Dangerous or useful? Homeless people and urban space production in Belo Horizonte and Bogotá

Abstract

In this article, we will analyze the mechanisms and strategies of power/knowledge that interfere, in the scope of urban planning and space production, on the life of homeless people in Belo Horizonte and Bogota, based on investigations that occurred during the years 2014 and 2015. To this purpose, we will try to understand how neoliberal urban planning has transformed public spaces – places of partial or total structuring of the life of the homeless – in commodity through strategies of privatization. The theoretical-methodological procedures used were based on Foucault’s ethnography and genealogy, which enabled both the construction of a neoliberal reason through time and the production of devices within urban policy to control bodies in two dimensions: individual and populational. In this perspective, we will take a look at the urban space from bodies and people understood not as problems, but as part of conflicts, belongings, strategies, forms of subjection and exclusions with the intention of thinking about the production of space in a critical way.