Spaces, Places and States of Mind: a pragmatic ethnography of liminal critique (original) (raw)

Intentional homeless communities, such as tent camps and shantytowns are increasingly entering political and academic debates about how to solve homelessness. Dignity Village Oregon, the first city licensed, homeless-built democratically selfgoverned, non-profit transitional housing community in US history, was the result of viii Table of Contents Abstract..…………………………………………………………………………………iii Acknowledgments.………………………………………………………………………..v Dedication………………………………………………………………………………..vi Contributors……………………………………………………………………………..vii Contents...........………………………………………………………………………….viii Figures……………………………………………………………………………………xi Special Figure-Mission Statement Excerpt ……………………………………………xii Chapter One: Introduction 1.1 Introduction……………………………………………………………………………1 10 1.4 Portland and Dignity Village-Conditions of Possibility Recently and since the economic crisis of 2007-2008, what some homeless activists and critics describe as the Great Recession 7 , leniency towards grassroots responses to homelessness like tent camps and shantytowns has been only slightly warmer, but warmer still, especially in Oregon, where there is a tradition of grassroots communitarian responses to poverty. 8 Oregon's longstanding resource economy and vast wild territories fostered a legendary hobo and migrant worker economy spanning much of the 19 th and early 20 th centuries; for labor, camping and travelling to seasonal work was common, and historically high and fluctuating unemployment rates have over time merged into a common value system or symbolic imaginary 9 , a concept borrowed from Jacques Lacan ([1971] 2002), by Castoriadis (1987) and Wright (1997); a symbolically shared system of (urban) identities and attitudes towards the use of space that in this case, understands rough sleeping and impoverished shelter communities as part of Oregon lore. 10 Portland, Oregon is a city of 598,000 people. As the largest urban centre in the state, it has borne the brunt of demands for social services in a period of economic recession and rising poverty rates not seen there since the early 1960's when Johnson's National War on Poverty was declared. In Oregon, since the last recession of 2008, 120,000 people crossed into poverty bringing the total to 596,000, slightly smaller than the population of Portland, and nearly double the population of Oregon's next two largest cities, Eugene and Salem. The US national poverty rate stands at an average of 14.3%, 11