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Rural homelessness: issues, experiences, and policy responses
ARTICLE IN PRESS
Journal of Rural Studies 19 (2003) 391–396
Book reviews Rural homelessness: issues, experiences, and policy responses Paul Cloke, Paul Milbourne, and Rebekah Widdowfield; The Policy Press, Bristol, 2002, 245pp Price d17.99; d45.00 hardbound, ISBN 1-86134-284-5 Why is homelessness hyper-visible in cities and all but invisible in rural places? This question, a centerpiece of Rural Homelessness, is not teased apart easily. Nor is the deeper question of social invisibility the authors ponder. Eight compact, well-ordered chapters journey into these troubling questions. Though the evidence and answers come almost entirely from the UK, readers can usefully refract them to other settings and cultures where variants of homelessness exist. And though written by academics, nothing arcane or inaccessible clouds the book’s style or content. Time and again the subject yields surprises, policy challenges, and sober reflections on such basic categories as ‘‘home,’’ ‘‘idyllic rural,’’ and ‘‘basic needs.’’ It is a book of much practical as well as scholarly value and well worth owning. Early in the book we learn that a homeless person is often displaced three times. Legally, she is without minimal shelter. Socially, she is invisibilized by stigmaaverse local authorities and, because of this underimagined by society at large. Psychologically, she denies her own abandoned condition, rationalizing and renaming it. For example, she is ‘‘just passing through’’ or ‘‘visiting friends.’’ In many rural quarters a fourth kind of displacement follows (and is backcloth to the types just listed): the cast-out, socially displaced person is bereft of a ‘‘home’’ in the fuller sense, i.e., a family or a community. In a word, the authors make a pedestrian topic deeply complicated, absorbing, and existential. This returns us to the central question. Part of the invisibility of rural homelessness falls to definitional disagreements and the meaning of ‘‘home’’ itself. Having a legally recognized accommodation satisfies the UK’s 1996 Housing Act, but is not ‘‘home’’ in the fuller sense. Home is more than a roof or a room just as work is more than a job and nutrition more than a meal. A second reason for the invisibility of the rural homeless has to do with ‘‘everyday rural culture,’’ particularly the blind spots of its more idyllic constructions. Using an intriguing blend of secondary sources, direct impressions and interviews, and official statistics from selected local authorities, the authors probe the sanitizing behavior in which so many non-homeless are complicit.
We deny, we invisibilize, we undercount, Thus, a social pathology that is hard to hide in cities is minimalized in many rural settings, reinforcing common urban-centric assumptions and myths about the geography of homelessness. So successful is the delusion that the rural homeless themselves reject the label of invisibility. Rather than protest, they submit to the moral censorship of the majority and become silent as well as invisible. The authors are at their best in unraveling the selfinterest behind this invisibility. As middle class commuters gentrify the shires, they deplete the supply of available housing for less affluent classes by raising land prices and taxes. As tourism and second home development spread, once affordable rentals are converted to seasonal dwellings and upscale retreats. As public housing buy-out laws run their course, social spaces turn private and ‘‘homes’’ (in both the narrow and broad sense) disappear. Conservation and historic preservation initiatives create amenities which slowly and subtly alter the social-cultural landscape of who can afford what and live where. Changes in rural employment for long-term residents (particularly youth) depress incomes and widen gaps between housing costs and cash resources. Though an acute social problem, rural homelessness of today resembles leprosy and mental illness of the past, that is, conditions which society was happy to overlook, understate, and relegate to near-oblivion. Is there a theory stitched across these insightful chapters? The answer is a qualified yes. The book does not lack for tantalizing formulations with deeply theoretical implications. These include the changing construction of ‘‘urban’’ and ‘‘rural’’ among the shifting populations of each. There is the ostracism of the homeless ‘‘other’’ and the implications for old tensions between sedentary lifestyles and their alternatives. Associated with this debate is the collapse of primal notions of ‘‘home’’ in changing cultural contexts, and its evolving interpretations by both victims and bystanders. These intriguing threads don’t always interlace well, however, and several theoretical connections are overlooked. For example, there may be parallels between attitudes towards homelessness and Steven Luke’s ‘‘third face of power’’ in interpreting why the homeless disavow their condition and its social causes. Or what of the segue to James Scott’s notion of legibility as administered by
ARTICLE IN PRESS 392
Book reviews / Journal of Rural Studies 19 (2003) 391–396
modern states, that is, managing people and structures so as to simplify a range of normal state functions? Scott speaks elaborately on this subject and its opposite, illegibility, something the present authors handily portray with data and stories and a logic somewhat different from Scott’s. The opportunity lays fallow, however. And what of historical precedents and patterns? A synchronizing historical chapter is somehow omitted from the book, and with it the longer tale of homelessness as incubated in the Poor Laws and other relevant power relations of past centuries. Such a chapter might have raised the passed-over issue of agency, past and present, among those lacking shelter and the amenities of ‘‘home’’ and explored whether the urban–rural discrepancy in homeless visibility is a recent or long-standing phenomenon. I found myself demanding more from this book because what it did provide was provocative and worthwhile. I became the greedy dinner guest, wanting more from the host and imagining another course or two to top off my satisfaction. Besides coherent theory and historical context, I missed a more generous treatment of global homelessness (even a truncated literature review) and of the ways in which globlisation
contribute to homelessness within the UK (new wealth and heightened inequalities, porous borders and inmigration, citizenship legal jumbles and deterritorialized identities, etc.). How have these forces and phenomena come home to roost in the rural UK and spawned a problem which remains invisible rather than sparking resistance and audible pangs of conscience? Are land invasions, squatting, and trespassing on the rise in urban centers and are there spillovers? In response to growing urban and rural homelessness, is England comtemplating anything like the modern land reform legislation recently adopted in Scotland? I hope the authors are planning volume II in the series. My debts to this book are several. Beyond its account of homelessness particulars, how they are perceived, and why this perception varies by place, I now routinely ask: what other social pathologies involving large numbers of people surround us which are selectively purged from sight and consciousness, and what are the ‘‘moral’’ narratives that allow this to be? Charles Geisler Department of Rural Sociology Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA
PII: S 0 7 4 3 - 0 1 6 7 ( 0 2 ) 0 0 0 8 6 - 4
Public concerns, environmental standards and agricultural trade F. Brouwer and D. E. Ervin (Eds.); CABI Publishing, Wallingford, New York, 2002, price d49.95 hardbound, ISBN 0 85199 586 1 This edited book attempts important work, to survey the varied landscape of environmental standards found in the context of the ongoing push to liberalise agricultural trade. The book bundles together who different sorts of material; description of environmental policy and standards in developed countries and some analysis of trade and environmental tensions informed by a knowledge of existing and emerging policy. I find myself, however, quite ambivalent towards the book and in the end frustrated with the approach taken to examine what is a very significant area of international and national concern. The book makes two crucial claims at the outset that signal direction and content. Firstly, a clear policy rationale is invoked. ‘Freer trade and improved environmental conditions have become robust public goals in most developed countries. International and national policies reduce government and industry trade barriers to foster more liberalised trade. Another set of policies treat market and government failures to improve environmental quality. Progress on each objective is
necessary to increase a country’s social welfare. There in lies the potential for conflict’ (p. 1). Secondly, and consequentially, the ‘challenge before policy makers is to design and implement trade and environmental policies that work in a ‘complementary’ fashion’. While I can understand the editors’ intellectual tradition, what I find puzzling is their unwillingness to problematise the theoretical premises they draw upon and the methods they use and to push the boundaries of their approach. But first let me deal with the book’s strengths. At one level, the opening sections dealing with emerging issues on agricultural trade and environment and public concern and the regulation of world trade, offer useful commentary about where lines of conflict are surfacing. Roughly half the book is devoted to outlining specific policies in the EU, US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand relating to water quantity and quality, soil related issues, air quality, nature conservation, biodiversity, landscape protection and management, genetically modified organisms, farm animal welfare and human-health issues. Acknowledged local experts author five inventory-style chapters. While the adherence to a common section-by-section account edges on tedious, the information provided makes the book a ready and helpful source of information. A great pity is that the contributing specialists seem not to have had a chance to interact with the other contributors. For
Journal of Rural Studies 19 (2003) 391–396
Book reviews Rural homelessness: issues, experiences, and policy responses Paul Cloke, Paul Milbourne, and Rebekah Widdowfield; The Policy Press, Bristol, 2002, 245pp Price d17.99; d45.00 hardbound, ISBN 1-86134-284-5 Why is homelessness hyper-visible in cities and all but invisible in rural places? This question, a centerpiece of Rural Homelessness, is not teased apart easily. Nor is the deeper question of social invisibility the authors ponder. Eight compact, well-ordered chapters journey into these troubling questions. Though the evidence and answers come almost entirely from the UK, readers can usefully refract them to other settings and cultures where variants of homelessness exist. And though written by academics, nothing arcane or inaccessible clouds the book’s style or content. Time and again the subject yields surprises, policy challenges, and sober reflections on such basic categories as ‘‘home,’’ ‘‘idyllic rural,’’ and ‘‘basic needs.’’ It is a book of much practical as well as scholarly value and well worth owning. Early in the book we learn that a homeless person is often displaced three times. Legally, she is without minimal shelter. Socially, she is invisibilized by stigmaaverse local authorities and, because of this underimagined by society at large. Psychologically, she denies her own abandoned condition, rationalizing and renaming it. For example, she is ‘‘just passing through’’ or ‘‘visiting friends.’’ In many rural quarters a fourth kind of displacement follows (and is backcloth to the types just listed): the cast-out, socially displaced person is bereft of a ‘‘home’’ in the fuller sense, i.e., a family or a community. In a word, the authors make a pedestrian topic deeply complicated, absorbing, and existential. This returns us to the central question. Part of the invisibility of rural homelessness falls to definitional disagreements and the meaning of ‘‘home’’ itself. Having a legally recognized accommodation satisfies the UK’s 1996 Housing Act, but is not ‘‘home’’ in the fuller sense. Home is more than a roof or a room just as work is more than a job and nutrition more than a meal. A second reason for the invisibility of the rural homeless has to do with ‘‘everyday rural culture,’’ particularly the blind spots of its more idyllic constructions. Using an intriguing blend of secondary sources, direct impressions and interviews, and official statistics from selected local authorities, the authors probe the sanitizing behavior in which so many non-homeless are complicit.
We deny, we invisibilize, we undercount, Thus, a social pathology that is hard to hide in cities is minimalized in many rural settings, reinforcing common urban-centric assumptions and myths about the geography of homelessness. So successful is the delusion that the rural homeless themselves reject the label of invisibility. Rather than protest, they submit to the moral censorship of the majority and become silent as well as invisible. The authors are at their best in unraveling the selfinterest behind this invisibility. As middle class commuters gentrify the shires, they deplete the supply of available housing for less affluent classes by raising land prices and taxes. As tourism and second home development spread, once affordable rentals are converted to seasonal dwellings and upscale retreats. As public housing buy-out laws run their course, social spaces turn private and ‘‘homes’’ (in both the narrow and broad sense) disappear. Conservation and historic preservation initiatives create amenities which slowly and subtly alter the social-cultural landscape of who can afford what and live where. Changes in rural employment for long-term residents (particularly youth) depress incomes and widen gaps between housing costs and cash resources. Though an acute social problem, rural homelessness of today resembles leprosy and mental illness of the past, that is, conditions which society was happy to overlook, understate, and relegate to near-oblivion. Is there a theory stitched across these insightful chapters? The answer is a qualified yes. The book does not lack for tantalizing formulations with deeply theoretical implications. These include the changing construction of ‘‘urban’’ and ‘‘rural’’ among the shifting populations of each. There is the ostracism of the homeless ‘‘other’’ and the implications for old tensions between sedentary lifestyles and their alternatives. Associated with this debate is the collapse of primal notions of ‘‘home’’ in changing cultural contexts, and its evolving interpretations by both victims and bystanders. These intriguing threads don’t always interlace well, however, and several theoretical connections are overlooked. For example, there may be parallels between attitudes towards homelessness and Steven Luke’s ‘‘third face of power’’ in interpreting why the homeless disavow their condition and its social causes. Or what of the segue to James Scott’s notion of legibility as administered by
ARTICLE IN PRESS 392
Book reviews / Journal of Rural Studies 19 (2003) 391–396
modern states, that is, managing people and structures so as to simplify a range of normal state functions? Scott speaks elaborately on this subject and its opposite, illegibility, something the present authors handily portray with data and stories and a logic somewhat different from Scott’s. The opportunity lays fallow, however. And what of historical precedents and patterns? A synchronizing historical chapter is somehow omitted from the book, and with it the longer tale of homelessness as incubated in the Poor Laws and other relevant power relations of past centuries. Such a chapter might have raised the passed-over issue of agency, past and present, among those lacking shelter and the amenities of ‘‘home’’ and explored whether the urban–rural discrepancy in homeless visibility is a recent or long-standing phenomenon. I found myself demanding more from this book because what it did provide was provocative and worthwhile. I became the greedy dinner guest, wanting more from the host and imagining another course or two to top off my satisfaction. Besides coherent theory and historical context, I missed a more generous treatment of global homelessness (even a truncated literature review) and of the ways in which globlisation
contribute to homelessness within the UK (new wealth and heightened inequalities, porous borders and inmigration, citizenship legal jumbles and deterritorialized identities, etc.). How have these forces and phenomena come home to roost in the rural UK and spawned a problem which remains invisible rather than sparking resistance and audible pangs of conscience? Are land invasions, squatting, and trespassing on the rise in urban centers and are there spillovers? In response to growing urban and rural homelessness, is England comtemplating anything like the modern land reform legislation recently adopted in Scotland? I hope the authors are planning volume II in the series. My debts to this book are several. Beyond its account of homelessness particulars, how they are perceived, and why this perception varies by place, I now routinely ask: what other social pathologies involving large numbers of people surround us which are selectively purged from sight and consciousness, and what are the ‘‘moral’’ narratives that allow this to be? Charles Geisler Department of Rural Sociology Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA
PII: S 0 7 4 3 - 0 1 6 7 ( 0 2 ) 0 0 0 8 6 - 4
Public concerns, environmental standards and agricultural trade F. Brouwer and D. E. Ervin (Eds.); CABI Publishing, Wallingford, New York, 2002, price d49.95 hardbound, ISBN 0 85199 586 1 This edited book attempts important work, to survey the varied landscape of environmental standards found in the context of the ongoing push to liberalise agricultural trade. The book bundles together who different sorts of material; description of environmental policy and standards in developed countries and some analysis of trade and environmental tensions informed by a knowledge of existing and emerging policy. I find myself, however, quite ambivalent towards the book and in the end frustrated with the approach taken to examine what is a very significant area of international and national concern. The book makes two crucial claims at the outset that signal direction and content. Firstly, a clear policy rationale is invoked. ‘Freer trade and improved environmental conditions have become robust public goals in most developed countries. International and national policies reduce government and industry trade barriers to foster more liberalised trade. Another set of policies treat market and government failures to improve environmental quality. Progress on each objective is
necessary to increase a country’s social welfare. There in lies the potential for conflict’ (p. 1). Secondly, and consequentially, the ‘challenge before policy makers is to design and implement trade and environmental policies that work in a ‘complementary’ fashion’. While I can understand the editors’ intellectual tradition, what I find puzzling is their unwillingness to problematise the theoretical premises they draw upon and the methods they use and to push the boundaries of their approach. But first let me deal with the book’s strengths. At one level, the opening sections dealing with emerging issues on agricultural trade and environment and public concern and the regulation of world trade, offer useful commentary about where lines of conflict are surfacing. Roughly half the book is devoted to outlining specific policies in the EU, US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand relating to water quantity and quality, soil related issues, air quality, nature conservation, biodiversity, landscape protection and management, genetically modified organisms, farm animal welfare and human-health issues. Acknowledged local experts author five inventory-style chapters. While the adherence to a common section-by-section account edges on tedious, the information provided makes the book a ready and helpful source of information. A great pity is that the contributing specialists seem not to have had a chance to interact with the other contributors. For