Douglas Gordon C C
Department of Urban and Regional Planning, San José State University, San José, California USA.
Int J Polit Cult Soc. 2023;36(1):35-56. doi: 10.1007/s10767-022-09426-x. Epub 2022 May 23.
This study is about the struggle for legitimacy in place among a group of people often assumed to have neither. It examines the roll of informal placemaking and community building in struggles for settlement among people experiencing homelessness. It does so through ethnographic observation, photo-documentation, and participatory action research at three sites in Oakland, California, on which unhoused people (and some housed members of the surrounding community) have demonstrated bold forms of grassroots placemaking on public land. The first site, which came to be known as Housing and Dignity Village, was a small intentionally organized community of unhoused women and families that existed for 41 politically charged days in a low-income residential neighborhood before being cleared by authorities in 2018. The second, a highly visible piece of desirable city-owned land, has been occupied by unhoused people to varying degrees since 2016 while being considered for various housing development proposals. The third is the Wood Street Encampment, Oakland's largest encampment and one of its longest standing, which has survived numerous partial evictions and a web of jurisdictional authority to become home to an extensive and innovative informal community-building effort. Despite their differences, each offers a powerful case of place-based bottom-up community organizing among unhoused people, in which placemaking becomes part of a subtle politics of visibility, being, and legitimacy. The study argues that these instances and others not only demonstrate a different sort of placemaking, but demand that we reconsider and reclaim the concept itself.
本研究关注的是一群通常被认为没有合法性的人在当地争取合法性的斗争。它考察了非正式场所营造和社区建设在无家可归者争取定居点的斗争中所起的作用。研究通过人种志观察、照片记录以及在加利福尼亚州奥克兰的三个地点开展的参与式行动研究来进行，在这些地点，无家可归者（以及周边社区的一些有住房的成员）在公共土地上展现出了大胆的草根场所营造形式。第一个地点后来被称为“住房与尊严村”，它是一个由无家可归的妇女和家庭有意组织起来的小社区，在一个低收入居民区存在了41天，期间充满政治争议，最终在2018年被当局清理。第二个地点是一块备受瞩目的、理想的市属土地，自2016年以来一直被无家可归者不同程度地占据，同时该地块也在考虑各种住房开发提案。第三个地点是伍德街营地，它是奥克兰最大且存在时间最长的营地之一，历经多次部分驱逐以及复杂的管辖权问题，成为了一项广泛且创新的非正式社区建设努力的所在地。尽管它们各有不同，但每个地点都有力地展示了无家可归者基于场所的自下而上的社区组织，在这种组织中，场所营造成为了一种关于可见性、存在和合法性的微妙政治的一部分。该研究认为，这些事例以及其他事例不仅展示了一种不同类型的场所营造，还要求我们重新审视并重新界定这个概念本身。
