Using historical ethnography and a systematic review of research on homelessness in modern Tokyo (1868–2019), I illustrate how imperial formations, or historically established asymmetrical relations of power, are bound up in homelessness regulation. I argue that the delegitimisation of unsheltered existence—seen in multiple policy fields across history—is a vessel for imperial formations that necessarily propagate anti-democratic limitations on rights and protections. Moreover, I advance that this continuous invalidation of the right-full existence of persons experiencing homelessness serves as a platform for paternalistic Janus-faced interventions co-constituted from corrective, compassionate, and middling ambitions. This research seeks to amend false dichotomies of a chiefly punitive past and a compassionate complex present, and redirects attention from presumed policy intent to the actual legal and social roots of urban injustice.
CITATION STYLE
Rusenko, R. M. (2020). Homelessness Regulation and Neoliberalism’s Imperial Past: The Janus Face of Anti-Homeless Urbanism and Tokyo’s Modern Socio-Spatial Development. Antipode, 52(6), 1815–1836. https://doi.org/10.1111/anti.12657
Mendeley helps you to discover research relevant for your work.