Mooring in the Homeless City. A Practice Theoretical Account of Homeless Urban Dwelling and Emplacement

Natalia Martini

doi:10.18778/1733-8077.17.3.03

Authors

Natalia Martini Jagiellonian University, Poland https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8254-7621

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.18778/1733-8077.17.3.03

Keywords:

homelessness, dwelling, spatiality, place, mooring, theories of practice

Abstract

Taking a practice theoretical approach and building on the research conducted with a group of people who live their lives on the streets of two Polish cities, this paper provides an account of the homeless city dwellers’ mode of emplacement. It offers the terms licensed, invisible, motile, material, relational, affective, and ad hoc mooring to describe how homeless people establish a place of and for various activities that make up their everyday practice of inhabiting the city. While highlighting the accomplishments of homeless places, the paper also underscores their tentativeness and instability. It situates the homeless mode of emplacement within a wider landscape of normative urban geography, against which the ways homeless people establish themselves in place are often judged out-of-place. It attends to the role that this transgressive potential plays in limiting homeless dwellers’ capabilities for mooring and considers how they might be enhanced.

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Author Biography

Natalia Martini, Jagiellonian University, Poland

Natalia Martini is a Doctoral Student at the Institute of Sociology, Jagiellonian University, Cracow, Poland. She is a sociologist with a background in cultural studies. She has a strong interest in urban everyday life and creative methodological approaches for studying its varied spatialities and temporalities. Her work cuts across sociology and human geography and favors an activist approach to scholarship. Her current research focuses on everyday practices of inhabiting the city. It uses participatory, mobile, and reflexive methods to discover how homeless dwellers navigate the city and anchor their places in various urban spaces, and how their capabilities for exercising the right to stay put might be enhanced.

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