ABSTRACT

In cities across the globe, the COVID19 pandemic and its associated lockdowns have held profound implications for urban dwellers already facing homelessness. Metropolitan and state governments deployed a raft of emergency measures, from new forms of shelter to new regimes of displacement and criminalisation, designed to “flatten the curve”. Yet “lockdown” and “social distance” hold distinct implications for those communities who already face criminalisation and social alienation. And “stay-at-home” orders are by definition impossible to follow for people with no permanent home. This paper explores the political, social, and spatial implications of these policies in Melbourne, which spent more days under lockdown than any other city in the world.

This paper explores the implications of this crisis response in Melbourne’s numerous lockdowns, drawing upon qualitative research, conducted in collaboration with members of the Homeless Persons Union of Victoria, documenting the experiences of service providers and homeless Melburnians who were for a time entitled to shelter under this policy.

This hastily assembled service regime was fraught with complications and oversights, however, from profound disparities in experience and access for clients, to the disruption of services and healthcare resources that had depended on public points of contact. It also carried profound human rights implications in a context in which lockdown implied an obligation to accept shelter, and a hotel room became a form of involuntary, solitary confinement twenty-three hours a day. Far from “ending homelessness overnight,” as some have optimistically claimed”, these emergency measures recast and refashioned the existing violences and exclusions of homelessness in complex ways that extend the “transcarceral” logic by which, although technically legally free, unhoused individuals are nonetheless often confined. If they had temporarily won a right to shelter, this paper argues, it came at the expense of their right to the city.

SPEAKER

Dr David Boarder Giles, Lecturer in Anthropology (Deakin University).

DETAILS

Our speaker will be presenting through this zoom link .

Or you can join us for an in-person gathering at Deakin Waterfront: ad1.122 in the Sally Walker building (click here for the map).