Precarious Dwellers: Creating Place and Self in the In-Between

The city is not just a space: it is a nexus of embodied encounters, quicksilver assemblies of place, people,
and things. Yet in engaging predominantly with the working of neoliberal policies, exclusion, and dystopic
livelihoods, much research has homogenised the concept of 'the homeless city.' Despite more recent
ethnographic studies in Australia emphasising the subjectivity of lived homeless identities, the
inattentiveness paid to the un/conscious co-constructive agency of precarious dwellers and cities has set,
with a few notable exceptions, such a city as the static entity in which homelessness 'takes place'.
Working from the performance of being-in-the-world as a precarious dweller, this study walks-with
homeless individuals in a recasting of Guy Debord's dérive. Bringing the embodied performances of
dwelling and their spatial contexts to the fore, I contend that in analysing performance, we may
understand cities and dwellers as co-produced. For, emerging in the diversity of homeless experiences
are a multiplicity of 'homeless cities', and it is through these bi-relational flows that we find the layering
of space, history, politics, and society, to glean a sense of how homelessness and cities are performed. In
examining how city spaces and precarious dwellers come into being through walking urban landscapes,
this research contextualises the unveiled in-between places by supplementing walking with oral histories
and ethnography, including participant observation and informal interviewing. By identifying the
relationality and emergent process of people and place with the orchestration of participant's personal
stories, this study seeks to provide a more nuanced understanding of the creative agency exhibited by
cities and their precarious dwellers.