotating cycles of decampment/emergency sheltering operations and evolving carceral policies and policing practices, as well new forms of municipal humanitarianism and governmental care that bring assistance but also foreclose certain possibilities for rights-claiming and social justice. I begin this new phase of research by showing how encampments, for instance, become articulations of “urban crisis” and instigate various responses in the form of “crisis urbanist” governance solutions, interventions and assemblages. I then explore ways that these autonomous forms of inhabitation, however ephemeral, become spaces of movement, dwelling and possibility for inhabitants caught in the crosshairs of multiple intersecting urban crises that persist and proliferate beyond municipal-technocratic efforts to contain and remove them. I then trace the political and pragmatic purposes of encampments to engender, transform and counter forms of “crisis urbanism”, and how they, in their own capacities as forms of “crisis urbanism” from the margins, work to resist the violence of the permanent temporary and forge hopeful futurities amidst the daily labour of survival in the ruins.

If cities are constant reminders of what could be but isn’t (Simone, 2008), these (counter) maps of drug users’ spaces of care and sociality are cartographies of fragments (McFarlane 2021) woven into alternate versions of urban inhabitation in the margins of “world cities”. We mean this in the sense that drug users’ inhabitations of the city are always fragmentary: piecemeal, shattered, under threat and opposition because of a “continuum of carcerality” that governs us / them. It means we / they are treated as less than human, less than citizens - but also in that these maps are collections of fragmentary stories of life in the city that are always in-progress and never complete.

{Excerpt] In creating these (counter) maps, we depict the phenomenon of encampments – where unhoused drug users (and others) who depend on public space inhabit tents and shelters installed in parks, on sidewalks, and in other urban place. The violent removal of these encampments by authorities who repeatedly confiscate and destroy inhabitants’ structures and possessions, even as we / they struggle to keep things together and take care of one another, is another component of this continuum of carcerality and displacement that contributes to the precaritization and marginalization, as well as the “urban crisis” constituted by the presence of some bodies’ presence in public space. As is often said on the streets, “no one is coming to save us. We have to save ourselves”. What are drug users’ existent spaces of care and sociality in these cities, and what could they be? How do street sweeps, decampments and other forms of displacement threaten drug users’ capacities to create spaces of care, sociality to secure their own survival amidst constant illegalization and threat of death? …

By walking and talking, listening and learning from people whose lived experiences of displacement and dispossession have marked the recent histories of certain contested neighbourhoods in Vancouver and Paris and the “crises” that shape them, we can learn much about why people live in encampments, their continued existence, as well as their destruction and the banishment of their inhabitants: People create and built encampments as infrastructures of care and sociality in face of State abandonment and the threat of death.

In 2023/2024, we will be undertaking a comparative project tracing mega-events and their effects on people precariously inhabiting urban spaces in “world cities”. We will work with past, present and future movements by poor peoples’ and housing activists’ movements to resist violent displacements in anticipation of, and during Olympic Games events in Vancouver (2010), Paris (2024) and Los Angeles (2028). We intend to articulate the effects of mega-events on unhoused drug users’ rights to the city and their abilities to inhabit urban spaces, specifically due to their neccessary dependence on public space for provisional shelter and survival. Drawing evidence from two “Olympic Cities” - Vancouver’s 2010 Winter Olympics and the upcoming Summer Olympics in Paris in 2024, as well as forward looks to L.A. and beyond - we demonstrate the necropolitical strategies of banishment and removal evolved to “sweep the streets” of unhoused peoples’ encampments, presences, and inhabitation of public space. Over the arc of a year, this project will involve developing opportunities for research and public events embedded in communities in these two cities for activists and community members themselves to exchange ideas and speak from their experiences in order to facilitate both public awareness of these (often covert) governmental strategies, as well to facilitate knowledge exchange and mobilization in both cities.

The project begins with preliminary research - archival and oral history of the “Poverty Olympics” organised in Vancouver by activist groups, and fieldwork with activists in Paris opposing ongoing (and evolving) strategies of decampment and removal at a time where both crisis and opportunities are articulated through the politics of the street and Olympic buildup in Paris, in order to highlight how resistance has been and can be organized in order to contest these hegemonic organizations of pubic space and their exclusionary and violent results.