Regulation through Vision: Homelessness in Melbourne

• In Event: Poverty and Crime

Abstract

This paper examines the regulation and control of homelessness through a politics of visibility in Melbourne, Australia. Here visible poverty and vulnerability are reframed as dangerousness, which is situated in direct contrast to aesthetic representations of safety and security in public spaces. The constructed benign character of Melbourne’s public spaces functions to indirectly endorse the targeting of images of indigence and poverty through a variety of control strategies. The mechanisms of regulation used range across various institutions: the police, municipal bodies, outreach organisations and charities. This paper will demonstrate how even seemingly ameliorative responses to homelessness are implicated within a broad, multivalent regulatory apparatus that coercively inserts problematic bodies into disciplinary systems of control and containment. The primary sphere through which this apparatus operates is vision: the ocular registration of behaviours, aesthetics, representations and bodies that interrupt normative urban aesthetics and flows of the projected imagery of Melbourne. This dynamic is described as constituting the substantive criminalisation of homelessness in Melbourne. Contextualising this situation is a critical lack of affordable housing while 80,000 apartments sit unoccupied across the greater metropolitan area. This paper presents the findings of my doctoral research in criminology at the University of Melbourne.

Author

• James Petty, University of Melbourne