Homelessness and water insecurity in the Global North: trapped in the dwelling paradox

TY - JOUR

T1 - Homelessness and water insecurity in the Global North: trapped in the dwelling paradox

AU - Meehan, Katie

AU - Melissa Beresford

AU - Fausto Amador Cid

AU - Lourdes Johanna Avelar Portillo

AU - Anna Marin

AU - Marianne Odetola

AU - Raul Pachego Vega

PY - 2023/7/23

Y1 - 2023/7/23

N2 - In this article, we introduce the “dwelling paradox” to explore how the state actively produces water insecurity for people experiencing homelessness in the Global North. We explain that the dwelling paradox is (1) produced by a modernist ideology of public service delivery that privileges water provision through private infrastructural connections in the home; (2) is reproduced by the welfare-warfare state, which has increasingly weaponized public water facilities and criminalized body functions in public space; and (3) is actively contested by some houseless communities, who challenge hegemonic ideals of the ‘home’—and its water infrastructure—as a private, atomized space. In advancing a relational and spatial understanding of water insecurity, we use the dwelling paradox to illustrate how unhoused people are caught in a space of institutional entrapment that is forged by state power and amplified by anti-homeless legislation. Such spaces of entrapment make it extremely difficult for unhoused people to achieve a safe, healthy, and thriving life—the basis of the human rights to water and sanitation.

AB - In this article, we introduce the “dwelling paradox” to explore how the state actively produces water insecurity for people experiencing homelessness in the Global North. We explain that the dwelling paradox is (1) produced by a modernist ideology of public service delivery that privileges water provision through private infrastructural connections in the home; (2) is reproduced by the welfare-warfare state, which has increasingly weaponized public water facilities and criminalized body functions in public space; and (3) is actively contested by some houseless communities, who challenge hegemonic ideals of the ‘home’—and its water infrastructure—as a private, atomized space. In advancing a relational and spatial understanding of water insecurity, we use the dwelling paradox to illustrate how unhoused people are caught in a space of institutional entrapment that is forged by state power and amplified by anti-homeless legislation. Such spaces of entrapment make it extremely difficult for unhoused people to achieve a safe, healthy, and thriving life—the basis of the human rights to water and sanitation.

UR - https://wires.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/wat2.1651

U2 - 10.1002/wat2.1651

DO - 10.1002/wat2.1651

M3 - Article

VL - 10

JO - WIREs Water

JF - WIREs Water

IS - 4

ER -