Mooring in the Homeless City. A Practice Theoretical Account of Homeless Urban Dwelling and Emplacement

Taking a practice theoretical approach and building on the research conducted with a group of people who live their lives on the streets of two Polish cities, this paper provides an account of the homeless city dwellers’ mode of emplacement. It offers the terms licensed, invisible, motile, material, relational, affective, and ad hoc mooring to describe how homeless people establish a place of and for various activities that make up their everyday practice of inhabiting the city. While highlighting the accomplishments of homeless places, the paper also underscores their tentativeness and instability. It situates the homeless mode of emplacement within a wider landscape of normative urban geography, against which the ways homeless people establish themselves in place are often judged out-of-place. It attends to the role that this transgressive potential plays in limiting homeless dwellers’ capabilities for mooring and considers how they might be enhanced.