The Difference that Seeing Makes: Homelessness and Visuality in Urban Ecology

Abstract

This project examines the impact of green urban development on the visibility of homelessness and the lives and livelihood of people experiencing it in New York City. Images of homelessness have long played an outsized role in the geography of urban development. In particular, photography of those living without a home has both presaged displacement and produced discourses that play upon racialized images to produce harmful notions of safety, policing/crime, and public space, all of which impact the city’s development priorities. But in recent years, New York City’s development model has shifted extensively to focus on environmental sustainability, an emphasis that, on the surface, has little to do with homelessness. This dissertation asks: How does the anti-homelessness at the heart of urban development shift when the development agenda cares the most about green spaces, horticulture, and sustainability metrics? In addressing this question, the dissertation relies on a research partnership with Picture the Homeless, a grassroots homeless-led organization in NYC that focuses on the importance of “picturing” homelessness in its full systemic context as a key component of social justice work. Building on this partnership and utilizing community-based research methods, ethnography, and semi-structured interviews with urban designers and local policymakers, I argue that we should understand homelessness in urban ecology through a frame of “green anti-homelessness.” Green anti-homelessness, I show, works in two key ways: By using horticulture and green design to mitigate, rather than destroy, the visibility of homelessness, and by shifting the value of urban spaces towards a narrow definition of urban sustainability that precludes many forms of ecologically-beneficial grassroots activities such as can recycling or reusing materials for survival. These findings demonstrate the importance of the relationship between urban ecology and homelessness, and open future pathways for further research on green anti-homelessness, the images associated with it, and broadened understandings of urban sustainability.