“My Hamburg” – “My Rio de Janeiro“ Ordinary Homeless Cities?” Geographies of Homelessness in the context of Rio de Janeiro (Brazil) and Hamburg (Germany)

January 23, 2016  • Posted in Member Projects  •  0 Comments

Katharina Schmidt, Working Group Critical Geographies of Global Inequalities, Institute for Geography, University of Hamburg, Germany

The photo project “My Hamburg” – “My Rio de Janeiro” is part of the PhD Project “Ordinary Homeless Cities?” Geographies of Homelessness in the context of Rio de Janeiro (Brazil) and Hamburg (Germany.)” From a global urban perspective, it understands the cities of Hamburg and Rio de Janeiro as ‘ordinary cities’ and researches their entanglements with their implicit ‘homeless cities’. Instead of treating homelessness either as a global, abstract phenomenon or an individual concrete situation, the project aims to focus on relations of power within processes, structures and dynamics in these cities, connecting the different dimensions and levels involved.

Taking knowledge from people in street situations (and acknowledging them as urban inhabitants and not as the urban other) as the starting point for the research project, twelve people in street situations participated in a reflexive and collaborative photo project. Through the production of photographs and the related comments, the involved individuals share their points of view about their city and their relation to places, topics, processes, and people in the respective city. In four exhibitions, these different points of view, meanings and understandings gain temporary sovereignty and are circulated through both cities, where they were exposed and thereby created spaces for negotiation and discussion in public.

As a form of situated knowledge, the visual and verbal data produced by people in street situations then reveals manifold power relations within cities and urban spaces from a perspective that is usually marginalized and thereby challenges dominant narratives about urban homelessness.

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