engleski

“This is in place of their own home”: Commoning, survival and social defeat among people experiencing homelessness

Theorizing the commons in public space, while arguing against the private in favour of the communal, has most often been related to the concept to social movements and “the right to the city” (Susser & Tonnelat 2013). However, it often fails to acknowledge that as such, the commons, while referring to “resources” for the wider community, also has strong classist and power implications for those who are on the urban margins. This classist position disregards the meaning of urban commons for those whose lives depend on these spaces, effectively reducing the potentiality of the concept “the commons” and constraining its use. For some (often marginalized and invisible) urban groups, the commons become spaces of urban survival and conflict, often leading to expulsions, increased policing, and further social exclusion. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in an exploratory study with people experiencing homelessness in Croatia, this paper explores the practices of commoning in public and private spaces as a tactic of survival. In this paper, I start by looking at what are the commons for people without housing in a post-socialist city and how such places are being used as the commons. I argue that the urban commons are shaped into a contested site of habitation and survival of social and spatial exclusion in urban settings. In addition, sites that become the commons also become liminal spaces to which the people in our study return to and which form the ground for social defeat many of them face. Furthermore, I argue that while inhabiting the commons, our interlocutors construct various and distinct meanings of them through appropriation, solidarity and conflict despite insecurity, danger as well as the structural and physical violence they face. This study shows that occupying the commons at the urban and social margins, may assume different forms and practices while remaining hidden. In this paper, I will present three such examples of commoning – at a main train station, the beach and abandoned urban properties (buksa). These examples show how people in our study deal with their adversities and how the commons, once created for dwelling become a generator of urban conflict. This research is based on qualitative materials gathered from the CSRP project Exploring Homelessness and Pathways to Social Inclusion: A Comparative Study of Contexts and Challenges in Swiss and Croatian Cities (No. IZHRZO_180631/1).

Homelessness ; commoning ; social defeat ; commons ; social exclusion

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