The Home Secretary of the United Kingdom, Suella Braverman, has announced a tougher hand on people who sleep in tents camping on the street. He blames them for making the cities ugly because they don't want to give up their particular "lifestyle". It has generated a good deal of controversy in its country.
The mapping of global cities is convoluted because it transcends administrative boundaries. Just as there is a cross-border tourist metropolis whose common denominator is posturing, there is also a liquid city that stretches across London, New York, Paris, Madrid or Barcelona and which could well be called Vila Decathlon, because many of the camping tents that spring up in these cities are bought in shops of this brand. The simplest ones cost 29.99 euros. They move to the most suitable place once assembled, so they are ideal for living from portal to portal.
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 on the ground – or under the thin polyethylene of the tent – are homeless migrants. The climate crisis and political instability in the Maghreb and the Sahel have unleashed a human tsunami impossible to contain with fences and patrol boats. Is the solution to develop recruitment policies at the source to achieve orderly flows of immigrants? Probably so, but to be successful it would be necessary to act on a large scale, in a coordinated manner with the whole EU and with an extraordinary capacity to adapt to the political ups and downs in the southern countries. That is to say, a complete chimera.
In addition, the migrant neighbors of Vila 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. We have the example of teachers or health workers who in some tourist municipalities have to sleep in a campsite.
The British minister is not entirely 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 debauchery in the public space. They would be the current version of the "idle paupers" to whom Jane Jacobs alluded in her famous Death and Life of the Big Cities. But Braverman misses the point when he generalizes and avoids showing the slightest compassion for people condemned to marginality by a combination of misfortune and bad life decisions.
The solution to the problem, if there is one, can only come from combined action. Town councils must begin to assume that the challenge is not a temporary one and increase both the temporary accommodation places and the specialized staff that cater to this group, and also fine-tune better the regulations regarding the use of the space public In the meantime, it's up to governments to act against the bigger causes: climate boiling, exponentially widening social rift, wars, and soon, the mass death of jobs due to artificial intelligence ( AI)...
With no desire to provide solutions, if not rather to minimize errors, the researcher in science and ethics Margaret Mitchell warned on Wednesday at the Smart City Expo congress in Barcelona about the risks of developing non-inclusive urban policies of AI. He gave as an example the fact that it has been discovered that some autonomous driving applications do not properly recognize children on the streets. For her, it is crucial that no one is left out of the story. One thing is diversity (“there are different people”) and another, more relevant, inclusivity (“everyone takes part”).
In other words, Vila Decathlon cannot hide under the carpet to appease bad consciences. Unfortunately – especially for its neighbors – it is a global city that is here to stay.
