Caring Temporalities: The Role of Urban Space for the Liveability of Fluidly Housed Youth

Source abstract

This article explores the role public space plays in providing care for fluidly housed youth. These young adults are experiencing fluctuating conditions of homelessness, moving between couch‐surfing, staying in overcrowded or informally occupied spaces, and sometimes experiencing periods of rooflessness. Using an adapted typology of homelessness and building on fundamental human needs and the process of homemaking in public, the article identifies three overarching socio‐spatial needs of fluidly housed youth. Through a mixed‐methods approach, the article uncovers three spatial potentials that afford fluidly housed youth to activate and adapt urban space through processes of radical care, and identifies urban spaces suitable to build infrastructures of care that afford meeting needs along a gradient of privacy. This way, it links socio‐spatial needs, socio‐spatial affordances, and the processes of care that connect both. In understanding this logic, it gives examples for careful planning that creates urban space affordances that activate and adapt to shifting needs. While this article does not claim to solve the housing crisis, it offers a starting point for how we can centre everyday practices of fluidly housed youth and create infrastructures of care that can better afford to meet shifting needs in urban space.