The United Kingdom Home Secretary, Suella Braverman, has announced a tougher line on people who sleep in camping tents on the street. He blames them for making the cities ugly for not wanting to give up their particular “lifestyle.” She has generated a good controversy in her country.
The cartography of global cities is convoluted because it goes beyond administrative limits. Just as there is a cross-border tourist metropolis whose common denominator is posture, there is also a liquid city that extends across London, New York, Paris, Madrid or Barcelona and could well be called Villa Decathlon, because many of the stores that spring up in These cities are bought in stores of this brand. The simplest ones cost 29.99 euros. Once assembled, they move to the most suitable place, so they are ideal for living close to the bush.
These concentrations of homeless people are not new, but there are more and more of them and they are more visible. In any city in the world. Many of those who sleep outdoors – or under the light polyethylene of the tent – are homeless migrants. The climate crisis and political instability in the Maghreb and the Sahel have unleashed a human tsunami that is impossible to contain with fences and patrol boats.
Is the solution to develop hiring policies at origin to achieve orderly flows of immigrants? It is likely so, but to be successful it would be necessary to act on a large scale, in coordination with the entire EU and with an extraordinary capacity to adapt to political ups and downs in the southern countries. That is, a complete chimera.
In addition, the migrant neighbors of Villa Decathlon are joined by locals expelled by an increasingly unfair system. The massive disappearance of reasonably paid jobs or the indecent rise in rents are to blame. There is the example of those teachers or health workers who in tourist enclaves have to sleep in a campsite.
The British minister is not completely right when she says that, for some people, camping is a lifestyle. Some groups of young expatriates have become accustomed to this comfortable way of living poorly in public spaces. They would be the current version of the “idle paupers” to whom Jane Jacobs alluded in her illustrious Death and Life of Great Cities.
But Braverman misses the point when he generalizes and avoids showing the slightest compassion for people condemned to marginality due to a combination of misfortunes and bad life decisions.
The solution to the problem, if it exists, can only come from a combined action. City councils have to begin to assume that the challenge is not temporary and increase both the temporary accommodation places and the specialized staff that serve this group, as well as better refine the regulations for the use of public space.
Meanwhile, it is up to governments to act against the major causes: climate change, the social gap widening at an exponential rate, wars and, soon, the massive death of jobs due to Artificial Intelligence (AI)...
Without the intention of providing solutions, but rather of minimizing errors, science and ethics researcher Margaret Mitchell warned on Wednesday at the Smart City Expo congress in Barcelona about the risks of developing non-inclusive AI urban policies. She gave as an example the fact that it has been discovered that some autonomous driving applications do not adequately recognize children traveling on the streets.
For her, it is crucial not to leave anyone out of the story. One thing is diversity (“there are different people”) and another, more relevant, inclusivity (“everyone intervenes”).
That is to say, Villa Decathlon cannot be swept under the rug to appease bad consciences. Unfortunately – especially for its neighbors – it is a global city that is here to stay.
