No-Place Like Home

NO-PLACE LIKE
HOME
Archiving Refusal, Dispossession, (and the Insurgent
Tent) in Downtown Los Angeles
Kelly Rappleye
MA Contemporary Art Theory | Dissertation | Wordcount: 14,996 (including

excerpts)
1
TABLE OF CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
A Note On Assumptions
PRELUDE: Improvisational Aesthetics of No-Place
SECTION I: Brutal Topographies in Downtown Los Angeles
Ia. Counting Bodies
Ib. On the Move: Anti-Homeless Policing in DTLA
SECTION II: HOMEPLACE: Slum Publics & Living Otherwise
IIa. Enclosure’s Pitiful Bodies
IIb. Slumming It
IIc. From the Slums to the Row
SECTION III: Fix Your Tent, Fix Your Self
IIIa. Veiled Refuge
IIIb. Self-Care! or Else…
IIIc. Racing to the Bottom of No-place
CONCLUSION: REFUSING HOME
APPENDIXES:
Appendix I: “Wow, I’m Homeless”
Appendix II: “We wake up happy. Here they come.”
Appendix III. “People are dying in the homes, too.”
Appendix IV: “We had a knock at the door… they said, I was resisting and trying to escape, my
own son's apartment.”
Appendix V: “They have a magic question… ‘is this yours?’ Just say no.”
2
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
INTRODUCTION
On May 18th, 2019, attendees of a blue-chip gallery opening in the heart of Downtown Los Angeles’
exceedingly hip Arts’ District encountered a collection of camping tents, which filled the gallery’s concrete, open-
air courtyard.1 That same day and a few, sprawling Los Angeles city-blocks away, Stephanie Arnold Williams woke
up on Skid Row and set about her daily routine, likely stationing herself at the helm of a sewing machine, where she
regularly offers water, sewing lessons, and smiles to her neighbours from a plastic fold-up picnic table. 2 Just down
the road from Stephanie’s tent, and 100 years prior, a group of children gathered on their porch in the warm
afternoon sun to pose for an unnamed photographer from the Los Angeles Daily News.3 This constellation of
moments, images, and facts begins to outline an enquiry of Downtown Los Angeles (DTLA), through which this
dissertation will explore the relations, materials, and regulatory mechanisms of homeplace and dispossession at the
core of this urban metropolis. The regulatory techniques of criminalisation and illegalization that shape the lives and
trajectories of DTLA’s unhoused and propertyless residents have been comprehensively dissected in the fields of
carceral geography, health sciences, criminology, urban studies, and journalism, amongst others. Such scrutiny has
in an expansive breadth of hyper-specialised and quantitively reasoned understandings of the social, inter-personal,
economic, and legislative dynamics of this urban population.
Yet, the residual hauntings of an encounter with a recent site-specific installation in DTLA by artist David
Hammons left a lingering proposition to query what the discipline of visual cultures can uniquely bring to bear on
the relations of homelessness in contemporary Los Angeles. Hammons’ work was a provocation to recognise the
1
David Hammons, Untitled, 18 August 2019, Installation at Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles, 18 August 2019,
https://www.hauserwirth.com/hauser-wirth-exhibitions/24162-david-hammons-los-angeles.
2
C. G. Chen, ‘Stephanie from “The White Tent” on Skid Rodeo from Skid Row LA, CA.’, Blog, Medium
(blog), 10 August 2019, https://medium.com/@cgchen/stephanie-from-the-white-tent-on-skid-rodeo-from-
skid-row-la-ca-3e36cdd31bed.
3
University of California, Los Angeles. -- Library. -- Dept. of Special Collections (repository), Tenement
House in Los Angeles (Calif.), 1929, B&W Image, 1929, Copyright is owned by the UC Regents, UCLA,
Library Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library,
https://calisphere.org/item/ark:/13030/hb809nb579/.
3
tool of the artist as materiality, this their instrument to carefully prick at a loose thread in the psychic imaginary, in
delicate tugs, until a new relation is miraculously realised. This relation can transform the mundane, quotidian
infrastructures of everyday life into extraordinary or monstrous bedfellows. This dissertation project aims to
elucidate these unseen threads of relation in DTLA as a spatial formation. The following Sections I-III engage the
visual remnants of urban poverty and of DTLA’s unhoused residents, to query the optic materials and regulatory
formations of power that render them visible.
This dissertation will unfold through an assemblage of images and textual passages that bare the visual
cultures of care, carcerality, and everyday survival in DTLA. Employing the discipline of visual cultures as a unique
theoretical entry point, this research will trace the relations of visuality and capitalist subjection from Foucauldian
critiques of governmentality in migration theory to urban analyses of space and carcerality. Section I: Brutal
Topographies in Downtown Los Angeles engages a collection of Getty Images news photographs that document
the visual cultures of homeless management in contemporary DTLA.4 The images depict volunteers conducting the
2015 Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority (LAHSA) “point-in-time” homeless census count. 5 Through this
archival encounter, I explore migration scholar Martina Tazzioli’s theory of “containment through mobility” to
understand how LA’s urban underclass is maintained in a state of perpetual disruption through the enforcement of
mobility.6 Tracing the tent as a material means of biopolitical regulation that visualises, evidences, and constitutes
the homeless in contemporary urban LA, the mechanisms of “enforced mobility” begin to emerge. 7
In Section II: HOMEPLACE: Slum Publics & Living Otherwise, my research begins to build a visual
and historiographic archive of homeplace and refusal in DTLA. Tina Campt’s archival excavation of Black life in
Diaspora articulates the ambivalence of photographic subjection, and offers a speculative archival methodology that
is simultaneously material and tangible.8 Section II learns from this methodology to interrogate the “haptic” strata of
4
David McNew, Volunteers Fan Out Across Los Angeles In Effort To Count City’s Homeless, 29 January 2015, Colour
Photograph, 29 January 2015, Getty Images North America,
https://www.gettyimages.co.uk/detail/news-photo/volunteers-count-homeless-people-on-a-dark-street-on-skid-
news-photo/462514860.
5
Los Angeles Homeless Service Authority, ‘The Greater Los Angeles Homeless Count’, LAHSA Homeless Count
Dashboard, lahsa.org, accessed 5 April 2021, https://www.lahsa.org/homeless-count/.
6
Martina Tazzioli, ‘Containment through Mobility: Migrants’ Spatial Disobediences and the Reshaping of Control
through the Hotspot System’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 44, no. 16 (10 December 2018): 2764–79,
https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183X.2017.1401514.
7
Martina Tazzioli, ‘Governing Migrant Mobility through Mobility: Containment and Dispersal at the Internal
Frontiers of Europe’, 2020, https://doi.org/10.1177/2399654419839065.
8
Tina Campt, Listening to Images (Durham : Duke University Press, 2017).
4
temporality, materiality, function, and ideology in each archival image. 9 This pursuit grapples with the shifting
function of the “homeless” social subject in capitalist society, from LA’s industrial modernity to its neoliberal
contemporary. Through archival images, this inquiry questions the role of visuality in the social reproduction of
dispossession.10 This research explores how producing specific knowledges and modes of visibility of DTLA’s
unhoused residents is a strategy that creates and maintains a terrifying horizon line, a perimeter marking the outside
to capital’s “normative spatiality.”11
Finally, Section III: Fix Your Tent, Fix Yourself traces the emergence of the present-day tent formation
as a shelter and refuge from mediatized capture, while also a regulatory device of “forced mobility.”12 My research
concludes this visual encounter with an exploration of neoliberal individuation in American culture, as evidenced by
the paradoxically punitive and “therapeutic” tendencies of neoliberal governance. 13 The conclusion will engage the
interwoven transcriptions encountered throughout the work, which are drawn from an interview with Skid Row
resident Stephanie Arnold Williams by the Los Angeles Poverty Department. 14 These excerpts are a proposition to
the reader, to engage Stephanie as an active interlocutor in this theoretical dialogue. The passages take the form of a
refrain, echoing Stephanie’s own words, which no theory can or should reduce or abstract. She is also joined by a
chorus of thinkers in conversation, Fred Moten and Saidiya Hartman, whose echoes resound in a dialogue with hers.
A Note On Assumptions
9
Campt, 88.
10
Allan Sekula, ‘The Body and the Archive’, Source, vol. 39 (Winter, 1986), https://www.jstor.org/stable/778312;
Campt, Listening to Images; Saidiya V. Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments : Intimate Histories of
Social Upheaval (New York : W.W. Norton & Company, 2019).
11
Abbe Schriber, ‘“Those Who Know Don’t Tell”: David Hammons c. 1981 †’, Women and Performance 29, no. 1
(2019): 50–51, https://doi.org/10.1080/0740770X.2019.1571866.
12
Martina Tazzioli, ‘Choke, Extract, Disrupt: Governing Migration through Mobility’ (Lecture, Centre for
Feminist Research Lecture, Goldsmiths, University of London, Professor Stuart Hall Building, 5 February
2020).
13
dmf, ‘Mark Fisher on The End of Emo-Politics’, Deterritorial Investigations (blog), 26 March 2016,
https://deterritorialinvestigations.wordpress.com/2016/03/26/mark-fisher-on-the-end-of-emo-politics/; Forrest
Stuart, ‘On the Streets, Under Arrest: Policing Homelessness in the 21st Century: Policing Homelessness’,
Sociology Compass 9, no. 11 (November 2015): 940–50, https://doi.org/10.1111/soc4.12324; Jessie Speer, ‘The
Rise of the Tent Ward: Homeless Camps in the Era of Mass Incarceration’, Political Geography 62 (2018): 160.
14
Stephanie Arnold Williams, Los Angeles Poverty Department/ Walk the Talk Archive, Video Interview and Audio
Transcription, 2020, Walk the Talk Archive, https://app.reduct.video/lapd/walk-the-talk/#/i/6de1de3910-
Stephanie_Arnold%20Williams/bio.
5
This research draws from a range of theorists across academic disciplines—from Diasporic poetics to
carceral geography—whose emphases locate variant urgencies. Yet, the analytic thread that runs through these
diverse theoretical frameworks to inform this project is a deep study of dispossession, and the ever-shifting
formulations of power that engender this condition in contemporary life. The orientation of this dissertation’s
scholarship builds on a Foucauldian understanding of power as fundamentally relational to develop a small,
incomplete cartography of these relations in place, over time, and in action.15 The other theoretical link uniting the
scholarship is a tendency to challenge foundational knowledges and assumptions in Western liberal thought, which
are often taken as foregone conclusions. In doing so, the scholarship of scholars such as Fred Moten, Tina Campt
and Martina Tazzioli expand beyond their disciplines, towards a radical pedagogy of critical thought. In Listening to
Images, Campt’s inhabits the “counterintuitive” to locate profound practices of refusal and dignity in the subtle,
palpable dynamisms of quietude, stillness, and the quotidian.16 This essay employs Campt’s practice of “listening”
to conduct a counterintuitive engagement with visuality and subjection in images. 17 This approach embraces the use
of “haptic” faculties of inquiry, which are rarely admissible in the rigid perimeters of academic discourse, to explore
insurgent tenors of refusal, that remain unaccounted for in processes of visual subjection.18 Campt’s focus on
mundane and forgotten images found in regulatory archives of repressive governance lends a framework for my
research to explore similarly “quiet” images.19 Tazzioli’s research at the intersections of political geography and
migrant governance provokes liberal assumptions which “equate mobility with freedom,” to open new
understandings of autonomy and the ways in which mobility and visibility are constructed.20 This shared conceptual
genesis of counterintuition allows these scholars to unearth exceptional understandings of human experience and the
mechanisms that regulate and subjugate it. The exigence of countering assumption is central to this dissertation
project, which seeks to complicate the supposedly binary logics of visibility and invisibility; care and harm; pity and
indifference; blame and forgiveness; inside and outside; and homeplace and homeless in Downtown Los Angeles.
These reductive binaries infect the discourses of homelessness in American urban life and perpetuate systems of
care which harm, and constructions of visibility that obscure.

15
Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 15th ed (London: Penguin., 2003), 29.
16
Campt, Listening to Images, 6.
17
Campt, Listening to Images.
18
Campt.
19
Campt, 5.
20
Tazzioli, ‘Governing Migrant Mobility through Mobility: Containment and Dispersal at the Internal Frontiers of
Europe’, 16.
6
PRELUDE: Improvisational Aesthetics of No-Place
In a 1981 film essay entitled Shopping Bag Spirits and Freeway Fetishes: Reflections on Ritual Space,
Barbara McCullough interviewed fellow Los Angeles (LA) artists on the meanings of “ritual” in their work and
practice.21 The film’s first interview opens with a pile of debris on an anonymous LA street corner. The pile is being
tended to by artist David Hammons. The camera follows Hammons as he carefully collects, scrapes, places, carves,
and arranges items of material over-spill that seem to have sprouted from the surrounding urban environ’s one-story
21
Barbara McCullough, Shopping Bag Spirits and Freeway Fetishes: Reflections on Ritual Space, Digital video, color,
Documentary, Film Essay, 1981, https://www.cinema.ucla.edu/la-rebellion/films/shopping-bag-spirits-and-
freeway-fetishes-reflections-ritual-space.
7
structures, asphalt, cement, dirt, and dusty-brown palm trees.22 Hammons pensively narrates his process of “forming
matter…Doodling…this could be a doodle. It’s a lot like music, like vanguard music, vanguard art, improvisation;
able to create on the spot, or else don’t create.”23 Pointing towards a nearby masse of litter and garbage, Hammons
remarks, “This design is harder to accept. This one would be too uncontrolled- this one is like a whole bunch of
musicians just getting together, (and) blowing.”24 The whirring wail of jazz horns warble behind his narration.
Figure 1. Screengrab image from McCullough, Hammons is tending to a debris sculpture
After a 45-year artistic absence, Hammons’ returned to LA in the summer of 2019 with a retrospective solo
exhibition at Hauser & Wirth gallery in Downtown Los Angeles. In line with the artist’s renowned enigmatic
approach to the art world, the exhibition refrained from providing any titles or dates. The show was titled, “Ornette
Coleman: Harmolodic Thinker,” and the only information released to inquiring minds was the oblique handout
pictured in figure 2.25 In the handout, the artist’s scrawled musical notes take on a similar improvisational form to
22
Barbara McCullough.
23
Barbara McCullough.
24
Barbara McCullough.
25
David Hammons, ‘David Hammons Press Release’ (Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles, 29 April 2018),
https://www.artnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/davidhammonspressreleasehwla2019.jpg.
8
his sculpture in Mccullough’s film.26 In each, he takes the given materials and order of a contextual environment as
his medium, freely placing and arranging their elements in careful disorder to assemble new material relations from
the quotidian. Hammons’ fascination with improvisation as a sacred ritual of practice is further reflected in the 2019
exhibitions’ tribute to jazz musician Ornette Coleman. Coleman’s “Harmolodics” was an improvisational theory of
jazz, which sought to create a music with no centre, wherein each component of the musical moment was freely
relating, without hierarchy.27 Hammons’ emphasis on improvisation seems to insist on the existence of alternate
systems of meaning and order, that exceed the limitations and violent confines of Western rationality.
Figure 2. Hammons Hauser & Wirth 2019 handout
26
Barbara McCullough, Shopping Bag Spirits and Freeway Fetishes: Reflections on Ritual Space.
27
Barry Kernfeld, ‘Harmolodic Theory’, 2002.
9
Figure 3. Hammons 2019 Tents (LA Times-cred)
In the 2019 Hauser & Wirth exhibition, the installation occupying the cement foyer, pictured in figure 3,
became the controversial focal point of the show.28 The sheen of the tents’ polyester and nylon colour blocks looked
to be new and unused, with the phrases “this could be u” and “this could be u and u,” spray-painted unto the tent’s
exteriors in stencilled, lowercase block letters.29 It is the type of work that easily elicits eye-rolls at the suspicion of
a lazy trope of activist art and liberal concern-politics on display.30 Hammons is just fine with that. This easy
dismissal misses Hammons’ artistic lineage, both in his use of sarcasm and irony, and his lifelong penchant for
engaging the fugitive, obscured spatial relations of the poor, racialised, and dispossessed in urban life. 31 Abbe
Schriber’s archival study of Hammons’ emphasises his use of rumour and everyday, performative gestures in NYC’s
public space, that “posited the readymade codes of the street’s inhabitants as productive of a legitimate mode of city
28
Facebook et al., ‘Review: If an Artist Sets up a Homeless Camp inside a Blue-Chip Art Gallery, Does
Anyone Care?’, Los Angeles Times, 18 June 2019, https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/la-et-cm-
david-hammons-hauser-wirth-review-20190618-story.html; David Hammons, Untitled.
29
David Hammons, Untitled.
30
Facebook et al., ‘Review’.
31
Coco Fusco, ‘Wreaking Havoc on the Signified’, Frieze, no. 22 (7 May 1995),
https://www.frieze.com/article/wreaking-havoc-signified; Schriber, ‘“Those Who Know Don’t Tell”: David
Hammons c. 1981 †’.
10
existence.”32 Hammons work continually employs quotidian materials of Black, urban life, to explore encoded
forms of sociality, that remain insurgent to the normative relations of American capitalism. 33 This evident “interest
in the unofficial archive” prompts an exploration of the encoded relations played upon in the 2019 installation.34 By
returning to LA with an exhibition in that locale, Hammons enacted a material constellation with the spatial histories
of DTLA. The juxtaposition of Coleman’s “harmolodic thinking” with the tent calls for a recognition of the
improvised living that takes place within its’ folds. Fred Moten describes a relation between improvisational
aesthetics and the “radical non-locatability”35 of social dispossession, noting,
“The musical form is all about the disruption, the making of new form, outside the notion of some kind of
necessary structural return to a tonic. So, there’s no tonal center. There’s no home like that. The
improvisations are unmoored in this way. So… recognizing that the most adventurous and experimental
aesthetics, where dissonance is emancipated, are hand-in-hand with the most fucked up, brutal, horrific
experience of being simultaneously held and abandoned.”36
Hammon’s consideration of this spatial materiality as the signifier of no home, no-place, insists on the
profundity of no-place, of “radical non-locatability.”37 What does it mean to make a home in no place?
Caribbean philosopher and poet Edouard Glissant posits “opacity—subsistence within an irreducible
singularity,” exceeding normative constructions of Western life, which are predicated on the ability to reason,
quantify, and determine all of life.38 Hammons’ revelation is to illuminate the tent’s opacity, its palpable
indeterminacy in urban spaces, that whispers and mumbles the possibility for alternate modes of sociality. He
reminds us that opacity’s mystery constitutes an opening, where, Glissant tells us, “Relation” can occur. 39 The
installation evokes an encrypted ode to living otherwise, employing the materiality of the tent as an entry point to
the spatial relations of DTLA’s dispossessed. The work is a material refrain to the insurgent presence within the tent,
where the propertyless and spatially unbound inhabit no-place. The tent is one of the most ubiquitous material
32
Schriber, ‘“Those Who Know Don’t Tell”: David Hammons c. 1981 †’, 50.
33
Schriber, 50.
34
Schriber, ‘“Those Who Know Don’t Tell”: David Hammons c. 1981 †’; David Hammons, Untitled.
35
Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study, Chapter Six:
Fantasy in the Hold., 2013, 139.
36
Harney and Fred Moten, 139.
37
38
Édouard Glissant and Betsy Wing, Poetics of Relation (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997).
39
Glissant and Wing, 190.
11
presences in the spatial and aesthetic terrain of DTLA, yet this obscure entity defies the neoliberal promise of
absolute individuation, and total privatisation. The stamps uttering “this could be u” cut through the symbolic
signifiers of cultural capital to directly address the bourgeoise blue chip gallery-attendees. It is a challenge to the
Liberal myth of individual freedom as an aspirational ideal, which defies the interdependency and collectivity of
experience. In all likeliness, this couldn’t be “u”… but it is “u,” all of “u”. 40
40
David Hammons, Untitled.
12
Appendix I: “Wow, I’m Homeless”
Figure 4. Stephanie Arnold Williams, screengrab from “Walk the Talk” interview Archive LAPoverty Department
(interviewed by Henriette Brouwers)
“Stephanie: After getting out of jail, I ended up hopping onto a Greyhound bus, cause I went
home and everything was gone. I lost everything. I had nothing left. And I don't know what, if you
know what it feels like to lose everything, your contact lenses, your clothes, your shoes, your
underwear, your furniture, the pictures that you've been saving forever, you just lose everything.
And I was like, wow, I'm homeless… And I had to hop on one foot and I'm on Skid Row at Fifth
and San Pedro and just like want to say ‘help!’ But people came from everywhere… said Skid
Row saved my life, because they came to the rescue. They say, what do you need? Like I need a
wheelchair. He brought me a wheelchair. He said, what do you not need? Clothes, need a place to
stay. And it was this pimp guy on the corner... I said, how do you do this homeless thing?...”
13
SECTION I: Tent on the Move
“I think of the famous Robert Frost line, “good fences make good neighbours,” and the question I
wanna ask would be: “Do good cells make good neighbours?”
--Fred Moten41
Figure 5. . Two Volunteers walk down a tent-lined street in Downtown Los Angeles for the Annual LAHSA P-I-T
Homeless Count, January 29th 2015. (David McNew, Volunteers Fan Out Across Los Angeles In Effort To Count
City’s Homeless, 29 January 2015, Colour Photogr
The photograph in figure 5 is part of a Getty Images series taken on the night of January 29, 2015, that
follows a group of volunteers through the streets of DTLA as they conduct the annual Los Angeles County homeless
41
Josh Briond and J.B. Ware, ‘“Wildcat The Totality” - Fred Moten And Stefano Harney Revisit The Undercommons
In A Time Of Pandemic And Rebellion (Part 1), “Give Your House Away, Constantly” (Part 2)’, Millennials Are Killing
Capitalism, accessed 16 April 2021, https://millennialsarekillingcapitalism.libsyn.com/wildcat-the-totality-fred-
moten-and-stefano-harney-revisit-the-undercommons-in-a-time-of-pandemic-and-rebellion-part-1.
14
count.42 Glimmering towers of DTLA’s skyline in the background provide an unmistakable locale to the
photograph’s otherwise indeterminate urban image, depicting a wide stretch of paved asphalt demarcated by neat,
white outlines of public parking spots.43 Behind these, a row of storefronts uniformly cloaked in anonymous steel
grid security shutters are barred for a night of defence. A parallel queue of camping tents, arranged in a peculiar
seriality, stretch to the end of the frame in the distinctive crimpled patina of polyester. This familiar urban
topography is so commonplace that it scarcely registers as an unusual public formation. Yet, these tent habitations
are notably different from LA’s usual, clustered encampments, where the overspill of personal mementos, shopping
carts, make-shift structures, and other sorts of lived trimmings usually expands into the permeable, public terrain.
The spotlight-halos of streetlamps that beam down unto the charcoal asphalt further illuminate an
uncharacteristically barren street, missing its usual layer of material accoutrements. The dearth of abundance
surrounding the tents in figure 5 indicates the presence of some external, regulatory force. The two figures caught
mid-gait in the foreground provide a clue, poised authoritatively over a clipboard, and adorned in matching white,
logo-branded tee shirts. They are the only two figures in sight, and yet it is clear, they are not alone…
Ia. Counting Bodies
Since 2003, The United States (US) department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) has contracted
agencies nationwide to conduct the bi-annual “Point-In-Time (PIT) homeless count.” 44 This snapshot census is
carried out by large-scale volunteer operations, tasked with determining the number of “sheltered” and “unsheltered
homeless” present within a certain locale on one night.45 This process engages a widespread networks of regional
organisations that provide homeless assistance, services, and shelter across America, and decides the annual amount
of financial assistance HUD will grant to address homelessness.46 In LA, LAHSA is provided a substantial grant to
conduct the count each year.47 Methods of data-collection used in the count, such as clipboards and paper, have been
42
David McNew, Two Volunteers Check Clipboards; Los Angeles Homeless Service Authority, ‘The Greater Los
Angeles Homeless Count’.
43
David McNew, Two Volunteers Check Clipboards.
44
Los Angeles Homeless Service Authority, ‘The Greater Los Angeles Homeless Count’.
45
Los Angeles Homeless Service Authority.
46
47
‘2019-20BudgetSummaryBooklet.Pdf’, accessed 5 April 2021,
https://cao.lacity.org/budget/summary/2019-20BudgetSummaryBooklet.pdf.
15
critiqued for largely undercounting the actual number of people who are living without stable housing or shelter. 48
Advocacy groups argue for more comprehensive methods of addressing the vast array of situations and
vulnerabilities that constitute homelessness, while local and state officials are motivated to prove year-on-year
regional decreases.49 Considering the enormous sums of funding at-stake in LA city, conflicting financial
motivations are a significant concern. In the year 2015, the city of LA alone committed over $100 million (USD) of
its budget towards addressing homelessness, with subsequent yearly budget increases that culminated in over $426
million (USD) allocated in 2019, and upwards of $399 million (USD) in 2020.50 Despite these massive increases,
the most recent count conducted in January of 2020 found 66,436 people unhoused people, indicating a 12%
increase in LA’s homeless population from the year prior.51 While more people were housed by city-funded aid
organisations than ever before in 2019, the incoming presence of newly homeless persons outpaced these gains.52
These issues highlight the circular nature of social and political discourses around homelessness, and the
need to develop alternative modes of inquiry and intervention. The homeless count and critiques levelled at its
methodology for insufficiently capturing the homeless population, probe foundational notions of visibility that
undergird mechanisms of biometric accounting that visualise “homelessness” in the US. Homelessness is a social
relation defined by a binary material condition of having and not having, that is entirely determined by external
forces. When advocates seek to treat the social issue of homelessness in contemporary urban society by quantifying
the bodies of those who do not have, what exactly is the aim? Why is there a need to make visible individuals, as
embodied carriers of a societal condition? If bodily visibility equates to funding, where exactly does that capital go
—towards remediating the material, monetary condition of that individual not having?
48
Robert Agans et al., ‘Enumerating the Hidden Homeless: Strategies to Estimate the Homeless Gone
Missing From a Point-in-Time Count’, Journal of Official Statistics 30, no. 2 (2014): 215–29,
https://doi.org/10.2478/jos-2014-0014; Facebook et al., ‘L.A. County Is Counting Homeless People This
Week. Here’s Everything You Need to Know’, Los Angeles Times, 21 January 2020,
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-01-21/homeless-count-los-angeles-county-faq; Christine L
Jocoy, ‘Counting the Homeless: The Culture of Quantification in American Social Policy’, Cultural
Geographies 20, no. 3 (14 September 2012): 397–403, https://doi.org/10.1177/1474474012454999.
49
Forrest Stuart, ‘Race, Space, and the Regulation of Surplus Labor: Policing African Americans in Los Angeles’s
Skid Row’, Souls 13, no. 2 (April 2011): 203, https://doi.org/10.1080/10999949.2011.574572; Agans et al.,
‘Enumerating the Hidden Homeless: Strategies to Estimate the Homeless Gone Missing From a Point-in-Time
Count’; Jocoy, ‘Counting the Homeless: The Culture of Quantification in American Social Policy’; Matt Tinoco,
‘LA Will Spend $30M This Year On Homeless Sweeps. Do They Even Work?’, LAist, 10 April 2019, sec. News,
https://laist.com/news/homeless-sweeps-los-angeles-public-health.
50
‘2014-15BudgetSummaryBooklet.Pdf’, accessed 5 April 2021, https://cao.lacity.org/budget/summary/2014-
15BudgetSummaryBooklet.pdf; ‘2019-20BudgetSummaryBooklet.Pdf’.
51
Los Angeles Homeless Service Authority, ‘The Greater Los Angeles Homeless Count’.
52
16
In DTLA, the unhoused’ continuous, daily encounters with law enforcement, social and administrative
services, and the public render them hyper-visible in public space. Yet, their presence and visibility are deemed
inappropriate, pathologized, and illegalised.53 This context makes it clear that visibility in contemporary LA’s urban
configuration is a far more expansive condition than mere quantification. Rather, Tazzioli posits that visibility is “a
site of strategy,” to manage the “unruly mobility” of certain bodies in space. 54 In DTLA, visibility is a site of
regulation, through which “homeless” bodies are made visible as a problem that must be fixed. Mechanisms of
visuality tactically produce or limit a social, infrastructural understanding of relations in a space. 55 Methods of
empirical data are employed to locate a problem inside of individual bodies, offering the bodies of those
experiencing a problem as the visuality of the problem itself.56 This subjectivation is not a new phenomenon, as
Sekula suggests that a regime of visual production is an inherent regulatory device to the functioning and
reproduction of urban capitalist society.57 Cultural productions visualise a social taxonomy that is contingent upon
the ideal normative, bourgeois property-owning subject, with all socially deviant subjects as its pole. 58 Sekula
evidences this in Early 19th century photographic technologies, that foregrounded behaviourist social
epistemologies, like phrenology and physiognomy, to “regulate the growing urban presence of the ‘dangerous
classes’, of a chronically unemployed sub-proletariat.”59 The “repressive” visual capture of those deemed criminal
allowed for the abstraction of individual subjects, rendering them observable, readable, and predictable by Western
epistemologies of social regulation.60 According to geographer Don Mitchell, the ways in which the homeless are
rendered today “licenses the creation of what I have elsewhere called a ‘brutal public sphere,’ one that might most
53
Stuart, ‘Race, Space, and the Regulation of Surplus Labor’.
54
Martina Tazzioli, ‘Disjointed Knowledges, Obfuscated Visibility. Border Controls at the French-Italian Alpine
Border’, Political Geography 79 (May 2020): 102155 (citation in-text),
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2020.102155; Andrea Mubi Brighenti, ‘Visibility: A Category for the Social
Sciences’, Current Sociology 55 (1 May 2007): 326, https://doi.org/10.1177/0011392107076079; Tazzioli,
‘Governing Migrant Mobility through Mobility: Containment and Dispersal at the Internal Frontiers of Europe’, 4.
55
Tazzioli, ‘Disjointed Knowledges, Obfuscated Visibility. Border Controls at the French-Italian Alpine Border’.
56
Tazzioli; Sekula, ‘The Body and the Archive’.
57
Sekula, ‘The Body and the Archive’.
58
Sekula.
59
Sekula, 39:5.
60
Sekula, 39:7; Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Updating to Remain the Same: Habitual New Media
(Massachusetts: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2016), 59.
17
directly target the homeless, the unemployed, and the poor (and nonwhite) …”. 61 This “brutal public” is shaped by
the production of knowledges across urban space.62
61
DON MITCHELL, Mean Streets: Homelessness, Public Space, and the Limits of Capital., vol. 47 (University of
Georgia Press, 2020), 46, https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvqmp379.
62
MITCHELL, 47:46.
18
In the regulation of the unhoused, the asymmetry of visibility also allows for the production of uncertainty
as a disciplining mechanism.63According to Tazzioli, beyond the dynamics of state surveillance, “opacity and
obfuscation as a strategic tactic of governance” produce “disjointed knowledges, obfuscated visibility and partial
non-registration,” through differential and unevenmodes of data collection and spatial management. Figure 4 depicts
reveals the annual PIT homeless count as a highly coerced regulatory mechanism of visibility, as police cars literally
light the path for volunteers to span out across DTLA to count curiously pre-arranged tent formations. 64 The days
leading up to the annual “homeless count” are reportedly a nightmare for the unhoused, who experience a surge in
harassment, police and sanitation sweeps of their camps, and violent displacement in preparation for the big night. 65
Figure 6. Volunteer Staci Pederson leads a group of volunteers past a grey tent. (David McNew, 29 January 2015,
Colour Photograph , 29 January 2015, Getty Images North America, https://www.gettyimages.co.uk/detail/news-
photo/the-lights-of-a-police-car-illuminate
63
Tazzioli, ‘Disjointed Knowledges, Obfuscated Visibility. Border Controls at the French-Italian Alpine Border’, 7.
64
David McNew, The Lights of a Police Car Illuminate the Street : Volunteers Fan Out Across Los Angeles In Effort
To Count City’s Homeless, 29 January 2015, Colour Photograph, 29 January 2015, Editorial #: 462514864, Getty
Images North America, https://www.gettyimages.co.uk/detail/news-photo/the-lights-of-a-police-car-illuminate-
the-street-as-news-photo/462514864.
65
Nadra Nittle, ‘Surprise Homeless Sweeps Aren’t Just Disruptive, Say Activists—They Aren’t Working’,
Curbed LA, 25 April 2019, https://la.curbed.com/2019/4/25/18516026/homeless-sweeps-encampments-
clean-streets; Matt Tinoco, ‘LA Will Spend $30M This Year On Homeless Sweeps. Do They Even Work?’;
National Coalition for the Homeless, ‘Swept Away: Reporting on the Encampment Enclosure Crisis’,
2016, https://nationalhomeless.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Swept-Away-2016.pdf.
19
While visibility of the unhoused is incessantly produced in a variety of modes, the mutual production of an
opaque impenetrability leaves a murky question mark over the “homeless crisis” in LA. One Los Angeles Times
article by reporter Gale Holland in 2019 captures the numerous points of contact with the unhoused, that extract
hyper-specific knowledges, yet produce little impact on material conditions,
“The county has expanded its outreach teams, given health screenings to thousands of homeless people,
trained sheriff’s deputies… Several employment programs have been launched… outreach workers are
collecting vast amounts of information from homeless people without having housing to offer in return.” 66
Pertinently, the production of opacity obscures the institutional and systemic ways in which poverty and
indebtedness are produced and perpetuated in contemporary American society in favour of collecting this hyper-
narrow, individualised data. Rather than overt state surveillance, or conspiratorial secrecy in the hiding of
information, the obfuscation of knowledges is often produced incidentally, when “opacity is not the outcome of a
linear state’s strategy. Rather, it stems in part from a will not to govern too much.”67 As an inherently transient
populous, the semi-permanent spatial presence further enables the uneven collation of certain knowledges, while
obscuring others.68
Appendix 2: “We wake up happy. Here they come.”
66
Gale Holland, ‘L.A. Spent $619 Million on Homelessness Last Year. Has It Made a Difference?’, Los Angeles Times,
11 May 2019, sec. California, https://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-ln-homeless-housing-count-
20190511-story.html.
67
Tazzioli, ‘Disjointed Knowledges, Obfuscated Visibility. Border Controls at the French-Italian Alpine Border’,
102155.
68
Tazzioli, ‘Disjointed Knowledges, Obfuscated Visibility. Border Controls at the French-Italian Alpine Border’.
20
Figure 7. Stephanie Williams pictured in a medium article, She smiles and points at her tent which reads “COP
WATCH” in big block letters
Stephanie: I know them all by name. Officer Joseph, Sergeant Matthus, the wannabe judge Mathis. I like,
you're not a policeman and you're not a judge, you're just a terrorist cop and you out here to terrorize the
homeless. They stole my sewing machine three times.
Stephanie: They still have it. They make it very difficult for you to get your things back. They make you
wait in the sun for two hours before they even answer the door. And then when they come they tell you in
the wrong place. They said you're in the wrong place. So I go to the right place and then when I get to that
place they say, ‘you don't have the paperwork.’ ‘I'm supposed to have paperwork?’ Where am I going to
get the paperwork?’ ‘From the arresting officer.’ ‘So where is he?’ Oh, I know where he is, he is out there
giving a ticket on Skid Row, so let me just go find him. And I find him, giving someone a ticket, right? And I
butt in, ‘I say, hey, Sergeant Mathis took my sewing machines and I want them back. He said ‘oh okay,
you're the one at Fifth and San Pedro. I'm going to get them back to you tomorrow.’ Never do. Oh, two
weeks ago by, I said, I know where to find him, find him giving somebody else a ticket. He agreed to give it
to me again. I never seen my sewing machine. .
… But we're going to stomp for a change and it's just time for change and we just got to dismantle the
system and start all new cuz we're not going to survive in the system. Everybody's just going to be dropped
dead and you're going to be suffering in your own homes. You know? Don't just think people on Skid Row
21
are suffering. People are suffering home going to work every day.That can kill you by itself, you know?
Why do you think they call it work yourself to death? You know, do we really have to work ourselves to
death? Bringing kids in his world? I feel like my son is safer in jail than he is on this, on this earth because
he don't have to work himself to death, you know, or uh, just work, work, work, you know, I don't think you
should work eight hours a day, 12 hours a day, three jobs to make ends work. Cause then when you get
done working, what time do you have left? What is life all about? Is it just about working and going to
sleep and getting back up? And having that car that in the house that you never see. You know, I'm afraid
for kids to grow up in this world because they, all you going to do is work.
Stephanie: I'm getting tired of the cops. They're causing the strokes. I just proved that. That's what I
proved. I'm not getting tired. I'm getting tired of the system. I'm getting tired of the law telling us what to
do. I, that's why I'm here to fight the system. I'm here to tear down and start a whole new system.
Dismantle it, cause we're fine on Skid Row until the cops come. We're fine with playing our music. We're
doing what we do. We wake up happy. Here they come. “What are you doing? Put your hands by you back,
get up against the wall!” We will be fine before you got here. Just leave us alone. I'm scared every day, of
the cops, it’s like whiplash. I'm like this. Oh God.
Stephanie: Every car that goes by, I think it's a cop. I think I should have therapy. I'm going to go to the
cops and I go to therapy and sue the cops or the system. We can't live off of the system any longer. It's
killing us. That's what's killing us. The cops come around on another body on the ground. You did that. The
system did that. The cops did that. They said, well, what would you do if we never had no cops? We would
do it. We're doing right now…
Stephanie: Well I'm going to keep on smiling. Through the pain, you know, regardless of how much pain
there is, I'm still on smile because my smile goes a long way and when I smile somebody else smiles. And
so I'm just going to keep smiling just waiting on this system to change because there's nothing I can do
about it until the system change, until the rules change. Cause we're living under someone else's rule.
Someone else mistake. ‘You broke the law!’ Now I gotta pay for it. I didn't do it. Can I just get a brand new
start? Can you just judge me on what I did? You know I didn't break into the bank and I didn't rob that
person. You know, I just want to be normal.
Ib. On the Move: Anti-Homeless Policing in DTLA

22
While DTLA’s unhoused are highly managed, surveilled, and cycled through carceral spaces of spatial
containment, this essay seeks to expand upon the spatial modes outside of “carceral circuits” that profoundly effect
their lives.69 Tazzioli considers how the spatial presence and movements of migrants are mediated, constructed,
diverted and disrupted, in a compelling force that produces “mobility itself as a technology of governance.”70 An
analogous dynamic can be seen in the governance and spatial regulation of unhoused in DTLA, whose movements
are continually subject to a regime of “containment through mobility.”71 A significant population of the unhoused
are maintained within DTLA’s urban core, occupying a relatively consistent residence in this space, yet their
presence is rendered diffuse, temporary and semi-permanent.72 Tactics of “hypermobility” and “spatial dispersal”
maintain a discreet barrage of obstacles, diversions, and displacements handed in slight, perseverating blows. 73 In
LA, these are delivered by an ever-shifting assemblage of state and “extrastate” actors, urban development interests,
social service providers, and law enforcement.74
The 2015 LAHSA homeless count provides an exemplar to understand these regulatory practices in spatial
context. Tables 1 and 2 visualise a sample of arrest data from the month of January 2015, when the count images
were taken. In that month alone, there was a total of 601 arrests by Los Angeles Police Department’s (LAPD)
Central Division jurisdiction that resulted in charges. The “01 Area District” covered by LAPD’s Central Division
includes the notorious Skid Row neighbourhood of DTLA, which has become emblematic of LA’s homeless crisis
due to the concentrated presence of homeless service agencies, SRO housing, and tent encampments. 75 The bar
69
Stuart, ‘Race, Space, and the Regulation of Surplus Labor’; Speer, ‘The Rise of the Tent Ward:
Homeless Camps in the Era of Mass Incarceration’; Madeleine Hamlin and Jessie Speer, ‘The Politics of
Conceptualizing the Carceral: A Commentary on Moran et al. (2017)’, Progress in Human Geography 42,
no. 5 (1 October 2018): 799–802, https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132517716997; Dominique Moran, Jennifer
Turner, and Anna K Schliehe, ‘Conceptualizing the Carceral in Carceral Geography’, Progress in Human
Geography 42, no. 5 (2018): 666–86.
70
Europe’, 3.
71
Tazzioli, 8.
72
Stuart, ‘On the Streets, Under Arrest’.
73
Europe’, 4.
74
Keller Easterling, ‘Zone: The Spatial Softwares of Extrastatecraft’, Places Journal, 10 June 2012, 4,
https://doi.org/10.22269/120610.
75
Los Angeles Police Department, ‘Arrest Data from 2010 to 2019 | Los Angeles - Open Data Portal’,
Public Safety, Arrest Data from 2010 to 2019 (Los Angeles City: LAPD OpenData, 5 June 2017), Los
Angeles Open Data Database, https://data.lacity.org/Public-Safety/Arrest-Data-from-2010-to-2019/yru6-
6re4; MITCHELL, Mean Streets: Homelessness, Public Space, and the Limits of Capital.; Stuart, ‘Race,
Space, and the Regulation of Surplus Labor’.
23
graph in table 1 and summary in table 2 visualises all “charge descriptions” recorded that month, clearly indicating
the most common charge brought against those arrested in the downtown area, at 25% of all charges filed that
month, was “SIT/ LIE/ SLEEP SIDEWALK OR STREET.”76 The blunt semantics of banal illegalisation seems to
highlight the absurdity of this charge, which was used to divert and control bodies in DTLA’s public 149 times that
month.77 These numbers indicate the illegalisation of “spatial presence” inherent to the regulation of the
unhoused.78 The same police who led the volunteers in figure (6) were the arbiters of 149 arrests of anyone found
sitting, lying, or sleeping on those same streets within the 30 days surrounding that count. These incongruities reveal
the “uneven management of spatial presence” that exact mobility as a regime of uncertainty for the unhoused, who
live in constant fear of the next encounter, never knowing when it may come.79
Table 1. Bar Graph depicts Dataset of “charge descriptions” associated with LAPD arrests in the Central Division
(Downtown LA/ Skid Row) between January 1-31, 2015. (Source:Los Angeles Police Department, ‘Arrest Data from
2010 to 2019’, Public Safety, (Los Ange City: LAPD OpenData, 5 June 2017), Los Angeles Open Data Database,
https://data.lacity.org/Public-Safety/Arrest-Data-from-2010-to-2019/yru6-6re4.)80
Table 2. Summary Table of Dataset of “charge descriptions” associated with LAPD arrests in the Central Division
(Downtown LA/ Skid Row) between January 1-31, 2015. (Source: Los Angeles Police Department, ‘Arrest Data
from 2010 to 2019’, Public Safety, Los Angeles Open Data Database, https://data.lacity.org/Public-Safety/Arrest-
Data-from-2010-to-2019/yru6-6re4.)
This subjection to “convoluted geographies” produces a form of “containment,” wherein, “movements and
presence are troubled, subjected to convoluted or hectic movements and to protracted moment of strandedness.” 81
76
Los Angeles Police Department, ‘LAPD OpenData’.
77
Los Angeles Police Department.
78
Tazzioli, ‘Disjointed Knowledges, Obfuscated Visibility. Border Controls at the French-Italian Alpine
Border’, 4; Los Angeles Police Department, ‘LAPD OpenData’.
79
Tazzioli, ‘Disjointed Knowledges, Obfuscated Visibility. Border Controls at the French-Italian Alpine
Border’, 4; Stephanie Arnold Williams, Los Angeles Poverty Department/ Walk the Talk Archive.
80
Los Angeles Police Department, ‘LAPD OpenData’.
81
Tazzioli, ‘Containment through Mobility’, 2765–86.
24
Within the LA’s urban core, the uneven application of visibility, enforcement, and care ensure “unruly movements
are contained insofar as they are disrupted, decelerated and diverted.” 82 The numbers in Tables 1 and 2 begin to
trace a faint outline of what it means to be made visible as an illegalised spatial presence, and the creative practices
of “spatial disobedience” that must be cultivated to survive these conditions.83
As a site of discipline, mobility inhabits the “grey space between the Foucauldian biopolitical binary of
‘making live’ and ‘letting die,’” to engender a quiet, everyday violence that permeates the lives of DTLA’s
unhoused by “choking out conditions of liveability.84 In sporadic blows, this force diverts and disrupts that the
grounds upon which a life is determined, the autonomous accounting of space and time. Alongside law enforcement,
the unhoused encounter a ceaseless barrage of bureaucratic stoppages, legal absurdities, and procedural conundrums
in governance and social service administration, which are often presented as a plethora of “choices”. As Jessie
Speer notes,
“Although shelters are distinct from jails and prisons in the fundamental fact that residents are free to leave,
this freedom must be examined in the context of anti-homeless policing. For decades, homeless people
have been subject to the perpetual threat of arrest for life-sustaining activities like sitting, sleeping, and
urinating (Davis, 1990, Mitchell, 1997; Amster, 2008). Beckett and Herbert (2010) argue that in effectively
banishing homeless people from public space, anti-homeless policing functions as a carceral mechanism
that enforces spatial mobility rather than confinement.”85
Thus, understanding mobility as a technology of control challenges the liberal conception of “mobility as
synonymous with freedom,” in situations where forced mobility restricts autonomy.86 Rather, Tazzioli suggests
mobility is a condition which is always-being produced by “historically and political determined” structures and
hierarchies of power, and enacted differentially upon a stratified populous.87
In spatial governance, the formation of the “hotspot…as…spatial crystallisations of…attempts to regain
control over migration movements, through ‘flexible’ and temporary measures,” is evident in concentrated zones
82
Tazzioli, ‘Governing Migrant Mobility through Mobility: Containment and Dispersal at the Internal
Frontiers of Europe’, 15.
83
Tazzioli, ‘Containment through Mobility’, 2765.
84
Martina Tazzioli, ‘Choke, Extract, Disrupt: Governing Migration through Mobility’.
85
Speer, ‘The Rise of the Tent Ward: Homeless Camps in the Era of Mass Incarceration’, 5–6.
86
Martina Tazzioli, ‘Choke, Extract, Disrupt: Governing Migration through Mobility’.
87
Europe’, 1.
25
like Skid Row, that focalise visible poverty and distress to justify the experimentation and sophistication of
“flexible” enforcement techniques.88 Skid Row has been the on-going site of such experiments, with successive
policing and urban planning variants enacted in the service of crisis management. 89 Beyond theorising Skid Row as
an area of spatial containment, Tazzioli considers how “hotspots…include junctions with high-intensity circulation,”
revealing the “heterogenous modes of containment that aim at disrupting, constraining and indirectly channelling…
mobility and spatial presence.”90 Skid Row is a buzzing hub of encounter, where the circulation of services, carceral
and punitive enforcement, aid, and administrative, biometric governance applies differential and uneven impacts on
unhoused residents.91 This multi-faceted centre of regulation exerts control through “the production of hierarchies of
lives, asymmetries of mobility and exclusionary partitions.”92 Subjecting Skid Row residents to “convoluted
geographies,” like returning to the same administrative offices repeatedly, waiting in hours-long lines to renew
identification or access shelter, or entering years-long permanent housing waitlists, makes “spaces unliveable.” 93
“Containment through mobility” weaponizes individual freedom as the full individual responsibility of unhoused
individuals to keep moving on.94
[Add Moten Quote]
88
89
Carla Green, ‘The Containment Plan’, Podcast, 99% Invisible (blog), 10 October 2017,
https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/the-containment-plan/.
90
91
Stuart, ‘On the Streets, Under Arrest’.
92
93
Europe’, 16.
94
Tazzioli, ‘Containment through Mobility’.
26
Appendix III. “People are dying in the homes too”
Figure 8
Stephanie:... At first my family like, ‘no, we're not coming to Skid Row and you better get outta
there.’ And I'm like, no, I'm never leaving. It was something about Skid Row that I said I'm never
leaving. I just loved this place, is so many bad things they say about it. But I didn't see that. I
didn't see the bad part of Skid Row, you know, of course bad things did happen and people do get
killed. And I've seen a lot of deaths since I've been there. But that happens in your own home, you
know, the hospital didn't open up for just Skid Row, you know, and the graveyard didn't open just
up for Skid Row. You know, people are dying in the homes too.
Stephanie: I would think people were dying more in homes that they are in Skid Row. You know,
just take the roof off the sucker and see what really going on inside people's homes. They're
arguing. They can argue over toilet paper. You know, when I was at home with my family, they
was are how argued about everything. Who used the last toilet paper? Who didn't? Who's washing
the dishes, who didn't do this and who didn't do that and where's all the food at?... And who's
paying the bill? And my car just broke down and I need $900… You know at Skid Row I don't
wake up with those problems…I don't think about what bill I got to pay, who I owe, what rent I
have to pay. I said, this is freedom and I think this is the way life should be. And so I said to myself
that I've never, I refuse to pay rent on the earth I was born on. I'm not paying rent. God said live
free off the land and you don't have to get mad at us on Skid Row because we're not working. You
don't have to work when you got teamwork.
27
SECTION II: HOMEPLACE: Slum Publics & Living Otherwise
“In certain liberal historiographies of slavery, it ends with a great legal act of emancipation.
(I’m) Trying to think about…the non-event of emancipation because of the way in which these
emergent modalities of servitude that took place within a discourse of freedom, and rights, and
liberty, etcetera—there was something for me, more rotten at the core, which is about the
imposition of a sort of regime of the subject that was so fundamentally defined by property, and
that being as good as it gets, right? So…both the impossibility of the achievement of those things
that define a certain kind of liberal citizen subject in the West, the Freed being excluded from that
—but then what are the kind of constituents of that subject to begin with? And is that something
that one wants to sign onto anyway? So many of the articulations of freedom, so much of the
practices of the ex-slave or the Freed articulated another imagination of freedom altogether. So
there’s an imposition of a certain regime of the subject. And the domestic is crucial—a certain
conception of the domestic is crucial—to the production of that subject.”
--Saidiya Hartman95
“Home is not this sovereign place, space, where everyone had a fence and you kept motherfuckers
out, it was this constantly violated thing. So even if we wanna maintain some kind of a
commitment to home, we do so by way of this constant questioning and violation of the rigidity of
the boundaries that it is supposed to represent. Homelessness is not the condition in which you
ain’t got no place to stay; homelessness is the condition in which you ain’t got a house.
Homelessness is the condition in which you share your house, literally; it’s the condition in which
you give your house away, constantly—as a practice of hospitality. So the homelessness that
we’re trying to talk about is precisely this interplay, of this practice of hospitality, the giving—
home is where you give home away.”
-- Fred Moten96
95
Fred Moten and Saidiya Hartman, ‘The Black Outdoors: Fred Moten & Saidiya Hartman | John Hope Franklin
Humanities Institute’ (Panel, The Black Outdoors, Duke University, October 2016),
https://fhi.duke.edu/videos/black-outdoors-fred-moten-saidiya-hartman.
96
Josh Briond and J.B. Ware, ‘Millennials Are Killing Capitalism’.
28
IIa. Pitiful Enclosures
Positing DTLA as a homeplace, this chapter builds an archive of visual productions of home within its
spatial and built topographies. To develop this archive, it is imperative to further elucidate the relationality between
productions of visuality and processes of social and spatial enclosure in the history of Western capitalism. Silvia
Federici evidences how capitalist society produces and necessitates a regime of scarcity, through ongoing processes
of primitive accumulation.97 Tracing histories of land dispossession in rural Europe and the UK, Federici links the
emergence of Western capitalism to the illegalisation of poverty and starvation in vagrancy laws developed
throughout the 1400s-1700s.98 The “Enclosures” of 16th century England notoriously forced peasants into transient
existences, roaming from town to town seeking waged work.99 Centuries of starvation ensued, and dispossessed
persons were occupied the peripheries of village life, while their presence was illegalised and scorned as vagabonds,
beggars, and vagrants.100 By the mid-16th century in Venice, Italy Federici shares an account of overwhelming
deprivation, noting how “the main weapons available to the poor in their struggle for survival were their own
famished bodies, as in times of famine hordes of vagabonds and beggars surrounded the better off, half-dead of
hunger and disease, grabbing their arms, exposing their wounds to them and, forcing them to live in a state of
constant fear at the prospect of both contamination and revolt.”101 In this context, bodily visibility was the only
strategy available to appeal to the basest visceral emotions of pity, in the hopes of forcing the wealthy to recognise a
shared biological vulnerability to mortality.
Notably, the introduction of “a system of public assistance in at least sixty European towns” in the years
directly following the Enclosures, reflecting an originary relation between the introduction of public, state assistance
and capitalism’s “unsustainability …of ruling exclusively by means of hunger and terror.” 102 This suggests, “the
function of the state as the guarantor of the class relation and… chief supervisor of the reproduction and disciplining
of the work force.” 103 Whether humanitarian or disciplinary, state intervention becomes an arbiter of capitalism’s
97
Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation (New York : London: New
York : Autonomedia, 2004).
98
Federici, 80.
99
Federici, 80.
100
Federici, 82.
101
Federici, 81.
102
Federici, 82.
103
Federici, 84.
29
ongoing alienation through the regulatory “public sphere.”104 Pertinently, a concurrent “leap occurred also in the
management of social reproduction, resulting in the introduction of demographic recording (census-taking, the
recording of mortality, natality, marriage rates) and the application of accounting to social relations,” demonstrating
the centrality of biometric accounting to “biopolitical” governance. 105 When poverty and scarcity become a
naturalised phenom, the state creates systems of empirical abstraction to locate and make visible deprivation within
certain social bodies. The following chapter builds on implications that the processes of alienation and dispossession
in early modern Europe were engendered not only by the spatial enclosure of land itself, but congruently by “a
process of social enclosure,” wherein, “workers (shifted) from the openfield to the home, from the community to the
family, from the public space (the common, the church) to the private.”106 It is this privatisation of social collectivity
which is the force of capital’s social enclosure, and the wake that continues to ripple. The entangled processes of
visuality, bodily vulnerability, biometric abstraction, social pity, and state intervention which operate this enclosure
continue to unspool.
IIb. Slum Publics
While a popular Western historicization imagines LA as a sleepy, sparsely populated region until its 20 th
century industrial boom, the reality was a centuries-long, sustained period of encroachment, genocide, and land
dispossession of its indigenous Tonvga and Chumash residents. 107 Geographer Forrest Stuart links the feudal
histories of capitalist accumulation to the racialised illegalisation of propertyless classes in the US throughout the
19th century.108 Following the post-Civil War legal emancipation of enslaved labour, Stuart establishes how the
same legal code was quickly harnessed to recapture this racialised population.109 [Add:Tongva]
104
Jürgen Habermas and Frederick. Lawrence, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere : An
Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge: Polity, 1989).
105
Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation, 84; Michel Foucault, The Birth
of Biopolitics : Lectures at the College de France, 1978-1979 (New York: New York : Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).
106
Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation, 84.
107
UCLA Mapping Indigenous LA et al., Mapping Indigenous LA: Placemaking Through Digitial
Storytelling, Story Map Journal (UCLA American Indian Studies Center), accessed 7 April 2021,
https://www.arcgis.com/apps/MapJournal/index.html?appid=a9e370db955a45ba99c52fb31f31f1fc.
108
109
Stuart.
30
The 20th century does mark the region’s rapid descent into industrial modernity when the population
famously ballooned from 100,000 in 1920 to nearly 600,000 in 1929.110 This period included the nascent formation
of this essay’s subject of spatial inquiry, the urban configuration of DTLA. The centre ushered thousands of
industrial labourers, mid-west farmers, business owners, speculators, creatives, construction workers and all other
sorts from across the country into DTLA’s Union Station each day.111 Among these were transient labourers
following the boom-and-bust cycles of industrial production, who slept in “municipal lodging houses, jailhouse
floors, rescue missions, SROs, and ‘cage’ hotels on Skid Row; bunkhouses provided by employers; and sometimes
park benches or storefront doorways.”112 Skid Row emerged as an inherent spatial formation of LA’s modern
urbanity, in “the tramps’ archipelago of housing” housing labourers who served a pertinent economic role in
fulfilling the fluctuating and sporadic needs of industrialisation. “Capital needed (and still needs, if now in a
different form) a highly mobile labor force,” to maintain an easily replaceable workforce and keep wages low.113
110
Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (London: London : Verso, 1990).
111
Davis.
112
MITCHELL, Mean Streets: Homelessness, Public Space, and the Limits of Capital., 47:77.
113
MITCHELL, 47:36;76.
31
The US Stock Market crash of 1929 once again revealed capitalism’s essential failure to safely sustain a
populous. Like the 15th century vagrants roaming villages, thousands of labourers set off in search of waged labour
and food. They found refuge in the peripheries of mainstream urban life, occupying “interstitial spaces” to construct
makeshift encampments, that became the site of radical political organising and drew brutal state repression. 114 This
visibility of capitalist crisis necessitated state intervention and the New Deal era—that many cite as a crucial
mediation to quell the growing influence of Communism—brought a massive expansion of the welfare state. 115 A
social reform movement and developing epistemologies of social science began to render a socially alienated,
“disaffiliated” homeless subject as “cut off from the ties and norms of settled bourgeois society.” 116 Positing
homelessness as, “not so much as a question of housing or economic structure, but more as a chosen ‘way of life,’
and thus a (subculturally reinforced) expression of people’s characters. The effect was to classify homeless people as
external to society, rather than produced by it and integral to its functioning.”117 These developments disclose the
necessity of cultural production to capitalism’s social reproduction. 118 In Depression-era Los Angeles, this process
of social enclosure is rendered socially and spatially through urban development and slum policy.
114
MITCHELL, 47:76;78.
115
MITCHELL, 47:35.
116
MITCHELL, 47:37.
117
MITCHELL, 47:37.
118
32
Figure 9. News Image Depicting Children on a porch in Los Angeles (Calif.) (source:
https://calisphere.org/item/ark:/13030/hb809nb579/)
A collection of Los Angeles Daily News negatives taken soon after the 1929 market crash purport to depict
“slums” and “tenement houses” in the DTLA area. 119 The image in figure 6 shows a group of children donned in
bare feet and tee shirts, the comforts of home, peering up at the camera from a wooden porch. The photographer
must have caught them amid an ordinary, sunny afternoon at home. The camera’s intrusive gaze points down on
them from a high angle to capture a patched tin roof and numerous wooden structures in various stages of disrepair.
The children return the camera’s stare with hesitant expressions and eyes squinted in discernment, chins poised, both
curious and withholding. A slightly older girl stands centre-crowd, holding two of the youngest children in her arms,
in the intimate, protective way of kin. The camera’s unfeeling, distanced lens is the familiar frame of 20 th century
119
UCLA, Library Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, ‘UCLA Library | Digital Collections’,
Digital Archive, UCLA Library Digital Collections I Los Angeles Daily News Negatives, accessed 11 April 2021,
http://digital2.library.ucla.edu/viewItem.do?ark=21198/zz00294nz8.
33
ethnographic “images intended to classify types rather than identify individuals... they are at best coerced and at
worst compelled.”120 These post-crisis images were intended to make visible an abhorrent, errant presence lurking in
the failed promise of a modern, civilized urban city. The labels carried by these news images probe the unsettling
discrepancies between an evident homeplace rendered, incontrovertibly, a “slum.”121 The impact of the word slum is
a visceral evocation, a queasy affective experience of the gut.
Figure 10. Figure 14. Doing the slums
Alan Mayne traces the etymology of slum to its slang usage in Victorian London’s East End
neighbourhood, where it was used to describe the dire conditions of poverty in the burgeoning bedrock of industrial
capitalist modernity.122 The term was first popularised as a verb, an activity known as “doing the slums,” wherein
the wealthy bourgeoise class would take a whirl around poor areas, partaking in the varieties of vice and sin—
prostitution, bibation—made available, for a price.123 In figure 14, two wealthy, white women in ‘late nineteenth-
120
121
University of California, Los Angeles. -- Library. -- Dept. of Special Collections (repository), Los
Angeles Slums in the Great Depression, 1929, B&W Image, 1929, Copyright is owned by the UC
Regents, UCLA, Library Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library,
https://calisphere.org/item/ark:/13030/hb058002j1/.
122
Alan Mayne, Slums: The History of a Global Injustice (Chicago: Reaktion Books, 2017).
123
Alan Mayne.
34
century’ NYC traverse the slums with police accompaniment, bestowing concerned glances upon the familiar tropes
of the “deserving poor.124” Saidiya Hartman captures the dynamics of salacious visibility and urban poverty in early
20th century NYC, where “the voyeurs on their slumming expeditions feed on the lifeblood of the ghetto, long for it
and loathe it. The social scientists and the reformers are no better with their cameras and their surveys, staring
intently at all the strange specimens.” Figure 15 brings these words to life in its’ rendering of a swarm of suited
white men, carefully dissectingthe built environment of DTLA’s slums. These self-appointed arbiters of safety,
propriety and decency locate the pathology and criminality of social deprivation in the built environ of the slums,
positing uncivilized structures as an extension of morally bankrupt urban subjects. What these slum images won’t
show is the,
Figure 11. Housing Director Holtzendorff and men going up rickety fire escape of tenement during tour of
slum areas (source: https://dl.library.ucla.edu/islandora/object/edu.ucla.library.specialCollections.latimes:3037
)
124
35
“world concealed behind the façade of the ordered metropolis… The ward, the Bottom, the ghetto—an
urban commons where the poor assemble, improvise the forms of life, experiment with freedom, and refuse
the menial existence scripted for them. It is a zone of extreme deprivation and scandalous waste. In the
rows of tenements, the decent reside peacefully with the dissolute and the immoral.” 125
Hartman’s poetic prose alights the senses to the other spaces within the slums, the lived spaces that go unseen,
untold, but felt. The forgotten image in figure (13) was intended to capture and identify a social illness breeding in
the shadowy recesses of modernity, the unkempt urban slums. Campt probes a reckoning with the ambivalence of
photographic subjection, wherein even the smallest acts of self-possession reflect “a desire to be seen, to be
photographed, to be visible, and to matter… a desire to live a future that is now.”126 This desire is palpable in the
children banded together on a porch, teeming with life, sharing the bond of homeplace. There is a palpable strength-
in-numbers, the ease of mutual assurance in the company of those who spend long summer afternoons outside
together, barefoot and baby-faced. Proud, small people who haven’t learned yet that their daily beings together, their
acts of taking care, are destined for enclosure, dispersal. They face that cold lens with triumphant stances and raised
brows that sense the threat, yet receive the stranger into their homeplace nonetheless. This tenor is not disclosed by
the optical impression of the camera, nor its written descriptors, but rather registers in the “sonic frequencies of
affect and impact. It is an ensemble of seeing, feeling, being affected, contacted, and moved beyond the distance of
sight and observer.”127 This cultural production of the slum exposes the ways in which urban poverty is made visible
to engender the spatial regulation of the poor under the pretence of care.
[A recent article delineates the urban history of the slum in the US, and the implication wrought by this
spatial and moral designation.]128 Under the auspices of community care through the alleviation of “urban plight,”
cities were enormously reconfigured through the designation and eventual decimation of slums.
“Title I of the Housing Act of 1949 made federal funding available to cities and authorized the use of
eminent domain for ‘slum clearance’ projects to address issues of ‘blight’ in urban centers. In order to
125
Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments : Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval, 24.
126
Campt, Listening to Images, 42–43.
127
Campt, 42.
128
Laura Kurgan, Dare Brawley, Jia Zhang, and Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, ‘Weak Ties: The Urban History of an
Algorithm’, E-Flux Architecture, Are Friends Electric?, 27 October 2019, https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/are-
friends-electric/348398/weak-ties-the-urban-history-of-an-algorithm/.
36
receive these federal funds, cities were required to adopt a general plan, and then to designate ‘renewal’
areas that supported the goals of that plan.”129
Racialised and positivist 19th century social epistemologies were interpellated into emerging “network theory”,
which greatly shaped urban development in the mid-20th century around problematic concepts of social affiliation
that perpetuated and reinforced social hierarchies.130 A mass removal and destruction of areas designated as slums
laid the infrastructure for the mid-century dream of sprawling suburbia, freeways, and single-family home
developments. Mitchell surmises a passage from hobo sociologist Todd DePastino, where he “concluded, ‘The Great
Depression, which began by sending millions to the lodging houses…ended by confirming hobohemia’s [Skid
Row’s] demise and recommitting the nation to the suburban domestic ideal.’” 131 In 1949, the LA City Council
swiftly drafted an order into effect condemning “slums” that were home to over 10,000 Angelenos. 132 Much of the
housing promised to replace these slums were never built and thousands of porches with thousands of possibilities
transposed, dispersed, diverted.
IIIc. Help Me, I’m Poor :?
Conditions of industrial production in mid-century America shifted from physically labour-intensive
infrastructure and construction to decentralised factory, commodity manufacturing, diminishing the need for a
surplus, mobile workforce within the urban core. 133 Keynesian New Deal reforms and the growing wealth from war
industrialism was selectively doled out in racialized investments to create the mid-century suburban ideal for some,
at the expense of the rest.
129
Laura Kurgan, Dare Brawley, Jia Zhang, and Wendy Hui Kyong Chun.
130
Laura Kurgan, Dare Brawley, Jia Zhang, and Wendy Hui Kyong Chun.
131
132
DON PARSON, ‘Los Angeles’ “Headline-Happy Public Housing War”’, Southern California Quarterly
65, no. 3 (1983): 251–85, https://doi.org/10.2307/41171049.
133
37
Figure 12. 1946, Veteran white family - CA "housing shortage crisis"
Figure 10 begins to display a new image of poverty in DTLA, housed in the industrially stitched green
canvas and characteristic camouflage green tent of US’ 20th century military factory-production. Unlike the
distanced frame in figure (11), this image is taken inside the domestic environ, with an intimate framing that allows
the viewer a sympathetic, shared perspective with its subject. The tent serves as a tender shelter for the family
centre-frame, sitting in a peaceful scene of domestic dwelling, as a father serves breakfast to the family gathered
around him. This is a significant departure from the children massed together in figure (11) without parents, who
were viewed at a distance to capture the surroundings that would define their social subjectivation, and dictate their
personhood as a product of their slum environ. The children in figure (17) are instead granted the compassionate
affordance of interiority. The photograph’s archival label reads, “Veteran Jesse Swatton and Family Living in Tent
Due to California Housing Shortage.”134 According to this, the is family suffering a brief stint of crisis, pictorially
framed as what Mitchell terms the “deserving poor.”135 This condition is rendered temporary, an unfortunate
accident wherein this family has been caught in a housing shortage, through no fault of their own. Their residence in
the tent is presented as a gracious, patriotic sacrifice for a nation at war. They may be down on their luck, but the
134
Calisphere, Veteran Jesse Swatton and Family Living in Tent Due to California Housing Shortage in
1946, 1946, B&W Photograph, 1946, edu.ucla.library.specialCollections.losAngelesDailyNews:647
uclalat_1387_b86_35948-2 ark:/21198/zz0002qnr4, UCLA, Library Special Collections, Charles E. Young
Research Library, https://calisphere.org/item/ark:/21198/zz0002qnr4/.
135
MITCHELL, Mean Streets: Homelessness, Public Space, and the Limits of Capital., 47:42; Calisphere, Veteran
Jesse Swatton and Family Living in Tent Due to California Housing Shortage in 1946.
38
images’ bright spotlight forms a halo to frame the clean, well-groomed, and orderly subjects with dignity. The
patriarch sits centre-frame, embodying traditional, binary masculinity as he provides coffee to the wife by his side,
whose head is bowed in deference, with ankles crossed demurely below a long pleated accordion skirt. The young
daughter beside her depicts femininity in a floral-patterned skirt and white blouse, and the young son looks up at the
camera stoically from a freshly buzzed head; a far-cry from the dusty children on the rickety porch. The well-
orchestrated composition suggests this photograph was likely staged, in this “honorific” family portrait that
illustrates the construction of a 20th century ideal. The upwardly-mobile, nuclear American family—self-sacrificing,
white, heterosexual, gendered, stoic, militaristic, humble, and hard-working, despite difficult social conditions. 136
Figure 13?. wartime housing” 1942-1945- a Black family in Little Tokyo- living in what was Japanese-owned
homes- “Bronzeville”  )
Another photograph taken within the same WWII period as figure (12) depicts a different American family sharing
the homeplace of DTLA, in a small enclave known today as Little Tokyo. While the image in figure (13) is taken
within an interior setting, it returns to the distanced, ethnographic gaze to size up its racialised subjects in a
136
39
shadowy, murky environ. In it, three women share an iron bedframe, each holding a shiny-cheeked infant, as a
middle-aged man seated across from them, pointedly turns around in his chair, to face the camera directly. The
photograph’s archival description reads, “Interior view of makeshift housing for an African American family in
Little Tokyo, Los Angeles. Little Tokyo in Los Angeles was dubbed ‘Bronzeville’ during World War Two, as
African American families and workers moved into the empty homes and businesses of the relocated Japanese
American community.”137 The housing made suddenly empty by “relocated” families was due to Franklin D.
Roosevelt’s presidential Executive Order 9066, that subjects any persons determined to be 1/16th Japanese anywhere
in the United States were subject to immediate detention, overnight.138 The supposed rights granted by the property
deed were instantly dissolved as 120,000 US residents were forced out from their homes and into outdoor detention
camps.139 This racialised dispossession again reveals that the sacred deed of private property upon which the
American Dream constructs its’ myth of meritocracy, is indeed a thinly veiled mirage. Capital’s most holy
consecration of privatisation in the individual homeowner, and the safety of the locked gate, have only ever been the
spoils of conquest. As mid-century American militarism expanded a global empire, the strategic, racialised
implementation of homeplace invested in a suburban dream that would leave the city and its racialised urban poor
behind. Amidst these towering sways of dispossession, the family sits in figure 18, taking up the impossible place
left for them, making a homeplace that was never theirs and will never be theirs. Yet, there is a pause, a moment of
respite, as the man centre-frame turns towards the camera, poised, and collected. Campt terms this tangible effort
“stasis,” as the “effortful equilibrium achieved through a labored balancing of opposing forces,” in the interplay of
subjection and capture, as the subject, who is never fully subjugated, labours to maintain a quiet moment of peace in
the multi-valent pulls of capital’s racist dispossession.140
DISCLAIMER: racially & physical abusive -

APPENDIX IV: “We had a knock at the door… they said, I was resisting and trying to escape, my own son's
apartment.”
137
Wartime Housing in Little Tokyo’s Bronzeville, Los Angeles (Calif.), 1945 1942, 1945 1942, UCLA,
Library Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library,
https://calisphere.org/item/ark:/13030/hb3b69n8bz/.
138
Hillary Jenks, ‘Bronzeville, Little Tokyo, and the Unstable Geography of Race in Post-World War II Los
Angeles’, Southern California Quarterly 93, no. 2 (2011): 201–35, https://doi.org/10.2307/41172572.
139
Jenks.
140
40
Stephanie: I went back to Indianapolis because my son had a child and he wanted me to
help him raise the child. And while I was there, we had a knock at the door to police
officers knocked on the door and kicked in the door actually and said my son was a
rapist. He had put naked pictures on Facebook. And so they arrested my son in front of
my granddaughter and then came back a month later and said I was the mother of the
rapist and broke my leg. They said, you're the mother of the rapist and we're going to
break your mother fuckin’ leg.
Henriëtte: They said, we are going to break your leg?
Stephanie: I actually had a conversation with em. I said, why would you do that? And
they said, well because we hate niggers. I said, you hate niggers? I was like, Oh wow. I
got the wrong cops in my house. You hate niggers. I said, yeah, we hate niggers and we
hate solving nigger problems and you need to take this problem over with God. And I'm
like, well if you leave, you know I can just take it up with God. Just let me take it up with
God. You need to leave cause I got the wrong cops in my house. We had a family dispute.
The reason the cops came, we were deciding where my granddaughter should go after
my son was arrested.
Stephanie: And we called the police because we had argued about where the daughter
would, granddaughter would go. So we were already, I thought the cops would come and
help us out and you know, you go to your corner, you go here and you do this and you do
that. But no, they came in terrorizing and they said, I'm just going to break your fucking
leg if you don't stop resisting. I wasn't even moving. I found out that was a cue of them
hitting you. They gave the cops a cue to hit. They say ‘she's resisting, bam! She's
41
resisting, boom!’ And he hit me on my head, my chest, my ribs, and then they threw me
down and handcuffed me and said, ‘if you keep on resisting, we going to break your leg.’
I'm like, I'm not resisting. They said ‘she's trying to escape! She's trying to get away!’
and it took me, broke my leg.
Henriëtte: With their hands?
Stephanie: With their hands. They had me down, they had their knee in my back and I
was handcuffed. I couldn't move. It was three of them. It was one female and two males,
and they said, I was resisting and trying to escape, my own son's apartment. And so they
said ‘now you're under arrest, get up, you're going to jail for trespassing.’ And I was
like, well I can't get up cause you just broke my leg. And they said, ‘we didn't break your
leg. You was walking a minute ago.’
-- Stephanie Arnold Williams
IIIc. From the Slums to the Row: DTLA’s Slums Publics
Despite Skid Row’s necessary role in urban LA’s modernisation, Posts-Keynesian, neoliberal shifts
towards decentralisation and deindustrialisation rendered those on Skid Row increasingly “useless” to the labour
needs of capitalist production.141 Like DTLA’s slums had 50 years earlier, the Skid Row neighbourhood became the
face of LA’s urban poverty by the 1980s. The news image in figure (19) labelled “carboard shantytowns” depicts
Skid Row by 1987.142 Long gone and forgotten are the days of the US military tent as the saviour of a housing
shortage. Without aid, without structures, these urban subjects are living inside-out, conducting private lives in
DTLA’s public streets. The image depicts a loose row of casually dressed men, engulfed by the accoutrements of
improvised shelter, bedsheets and personal items, accumulated below a cement wall, dramatically splattered with
bursts of Black soot from makeshift stoves. The row of black spouts mimicks the row of men on the sidewalk below,
framing the busy scene in a tangible layer of grime. There is a causality to the moment captured, that appears in the
grinning faces and comfortable slouches of its subjects, whose abundant piles and gestural bodies in every direction
exude a vibrant, frenzied tenor.

141
MITCHELL, Mean Streets: Homelessness, Public Space, and the Limits of Capital., 47:36–39.
142
Javier Mendoza, Cardboard Shantytowns, 1987, 1 photograph: b&W, 1987, HE box Homeless, Los
Angeles Public Library Photo Collection I TESSA Digital Collections of the Los Angles Public Library,
https://tessa.lapl.org/cdm/ref/collection/photos/id/18320.
42
Figure 14. (1987, “shantytowns”) (source: https://calisphere.org/item/7a2fe48af121166089eb5e7b03998e3b/)
The dominant historiographic narrative of LA’s Skid Row cites a failed 1970s experiment in urban
planning, known as the “containment plan,” as a disaster, that funnelled unwanted members of the urban populous
into a concentrated area of neglect.143 Implemented in 1976, the plan sequestered homeless aid services to the Skid
Row area, to “serve as a magnet to hold undesirable population elements in Skid Row, not against their will but of
their own accord. Strong edges will act as buffers between Skid Row and the rest of the central city. When the Skid
Row resident enters the buffer, the psychological comfort of the familiar Skid Row environment will be lost.” 144
Henri Lefebvre suggests “representations of space” are codes that prescribe the function, relations, and operations of
a space according to “the relations of production.”145 The Skid Row containment plan was a representation of space
to construct an urban public that would engender specific parameters of subjectivity—that which is ‘undesirable’. 146
Therefore, if the residents of this space demand desirable facilities, infrastructures, or resources (ie. running water,
toilets, parks, healthy food, good schools), that is unacceptable according to the preordained sociality of this space,
this undesirable public. Yet, normative subjectivity in urban space is always being challenged by those who use it in
illicit, unplanned, and spontaneous ways. Lefebvre calls these “representational spaces, embodying complex
symbolisms… linked to the clandestine or underground side of social life.”147 Skid Row residents continually
exceed their spatial designations. Historicization of the Skid Row containment plan often omits the fact that the
143
Carla Green, ‘The Containment Plan’.
144
Carla Green.
145
Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Oxford: Oxford : Blackwell, 1991), 33.
146
Lefebvre, The Production of Space; Carla Green, ‘The Containment Plan’.
147
Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 33.
43
policy was largely developed by a community coalition, as a strategy against displacement. 148 In the now-familiar
wake of urban development, Skid Row declared itself a community rather than a blight, and demanded to be allowed
to stay.149 Skid Row residents were willing to take on the designation of “undesirable,” if that meant they could be
left alone, let to remain. Propertyless Skid Row residents, who understand first-hand the costs of being made visible
in an exclusionary public sphere, enacted a different kind of public space; a public for the unpropertied, the
undesirable. This small act of self-fashioning is easily dismissed, as the plan’s legacy is a highly visible, disturbing
concentration of poverty, neglect, substance addiction and abuse, and mental illness. Yet for those experiencing it,
this was the future guaranteed them regardless.
Mitchell prompts a recognition that the supposedly free public sphere in Western thought, originating in the
Greek concept of (the) agora, was always predicated on the exclusionary grounds of private property and individual
ownership.150 Only those few (white, male) citizens who owned property were ever “free” to voluntarily engage in
this public space. These normative spheres are intrinsic to the Western notion of public space, as “in America… To
be public means having access to private space to retreat to (so that publicness can remain voluntary).” 151 This
binary of public and private space necessitates the maintenance of an enclosed, privatised space of absolute
domination from which the civil urban subject can voluntarily enter the public.152 The propertyless, tramp, transient,
bum, fugitive residents of urban streets enact a radical potential in Western capitalist society, as their presence is an
on-going refusal of the foundational private-public spatial binary. In living exposed, their existence threatens the
immaterial, normative functions of the “public sphere,” as regulatory arbiter of the state.153 The illicit, material
“spatial practices” of the propertyless in DTLA reconstitute public space and indicate the possibility of spatial and
social forms that exceed the horizons of Western liberal thought. 154 Mitchell highlights this insurgent capacity;
148
The Skid Row History Museum and Archive, ‘Blue Book Silver Book Exhibition Introduction’ (The Skid Row
History Museum and Archive, 11 June 2015), Events, The Skid Row History Museum and Archive,
https://www.lapovertydept.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/Blue-Book-Silver-Book-exhibit-intro.pdf.
149
The Skid Row History Museum and Archive.
150
Don Mitchell, The Right to the City: Social Justice and the Fight for Public Space (New York: Guilford Press,
2003), 132.
151
Mitchell, 132–35.
152
Mitchell, 135.
153
Habermas and Frederick. Lawrence, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere : An Inquiry into a
Category of Bourgeois Society.
154
44
“For those who are always in the public, private activities must be necessarily carried out
publicly…our notions of what public space is supposed to be are thrown into doubt… public parks and
streets begin to take on the aspect of home. They become places to go to the bathroom, sleep, drink, or
make love—all socially legitimate activities when done in private but seemingly illegitimate when carried
out in public.”155
In the tenuous existence of inhabiting an impossible, fugitive public space, practicing refusal is a matter of
survival, and an ontological fact of life on the streets. Cultivating a moment of “stasis”, whether a seat on the corner
in figure (14) or claiming a careful repose on an outdoor couch in the face of “sustained, everyday encounters with
exigency and duress that rupture a predictable trajectory of flight,” are profound refusals. 156 The photographic
capture that is intended to subjugate and disaffiliate the propertyless, non-productive urban populous always carries
this irrepressible, insurgent feel of refusal. 157
155
Mitchell, The Right to the City: Social Justice and the Fight for Public Space, 135; Lynn A Staeheli, ‘Publicity,
Privacy, and Women’s Political Action’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 14, no. 5 (1 October 1996):
601–19, https://doi.org/10.1068/d140601.
156
157
45
Figure 15. Maureen Kindel inspecting homeless sidewalk encampment on Skid Row in Los Angeles, Calif 1987
SOURCE- Los Angeles Times Photographic Archive , UCLA Library (source:
https://dl.library.ucla.edu/islandora/object/edu.ucla.library.specialCollections.latime
The 1987 newspaper image in figure 13 depicts a Skid Row “inspection” by then-President of the LA
Board of Public Works, Maureen Kindel.158 The chaotic scene captures the recognisable frenzy of a political
publicity stunt, as the mics and lenses of journalists protrude from a crowd of suited bureaucrats. The hectic cloud of
movement contrasts the stillness of the man seated centr-frame, who pointedly glares from a sagging, soiled couch.
His semi-reclined position highlights his exposed vulnerability to the besieging gazes of the throng of onlookers, all
standing above him. In a dramatic line across the pictorial frame, a large film camera pointed at the man aligns with
the voyeuristic gaze of the photograph’s viewer. The tensed cool of the central figure is striking; his calm, collected
refusal to hide away, to scurry, or to pander. Campt outlines the liberatory capacity of tense muscles, even in
repressive photographic subjection, suggesting that “muscular tension constitutes a state of black powerfulness in
158
Ken Lubas, Maureen Kindel Inspecting Homeless Sidewalk Encampment on Skid Row in Los Angeles, Calif., 1987,
1987, news photograph, still image, 1987, Los Angeles Times Photographic Archive. Department of Special
Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA.,
https://dl.library.ucla.edu/islandora/object/edu.ucla.library.specialCollections.latimes:1431.
46
the midst of debility, a form of resistance expressed through a refusal to accept or acquiesce to defeat.” 159 Despite
his being outnumbered and surrounded, the photograph’s central figure manages to command the entire space from
below. His reclined composition is not a comfortable sprawl, rather held firmly into place by a taut grip that refuses
to yield. His outstretched arm clutches unto the couch-frame, and his clenched jaw, head cocked slightly to one side,
maintains a piercing glare at the camera lens that faces him. He grasps unto this relational moment of subjection,
taking a hold of it to be still, unwavering. His refusal to embody the meek, “deserving poor,” is an insistence that his
life in that urban public space exceeds its proprietary bounds.160 Between the privatised spaces of Western
experience, there is a palpable “frequency”, a melody of refusal from those forced to inhabit a space of
impossibility.161 Harney and Moten refer to a “new feel” that arises, as “the hold’s terrible gift was to gather
dispossessed feelings in common.”162 From those forced
“not only to reside in this unlivability but also to discover and enter it… there is a wailing that accompanies
entrance into and expulsion from sociality. This musical moment – in all its terrible beauty, in the
alienation that is always already born …is a precise and rigorous description/theory of the social life of the
shipped, the terror of enjoyment in its endlessly redoubled folds.”163
Skid Row’s “brutal public” is an impossible, terrible place to exist, to survive, and yet, Skid Row is
simultaneously a homeplace, and the only place they’ve ever felt acceptance, love, care, or freedom. (cite)
159
Darieck Scott, Extravagant Abjection Blackness, Power, and Sexuality in the African American Literary
Imagination, Sexual Cultures (New York: NYU Press, 2010); Campt, Listening to Images, 50.
160
Mitchell, The Right to the City: Social Justice and the Fight for Public Space.
161
162
Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study, 94.
163
47
Figure 16.
Stephanie:Like why? And I still want to answer the question but it's like, I don't want to say th
e wrong thing cause it's like you're not supposed to be living on Skid Row. What is wrong with
you? But it's such a fun place. The oxygen is out there. I breathe better. I got a bad case of m
enopause. I don't know about whoever deals with menopause, you know? Did you know that g
oing outside and getting some airyou feel better? You're flipping flop into bed all night and yo
u can't get enough oxygen. Yeah. I sleep better in a tent. I think it was meant to be that way. I
don't think we should be in buildings. I don't think we breathe better and build …
You know, I could just inspire you and teach you how to do something. You can just blow up.
So people come to my tent to say, ‘hey inspire me!’ That's all I do. You can do what you can
do. I got a song, it's called, you can do it. You can do it. If you put your mind to it, if you put
your mind to it, you can do it, do it, do it. So it's whatever I touch turns to gold, and I got so
many ideas, I can share them, I could sell them. I just, full of ideas…
Stephanie:I didn't mention that part. I do free sewing for the community, you know, because I
didn't come needy. I don't charge people. I've been blessed in my life. I decided to give back to
the community by doing free alterations. And when I'm doing the free alterations, I'm not just
doing free alterations. I'm doing a talk show where you're waiting for your alterations. We're
going to talk, you know, life on Skid Row. What are you doing here? You know, most people a
re trying to get out of skid row. I'm trying to get in skid row…
I do free alterations. And then I started free sewing classes, um, with the solar panels… charg
e the homeless cell phones.
48
PART III. Fix Your Tent, Fix Your self
“It’s the general ‘imposition of severalty’ to use Theodore Roosevelt’s evil
terms, that I’m trying to think about and undermine. He knew that
possessive individualism – that the self-possessed individual, was as
dangerous to Native Americans as a pox-infested blanket. Civilisation,
or more precisely civil society, with all its transformative hostility,
was mobilized in the service of extinction, of disappearance. The
shit is genocidal. Fuck a home in this world, if you think you have
one.” –Fred Moten (undercommons, p. 140)
IIIa.
The visual parallels between the 2015 LAHSA homeless count images in Section I, the “slum” voyeurs and
housing examiners in Section II, and through to the Skid Row inspection in (figure 20), are striking in their
likenesses and telling in their deviations.164 The ever-shifiting configurations of labour, industry, production and
real estate in Los Angeles continually remediate the prescribed “representations of space” for the propertyless and
unhoused to navigate.165 In stark contrast to the displayed, exposed bodies of 1980s Skid Row, images of DTLA’s
unhoused from the 1990s indicate a significant shift. In place of the inside-out, exposed figures, there is a
remarkable obscurity of the body, and of the individual.
164
David McNew, Two Volunteers Check Clipboards.
165
49
Figure 17. Jerry Berndt. View of the Homeless, Union Rescue Mission of Los Angeles, 1996. 1996. 1 photograph :
photoprint, b&w. Jerry Berndt Collection I Soul of Los Angeles Collection. University of Southern California.
Libraries. https://calisphere.org/item/667
The 1996 news photograph in figure (25) reveals a very different DTLA public to the one pictured in figure
12, where the chaotic scene of unhoused life carried a notable vibrance to its tumult.166 Large spools of barbed wire
hang over a row of cloaked shelters against a colossal, black iron fence that engulfs the right-side of the image.
From an industrial spotlight over an iron-grilled doorway, to a vanguard streetlamp stamped with iron parking notice
signs, on which the letters “NO” are legible. A row of cement block structures subsume the frame, as if there is no
sky. Beside the cracked, trash-littered asphalt street, the figure of one lone man emerges from the plastic folds of a
tarp. He is looking down, seemingly unaware of his photographic capture. Figure (17) reveals the emergence of the
tent as the ubiquitous face and visuality of the unhoused in contemporary urban life. This indicates a new formation
of visibility. No longer pictured are the exposed, vulnerable lives. The unhoused are still living on DTLA’s public
166
Jerry Berndt, View of the Homeless, Union Rescue Mission of Los Angeles, 1996, 1996, 1 photograph :
photoprint, b&w, 1996, Jerry Berndt Collection I Soul of Los Angeles Collection, University of Southern California.
Libraries, https://calisphere.org/item/66704d9032ae3973ab638a4688b2a71a/.
50
street, yet they’ve been forced into furtive refuge behind the polyester shroud of the tent, where they are kept
mobile, packed up each morning, left to steal private moments only in passing.
IIIb. Fix Yourself! Or Else… [The history of tent encampments in American urban geography has been the focus
of recent scholarship considering their radical capacity as sites of collectivity and political organizing, as reflected
by the brutal enforcement and sophisticated regulatory techniques that have targeted such sites. 167]
The continued effects of neoliberal deindustrialisation with the evisceration of public housing were
devastating on Los Angeles’ working-class and Black populations. By the early 1990s, East and South-Central LA
"contained one-third of the county's residents," yet "more than half were living in poverty, (and two-thirds were
African American.)"168 As the homeless population in downtown skyrocketed, Forrest demonstrates how “broken
windows policing” managed individual bodies as spatial vectors of social contagion, with extremely racist
outcomes. Brutal policing tactics targeted the unhoused through a slew of newly passed “quality-of-life ordinances
and ‘civility laws,’” that serve to “further criminalize the narrow sets of behaviors on which homeless people rely
for daily survival.”169 Compounding these effects, neoliberal privatisation created a “collection of quasi-public,
voluntary, and philanthropic agencies” competing for federal grants to “supply the direct services hitherto supplied
by government.”170 Stuart argues this competitive antagonism was further bolstered by a “pay per bed” funding
policy, wherein enormous social service agencies operating at a consistent financial loss were incentivized to get
more bodies into services.171 The emergent “nonprofit industrial complex” greatly expanded alliances with the
LAPD to legally snare and enforce participation and engagement with social services from previously non-involved
persons.
The early 2000s brought another major shift in the conditions of capital, meaning a new era for the
unhoused, propertyless, transient inhabitants of Downtown LA. The sudden wave of re-urbanization and
167
Mitchell, The Right to the City: Social Justice and the Fight for Public Space; Ben Ehrenreich, ‘Tales of Tent
City’, The Nation, 3 June 2009, https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/tales-tent-city/; Speer, ‘The Rise of the
Tent Ward: Homeless Camps in the Era of Mass Incarceration’; Don Mitchell, ‘Power Abhors a Tent: Or, the
Tiranny of Abstract Space’, Urban, no. 3 (2012): 8–19.
168
Stuart, ‘Race, Space, and the Regulation of Surplus Labor’, 202.
169
Stuart, ‘On the Streets, Under Arrest’, 943.
170
Stuart, ‘Race, Space, and the Regulation of Surplus Labor’, 203.
171
Stuart, 207–8.
51
gentrification that swept across the US “brought in (Skid Row) from the margins, from the interstices (;) placed right
at the center of the new city.”172 As privatised social services increasingly linked care with punitive, carceral
techniques, Speer notes the horizons of once distinct spatial delineations between home, work, and school become
increasingly difficult to identify with the diffusion of prisonlike “mechanisms of authority” across a network of
“quasi-carceral” spaces.173 Speer emphasises the "conditions of carcerality; intent, detriment, and spatiality," are
dispersed across spaces in a “carceral continuum.”174
his blurring indicates the sophistication of containment techniques, as the unhoused are increasingly legally
bound to a network of “quasi-carceral” spaces. Building on Moran et. al theorization of the "conditions of
carcerality; intent, detriment, and spatiality," Speer emphasises the diffusion of these conditions across space using
“Foucault’s metaphor of the carceral continuum.”175 As "carceral institutions rival homeless shelters as primary sites
of homelessness management" in the early 2000s, the development and sophistication of anti-homeless policing
became an art form in LA policy and police enforcement. 176 Stuart emphasizes how this “policing engaged in a
simultaneously disciplinary and punitive project intended to ‘fix’ homeless people and coercively reintegrate them
as productive, responsible, and self-regulating citizens.” Rather than state or social care through the provision of
basic needs, this is the “therapeutic” care of the individual for themselves. Stuart suggests this aligns with neoliberal
ideology, “as social problems are increasingly redefined as the result of personal choices of flawed market actors
(rather than the result of structural inadequacies or political failings), the poor are re-envisioned as lacking the
necessary levels of competence, intention, and willpower to responsibly manage their daily activities.” 177 In this
context, figure (16) demonstrates how the plea of shared bodily vulnerability that once constituted the grounds for
pity is no longer a viable option to the impoverished and dispossessed. Rather than a recognition of a shared
mortality, the mediatised hyper-visibility of the homeless subject in the 1980s was employed to place scorn, fear,
172
173
Speer, ‘The Rise of the Tent Ward: Homeless Camps in the Era of Mass Incarceration’, 4.
174
Moran, Turner, and Schliehe, ‘Conceptualizing the Carceral in Carceral Geography’; Speer, ‘The Rise
of the Tent Ward: Homeless Camps in the Era of Mass Incarceration’, 5; Hamlin and Speer, ‘The Politics
of Conceptualizing the Carceral’; Hamlin, Madeleine, and Jessie Speer, ‘Hamlin, Madeleine, and Jessie
Speer. “The Politics of Conceptualizing the Carceral: A Commentary on Moran et Al. (2017).” Progress in
Human Geography 42, No. 5 (October 2018): 799–802. Https://Doi.Org/10.1177/0309132517716997.’,
October 2018.
175
Hamlin and Speer, ‘The Politics of Conceptualizing the Carceral’; Moran, Turner, and Schliehe,
‘Conceptualizing the Carceral in Carceral Geography’.
176
Speer, ‘The Rise of the Tent Ward: Homeless Camps in the Era of Mass Incarceration’, 5; Stuart, ‘Race, Space,
and the Regulation of Surplus Labor’; Stuart, ‘On the Streets, Under Arrest’.
177
Stuart, ‘On the Streets, Under Arrest’, 945.
52
derision, and blame on the individual subject homeless subject.178 The presence of the tent further indicates the
neoliberal formation of “mobility as a technology.”179 A tent ensures a temporary presence that will be maintained
as such.
IIIc. Racing to the Bottom of Nowhere
The dogmatic adherence to the neoliberal ideology of individualism in American culture deeply exposed by
the continued persistence of the concept of the disaffiliated homeless individual. According to theorist Byung-Chul
Han, this cognitive dissonance is achieved through an internalisation of the logics of capital at the psychic level. 180
Neoliberal “psychopolitics” interpolate a deeply corrosive individual subject that entirely subsumes the social, and
who is self-regulated to the needs of capital.181 This is evidenced by Alex Williams’ concept of “negative solidarity”
as “the tendency for neoliberal subjects to ‘race to the bottom.’… If others are perceived to be in receipt of resources
or benefits that they haven’t ‘earned’, they should not only be denied those resources, they should be publicly
shamed for claiming them. Everyone should ‘stand on their own two feet’.” 182 In the US, the dynamic of punitive
care for the unhoused reflects what Mark Fisher terms the “double bind” of neoliberal governance, which purports
the individual’s ultimate self-capability and self-responsibility for failure, while also subjecting the individual to
extreme state intervention and regulatory disciplining.183 Fisher stresses the US’ “aggressive use of incarceration” is
in conflict with the “hyper(neo)-liberal interpellation of the subject as capable of self-determination and self-
reinvention.”184 Yet, the neoliberal society that overwhelmingly blames the unhoused individual for their conditions
reveals how “the dissemination of therapeutic concepts has resulted in a hardening of the individual subject.” Each
person is burdened with the onus of fixing, withstanding, and managing capitalism’s inherent crises, as “institutions
can no longer be relied upon to support or nurture individuals… a therapeutic narrative of heroic self-transformation
is the only story that makes sense.”185 The tent is the spatial realisation of neoliberalism’s absolute social
178
179
Tazzioli, ‘Governing Migrant Mobility through Mobility: Containment and Dispersal at the Internal
Frontiers of Europe’.
180
Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics : Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power, Neoliberalism and New
Technologies of Power (London : Verso, 2017).
181
Han.
182
dmf, ‘Mark Fisher on The End of Emo-Politics’.
183
Stuart, ‘On the Streets, Under Arrest’; dmf, ‘Mark Fisher on The End of Emo-Politics’.
184
dmf, ‘Mark Fisher on The End of Emo-Politics’.
185
dmf.
53
individuation, as it becomes the singular spatial unit of an individual’s ultimate failure, socially scorned and
continually targeted in the “brutal public.”
The purported freedom in neoliberal society, means any individual theoretically can overcome struggle and
self-actualise success, while the reality of this freedom is a debilitating precarity. Hearkening back to Tazzioli’s
insistence on “disjoining freedom and mobility,” this is further evidence that mobility and freedom are not always
liberatory.186 Speer indicates the slippery paradoxes of contemporary punitive homeless care, where a certain
measure of freedom and individual choice means “homeless people themselves navigate services according to their
own needs, such that they are never fully subject to the disciplinary demands of any single shelter.” 187 Yet, it is
precisely the “freedom” of choice which seems to constrict the actual autonomy of the unhoused, as they are
rendered free to choose from a network of lesser-than-prison, but still “quasi-carceral” spaces. 188This highlights the
morally ambivalent topologies of care and regulation that create a “complex, nuanced landscape of homelessness
that is simultaneously confining and open, punitive and caring. Thus, in the case of homelessness, quasi-carceral
spaces are not permanent or fixed, but involve a constant cycling through a diffuse range of both therapeutic and
disciplinary institutions.”189 This further elucidates the centrality of mobility as the “space of the tent…reveals the
interplay between these contradictory logics, as welfare and incarceration are deeply enmeshed in” regulation of the
tent, and in spatial practices and socialities that emerge from its presence in DTLA.190
APPENDIX V: “They have a magic question… ‘is this yours?’ Just say no.”
186
Europe’.
187
Speer, ‘The Rise of the Tent Ward: Homeless Camps in the Era of Mass Incarceration’, 6.
188
Speer, ‘The Rise of the Tent Ward: Homeless Camps in the Era of Mass Incarceration’.
189
Speer, 6–7.
190
Speer, 7.
54
Figure 18. Stephanie blows her cop whistle (Medium)
Stephanie: Yeah. I charge cell phones. I do sewing. And the most important thing that I do is I
provide chairs in the shade because it's against the law to sit down on Skid Row. You're not
supposed to be sitting in the chair. It's called illegal lodging. No sitting when you're homeless, you
know, what are you supposed to do?... You know, the sun does shade, the tent gives me shade and
comfort... So why do you want to take our tents away?
Stephanie: You take your house down, you try it out. Now you take your house down brick by
brick every day and build it brick by brick…. this is what we do, and we do it to the homeless. …
So what made you think it made sense for us to break our tents down? So I started the movement
and not taking them down. Everybody on this block, keep them up. Don't be scared. Blow your
whistle. We blow our whistles at the cops and we keep them up and we have to lie. You know, the
cops lie, they say they gonna serve and protect us, you know, so I just came up with a lie that tent
ain't mine, and it worked.
Stephanie: Cause they first ask you, they have a magic question. They come out and say, ‘is this
yours?’ I said, Oh, that's the magic question. Just say no. And they walk away. I said, Oh, that
works. Let me go tell everybody. So I went all the way down the block. I said, when do they come
say it's not yours! They said, that ain't gonna work Steph. I said, yes, it is. Just say, it ain't yours...
So they got outside their tents. I blow the whistle ‘cop on the block! cop on the block!’ and they
get up against the wall and the cops go by and they knock, knock, knock. If you don't come, they're
not gonna go in. But if you answer, ‘hey it's mine!’ ‘Hey put your hands behind your back! Get
against the wall!’ And it worked.
Stephanie: Everybody stood up against the wall. ‘Ain’t mine, ain’t mine.’ ‘Whose is that?’ ‘That
ain't mine.’ And so the cops are scratching their head. They're like, hmm, something fishy going
on around here. I know. And they say, ‘well Stephanie, I know that's yours.’ You know, ‘I don't
know about them, but I know that's yours.’ And I said, when did you know it was mine? They said
‘yesterday when I saw you in it.’ I said, ‘but that was yesterday. Today its my sister's, and
tomorrow, next day it's going to be my nephew and my cousins. And my brothers, cause I ain't got
no deed on it. You can't prove that as mine. I gave it away.’ You want to play? Let's play.
Conclusion: REFUSING HOME
55
“The general understanding of home in America… your home is your castle- it’s your sovereign
space- you put a fence around it and barbed wire if you can get some- and you get some goddamn
surveillance equipment and some dogs – and whatever the hell you can do, to make sure that
nobody comes up in your home.
But When I was a kid, my experience of home- and what makes me love home and feel that I miss
home was the experience, the constant violation the boundaries of so-called home.
My mom was a school teacher and she had certain students who would come to my house and I
was like an only child so they were like my older siblings, one in particular named Mike Davis
who was like my brother- and the greatest feeling in the world for me- was to hear or see Mike
walk through the front door. Without knocking, you understand? Without knocking. That was- that
was the pinnacle for me when I was growing up, I mean there was nothing better than that.
How much of the brutal, vicious interdictions against Black life are manifest precisely as
regulations and disruptions of that loving, violent transgression of the boundary, okay?”
-- Fred Moten191
The visual impressions engaged in my research reveal the spatial relations of Los Angeles as a frenzied
thicket of counter-acting flows and relational circuits, bumping alongside, up against, through and with one another.
The “creative practices of refusal” exist in a ceaseless dialectic with the dispossessing flows of capital create
urbanity’s undercurrent, creating rhythms palpating and breathing insurgent frictions through the industrial bones of
“logisticality.”192 This undercurrent is subjugated at the level of the optic, through productions of social and cultural
knowledges. Yet within this subjection, always palpable in social expulsion—an existence within an impossible
space—there is a terrible, beautiful ontology of “living otherwise.”193 This visual inquiry into the spatial relations of
contemporary Los Angeles does not seek to dissect the nature of homelessness, nor to paint a rosy vision of its’
brutal survivors. Rather, this project seeks to present a series of questions and provocations to the ways in which a
concept of “home” is always being produced in contemporary capitalist society as a terrain of exclusion and
expulsion. Yet, as Fred Moten says,
“Anybody who thinks that they can even come close to understanding…anybody who thinks that they can
understand how terrible the terror has been, without understanding how beautiful the beauty has been
191
192
Campt, Listening to Images; Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study.
193
Fred Moten and Saidiya Hartman, ‘The Black Outdoors: Fred Moten & Saidiya Hartman | John Hope Franklin
Humanities Institute’.
56
against the grain of that terror, is wrong. There is no calculus of the terror that can make a proper
calculation without reference to that which resists it, it’s just not possible.” 194
Stephanie Arnold William’s story tells a “refusal of that which is refused.” 195 Stephanie tells us she lived
like you, she paid her rent, she closed her gate, she locked her front door. Until that implicit social contract was
eviscerated, when the brutal force which makes that world operative breeched her front door and her locked gate and
revealed the un-liveability of such a premise. The promises of “home” in American life were violently breeched, at
the helm of a prescribed sociality, shattered by those she called into it. [That breech of the supposed truths of
contemporary urban sociality sent her into the peripheries, unto the unstable, faltering ground of expulsion.] For
Stephanie, the only way forward was and is an impossible life, inhabiting the “contrapuntal” homeplace of no-place
within the tent.196 In the final passage above (Appendix V), Stephanie refuses the neoliberal grounds of private
property and possessive individualism over the tent—the tent is not hers. She is not her; she is her sister nephew, her
cousin, and her neighbour, and the tent is none of theirs and all of theirs, because it belongs to no one. In this refusal,
she evades, if only for a moment, the brutal enforcement of a public constituted on those grounds. Stephanie is
“giving away her home” all the time and receiving an abundance in return. 197 In refusing money, fences, roofs, bills,
she has found an excess of giving love, skills, repair and care. In giving away her home, Stephanie is cultivating
some kind of liberation; in stops and starts, in brief interstices between and through the brutalities.198
I will conclude with a request to stop talking, stop thinking, and to listen to Stephanie Arnold Williams, to
her words and to the “haptic” senses of refusal in her images. Listen for the lyricism of refusal and the haptic
palpitations of living otherwise.
I'm on my way home

I left three days ago, but noone seems to know I'm gone
Home is where the hatred is
Home is filled with pain and it,
194
Fred Moten and Saidiya Hartman.
195
196
Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study, 94.
197
198
Josh Briond and J.B. Ware.
57
Might not be such a bad idea if I never, never went

Home again…
Home was once an empty vacuum that's filled now with my
Silent screams
Home is where the needle marks
Try to heal my broken heart
And it might not be such a bad idea if I never, if I
Never went home again
Home again
--Gil Scott Heron (cite)
Figure 19. Stephanie's tent at 6th St and St Pedro St
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No-Place Like Home

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NO-PLACE LIKE

MA Contemporary Art Theory | Dissertation | Wordcount: 14,996 (including

PRELUDE: Improvisational Aesthetics of No-Place

SECTION I: Brutal Topographies in Downtown Los Angeles

Ia. Counting Bodies

Ib. On the Move: Anti-Homeless Policing in DTLA

SECTION II: HOMEPLACE: Slum Publics & Living Otherwise

IIa. Enclosure’s Pitiful Bodies

IIc. From the Slums to the Row

SECTION III: Fix Your Tent, Fix Your Self

IIIa. Veiled Refuge

IIIb. Self-Care! or Else…

IIIc. Racing to the Bottom of No-place

CONCLUSION: REFUSING HOME

Appendix I: “Wow, I’m Homeless”

Appendix II: “We wake up happy. Here they come.”

Appendix III. “People are dying in the homes, too.”

own son's apartment.”

economic, and legislative dynamics of this urban population.

formations of power that render them visible.

to capital’s “normative spatiality.”11

scholarship builds on a Foucauldian understanding of power as fundamentally relational to develop a small,

care which harm, and constructions of visibility that obscure.

PRELUDE: Improvisational Aesthetics of No-Place

Figure 1. Screengrab image from McCullough, Hammons is tending to a debris sculpture

Figure 2. Hammons Hauser & Wirth 2019 handout

Figure 3. Hammons 2019 Tents (LA Times-cred)

aesthetics and the “radical non-locatability”35 of social dispossession, noting,

experience of being simultaneously held and abandoned.”36

Appendix I: “Wow, I’m Homeless”

SECTION I: Tent on the Move

Ia. Counting Bodies

the production of knowledges across urban space.62

hyper-specific knowledges, yet produce little impact on material conditions,

Appendix 2: “We wake up happy. Here they come.”

Ib. On the Move: Anti-Homeless Policing in DTLA

social service providers, and law enforcement.74

of “spatial disobedience” that must be cultivated to survive these conditions.83

that enforces spatial mobility rather than confinement.”85

hierarchies of power, and enacted differentially upon a stratified populous.87

In spatial governance, the formation of the “hotspot…as…spatial crystallisations of…attempts to regain

individuals to keep moving on.94

[Add Moten Quote]

Appendix III. “People are dying in the homes too”

SECTION II: HOMEPLACE: Slum Publics & Living Otherwise

conception of the domestic is crucial—to the production of that subject.”

IIa. Pitiful Enclosures

shared biological vulnerability to mortality.

IIb. Slum Publics

a visceral evocation, a queasy affective experience of the gut.

Figure 10. Figure 14. Doing the slums

areas that supported the goals of that plan.”129

transposed, dispersed, diverted.

IIIc. Help Me, I’m Poor :?

Conditions of industrial production in mid-century America shifted from physically labour-intensive

at the expense of the rest.

Figure 12. 1946, Veteran white family - CA "housing shortage crisis"

the multi-valent pulls of capital’s racist dispossession.140

DISCLAIMER: racially & physical abusive -

IIIc. From the Slums to the Row: DTLA’s Slums Publics

exude a vibrant, frenzied tenor.

Figure 14. (1987, “shantytowns”) (source: https://calisphere.org/item/7a2fe48af121166089eb5e7b03998e3b/)

this was the future guaranteed them regardless.