Unsheltered Homelessness and the Right to Metabolism: An Urban Political Ecology of Health and Sustainability

Abstract

Unsheltered homelessness has increasingly become a standard expectation as part of the contemporary urban landscape. This phenomenon is problematic for multiple reasons. Primarily, unsheltered homelessness is a concern because it represents a very real form of human suffering for the individuals facing homelessness. For the vast majority of people, they very desperately want a more stable and permanent housing option, and their inability to secure stable housing is often a difficult and desperate form of distress. Secondly, for urban community members not facing homelessness, unsheltered homelessness is often perceived as unsightly, and offends their sense of what a city—and a society—should be. Not only is unsheltered homelessness a visible sign of poverty and inequality, but it also disrupts normative visions of public space and public ecologies—seeing unsheltered homelessness represents, in part, a collective failure to produce a public domain that is equitable, inclusive, healthy, and sustainable. Common imagined landscapes of functional urban environment simply do not account for unsheltered homelessness. The ways in which we position unsheltered homelessness, and how we might do so in a more just manner, is the subject of this chapter.