Learning from and with homeless urbanites

Homeless City is a research project looking into how the city as a sociomaterial phenomenon manifests itself in the practical course of everyday life of homeless people.

The project has four main aims:

1. To establish praxeological urbanism as a theoretical-methodological orientation through which to investigate the city as it manifests itself in the practical course of everyday life.
2. To develop methodology consistent with the epistemological assumptions of theories of practice suited for studying the city re-specified as an object of praxeological inquiry.
3. To better understand the ways in which the homeless city as a lived urban world is being brought into being through the everyday practices of homeless people.
4. To create opportunities for people who live their lives on the streets of Kraków and Łódź to articulate their perspectives as the city inhabitants, and for members of the housed public to recognize them as fellow urban dwellers, not urban Others.

The Homeless City project is led by Natalia Martini from the Institute of Sociology, Jagiellonian University. It is funded by the Polish National Science Center (grant no. 2016/23/N/HS6/00810) and runs between September 2017 to July 2021. Research conducted within the project was approved by the Ethics Committee of the Department of Philosophy, Jagiellonian University.