The European Union is committed to ending homelessness by 2015, but across the continent, policies that frame homelessness as an ‘offence’ and the governance of public spaces as a law and order problem, are working against this goal.
In 2010, the European Parliament adopted a Declaration on the strategy to end street homelessness in the European Union by 2015. The declared aim is: no one sleeping rough; no one living in emergency accommodation for longer than the period of an ‘emergency’; no one living in transitional accommodation longer than is required for a successful move-on; no one leaving an institution without housing options; and, no young people becoming homeless as a result of the transition to independent living. Achieving this goal, however, will require a significant departure from the current practices governing homelessness and public spaces across Europe which are increasing the exclusion, institutionalisation and criminalisation of poor and homeless populations, trying to render them invisible rather than addressing the root of the problem.
The geography of exclusion is most visible in the governance of public space and the management of homeless people--rough sleepers, hostel dwellers or the inadequately housed--who are forced to carry on their ordinary (and extraordinary) business of life in public space. Public space refers to all those areas of passage to which everyone (in theory) has direct and unrestricted access, and which are customarily common property or part of the public domain; the ‘urban commons’ that is often both a source of sustenance and violence for people in poverty, especially the homeless. However, the interpretation of what constitutes public space is far from uniform, from both a legal and a socio-cultural point of view. The European Observatory on Homelessness (EOH), for example, uses three categories of public spaces: external, internal, and quasi-public space. Governance in Europe, influenced by neoliberal thinking, has gradually shifted the balance towards private or quasi-public spaces; a development which has important implications for the rights of homeless people. Even if homeless people tend not to be the explicit targets of measures used to control public space they nonetheless feel their effect disproportionately because of their reliance on such space to conduct their daily activities.
In 2010, the European Parliament adopted a Declaration on the strategy to end street homelessness in the European Union by 2015. The declared aim is: no one sleeping rough; no one living in emergency accommodation for longer than the period of an ‘emergency’; no one living in transitional accommodation longer than is required for a successful move-on; no one leaving an institution without housing options; and, no young people becoming homeless as a result of the transition to independent living. Achieving this goal, however, will require a significant departure from the current practices governing homelessness and public spaces across Europe which are increasing the exclusion, institutionalisation and criminalisation of poor and homeless populations, trying to render them invisible rather than addressing the root of the problem.
The geography of exclusion is most visible in the governance of public space and the management of homeless people--rough sleepers, hostel dwellers or the inadequately housed--who are forced to carry on their ordinary (and extraordinary) business of life in public space. Public space refers to all those areas of passage to which everyone (in theory) has direct and unrestricted access, and which are customarily common property or part of the public domain; the ‘urban commons’ that is often both a source of sustenance and violence for people in poverty, especially the homeless. However, the interpretation of what constitutes public space is far from uniform, from both a legal and a socio-cultural point of view. The European Observatory on Homelessness (EOH), for example, uses three categories of public spaces: external, internal, and quasi-public space. Governance in Europe, influenced by neoliberal thinking, has gradually shifted the balance towards private or quasi-public spaces; a development which has important implications for the rights of homeless people. Even if homeless people tend not to be the explicit targets of measures used to control public space they nonetheless feel their effect disproportionately because of their reliance on such space to conduct their daily activities.
