THE ETHICS OF SPACE: HOMELESSNESS AND SQUATTING IN URBAN ENGLAND - STEPH GROHMANN

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I didn’t read this as a traditional “book” in the sense of bound pages I paid for. Rather, somewhat in the spirit of the sort of anarchist squatting this book reports on, I printed the book from a free pdf I found online.  All and all, a nice way to read a book, perhaps not as permanent as a traditional book but I liked the size and it wasn’t hardcover. Plus, since I work at a homeless shelter, I think it would be fair to call this professional development. Actually, it is my work that drew me to this book originally and it’s my work that colored my reading. The book is basically 2 things: first, it’s an academic, anthropological treatment of the issues surrounding homelessness (in England in particular, but this part of the book is broad and applies to the work I do here in Amerika). This part is bibliographically dense and theoretically engaged. The other part of the book relays Grohmann’s personal experiences with homelessness and squatting in Bristol. She’s a Austrian Anthropology student who slowly integrates into the squatter-scene, lives at various squats and gives us some interesting tidbits about the lifestyle, eventually lives in her car before getting a more stable job and finishing the book. I found this part of the book slightly less interesting. Besides my general complaints about ethnographies (too long to get into here) this part also seems like fantasy for someone from the USA. In England, due to centuries of property laws that Grohmann gets into, it seems pretty easy to squat. Any vacant home can be squatted and it seems somewhat bureaucratically time-consuming to evict. A true golden age. This changes during the writing of the book as right-wing English politicians change the rules in the country. I know things have been different in certain parts of the USA at certain times (look at LES in the 80’s) but in my experience, Amerikan squats, especially politically engaged ones, are broken up by the police, violently and quickly. Amerikans’ love and religious veneration of private property makes squatting abhorrent. 

The theoretical parts were deeply interesting and challenging to me. The parts about the ways in which social services and homeless shelters deploy defensible architecture and distorted engagements (defined as when the government or agency exacerbates the vulnerability of poverty or subverts the poors’ own efforts to transform and change their world) rings all too true. I see the us vs. them attitude in other care-workers as well as myself. Everything in the homeless services world (and I would argue the larger do-gooder-industrial-complex) revolves around a one-way I’m-helping-you-because-you’re-helpless mindset. It’s bad but it was helpful to see a more academic treatment of this felt phenomena.  Likewise, the scholarship around “social defeat” and the ways this defeat shades into mental illness, especially psychosis. The play between social power and individual mental health is very helpful in this neoliberal, your-problems-are-yours-alone-and-probably-just-brain-chemistry-here-take-this-pill age and way of thinking about mental health. I hope people I work with read this book. 1676 Squats