:The Ethics of Space: Homelessness and Squatting in Urban England

Abstract

Does the ethical turn in anthropology divert us from the political? Quite the contrary: there is simply too much about the political—its energies and angers, its solidarities and purposes, its imagination and hopes—that can’t be understood without probing its ethical wellsprings. Steph Grohmann’s The ethics of space: Homelessness and squatting in urban England is, among other things, an engaging and nuanced exploration of this insight. At its heart are occupants of properties left vacant by their legal owners. Some are anarchist activists, others are unhoused for more mundane reasons. They vary in their political commitments and exposure to contingency but are bound and motivated by an ethics of support for the most vulnerable. The ethics of space speaks to me in a rather specific way. I grew up not far from New York’s Bowery at a time, pregentrification, when it was still the city’s most famous skid row. Throughout my childhood, the daily walk to school took me through a small park that was primarily occupied by the unhoused. They were a highly visible, often abject, sometimes aggressive, and always disturbing and fascinating presence that I was too young and naïve to filter out. Early on I foundmyself asking what was the difference between them and me. I had a comfortable apartment to return to each day, they did not: why was it not the other way around—what was keeping me afloat? Grohmann might say that I simply had not yet gotten capitalism’s message, that the homeless are so Other “that the settled person can suppress all fear that, but for