About the project
The Homeless City project is a multi-method sociological study informed by theories of practice, focused on the homeless urban dwelling as a constellation of embodied and emplaced practices of inhabiting the city generative of a particular form of everyday urbanism. It explores how this form of everyday urbanism unfolds as spatiality transforming urban milieu into a matrix of places through which homeless dwellers experientially act.
The project aims at challenging the dominant representations of the city by paying attention to urban experiences that are typically passed over or simply ignored. Its intention is to amplify the voices of those who live their lives in the city but quite often are deemed its un-inhabitants, treated as personifications of social and aesthetical problems that need to be removed from the streets, not as subjects who have the right to exercise their right to dwell. More broadly, this project engages in the question of who do we learn about our cities from and with, whose cities do we actually study, and how can we create the conditions necessary for those other than the privileged few to participate in the process of urban knowledge production.
Empirically, the Homeless City project focuses on everyday practices of inhabiting two Polish cities, Kraków and Łódź, by people in a homeless situation. It looks at how these cities are navigated through by homeless urbanites. How do they look and feel like when approached from the homeless dwellers’ perspective? What do they consist of? How their particular features and spaces are made meaningful by the embodied and emplaced performances of homeless urban dwelling? How homeless inhabitants negotiate social boundaries and address material barriers, and how these practices mark spatial patterns of their (non)belonging in these cities? Finally, what might be done in terms of reconfiguring the components of homeless dwelling practices and their material arrangements in order to improve the quality of life on the streets and design more desirable urban experiences for homeless dwellers?
Methodologically, the project has many affinities with deep mapping research practice. It draws upon various methods and resources (walk-alongs, interviews, observations, practical skills acquisition, auto-observation, photography, GPS, GIS) in order to generate knowledge about the homeless practical intelligibility of the city. The process of knowledge generation is led by homeless dwellers accompanied in a natural unfolding of their daily routines or reenactments of their typical mobilities and moorings during walk-alongs or verbal guided tours around their everyday urban environments during conversations held over maps of the cities they inhabit, as well as in practical training in homeless urbanism during demonstrations of how things that make up a daily life which is lived in a homeless situation and in relation to the urban are being done.
The Homeless City project also has an activist component encapsulated in the intent to establish meaningful seeing relations between homeless dwellers and members of the housed public in the cities of Kraków and Łódź through participatory photography and counter-mapping.
The Homeless City project is funded by the Polish National Science Center (grant no. 2016/23/N/HS6/00810).
The team
Natalia Martini, Jagiellonian University, Principal Investigator & Researcher
Karolina Piech, Institute of Urban and Regional Development, GIS Analyst
Marcjanna Nóżka, Jagiellonian University, Advisor