Encampment geographies: Refuge, return, and refusal

Thinking from Los Angeles, amid the expanding criminalization of homelessness, we advance a conceptual framework of encampment geographies. We argue that the homeless encampment must be understood in relation to state power, specifically the state as landlord. As residents of state spaces—sidewalks, shelters, interim housing—encampment dwellers are institutionalized. This includes interpellation in humanitarian exchange, notably through forms of mutual aid that emerge in the interstices of state violence. Drawing on ethnographic research and movement histories at Aetna Street, we present three encampment geographies: return, refuge, and refusal. We conceptualize the encampment as a site of enforced return and a space of refuge whose residents are akin to refugees. In doing so, we situate the homeless encampment in a global geography of camps, drawing on literatures that are attentive to expulsion, containment, and asylum. Yet encampment residents refuse enclosure, in particular, exploitation and its articulation in wage–rent relations. In keeping with Aetna's history as a node of Black life in Los Angeles, we study these geographies of struggle guided by Black feminist theory, notably the Practicing Refusal Collective. In doing so, we conceptualize the encampment as a form of living within and beyond racial capitalism.