AbstractsLaw & Legal Studies

This study looks at three public places, in the cities of Victoria and Vancouver, BC, where homeless people and other activists have come together with common purpose to gain political visibility and challenge the dominant legal and political discourses that bound ‘public space.' The Cridge Park action in Victoria led to the BCSC and BCCA decisions in Victoria (City) v. Adams that found a right for the homeless to set up temporary overnight shelter in public places, when insufficient shelter beds were available in the city. The limitations on this right, which protect homeless persons from being forced to take down temporary shelter at night, but not from being made to take it down in the morning, affirm that public places are intended only for temporary uses by people who have a ‘private space' to go home to, and leave the homeless with no place they can legally inhabit on an ongoing basis. An effect of these limitations is to legally deny to the homeless a place for the sort of community empowerment that occurred in the tent city and made the homeless participants politically visible. Employing Hannah Arendt's theory that people gathering in ‘public space' are the source of power in a political society, I argue that the tent city subverts dominant notions about the public/private divide that effect an exclusion of the homeless, and creates a new extra-legal ‘public space' where they become visible as political actors. The Woodward's action in the 1990s/2000s in Downtown Eastside Vancouver is an example of a tent city that clearly empowered the participants as political actors. Occupy Vancouver, which set up a tent city in Robson Square in Fall 2011, was a large-scale action that created a new ‘public space' in the central square of the city and brought many homeless people into political visibility as political actors, and was disbanded by an injunction from the City of Vancouver that Adams did not provide a constitutional defence against. These tent cities show that public places in the city provide a stage for the excluded homeless to place themselves on the urban landscape as members of a community and as political actors. While these actions disrupt the boundaries of legal ‘public space,' the extra-legal ‘public spaces' that are created are a means for homeless people to resist their political exclusion and assert the right to a place in the city. Cette étude analyse trois espaces publics dans les villes de Victoria et Vancouver en Colombie Britannique, où des sans-abris et autres militants ont uni leurs forces pour augmenter leur visibilité politique et s'opposer aux discours politiques et juridiques prédominants. Les mouvement de «Cridge Park» a mené à des décisions de la Cour supérieure et de la Cour d'appel de la Colombie Britannique dans l'affaire Victoria (City) c. Adams, où la cour a jugé que les sans-abris avait le droit de construire des abris temporaires dans les espaces publics quand il manquait de lits d'hébergement dans les refuges pour sans-abris de la ville. Les limites de ce droit, qui permet…