Tent City, Seattle by Tony Sparks;

Author:Tony Sparks;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lightning Source (Tier 4)

4. Seeing Like a Tent City

In their refusal of homeless subjectivity, Tent City 3 residents produced homespaces and subjectivities based on commoning, care, and collectivity. However, it was through camp governance that these norms persisted. To say this persistence was improbable is an understatement. Not only does the camp relocate every thirty to sixty days, but the residents, propelled by various needs and circumstances, are likewise in constant flux. It is rare for a camper to remain for longer than a few months. Nevertheless, Tent City 3 has persisted. At the time of my stay, the camp had been in continuous operation for six years. In 2023 that number stands at twenty-three. And the camp is still in operation, continuing its peripatetic existence across Seattle’s gentrified landscapes. It has outlasted seven mayors and four presidents. This temporal persistence is a luxury not often afforded to the informal habitations of the poor in the United States.

In this chapter, I explore how the norms, subjectivities, and spaces of the camp are sustained and negotiated through practices of collective self-government. I explore how, as both a home and a city space in which the boundaries between public and private are porous and fluid, the camp’s collective self-governance produces a localized form of informal “governmentality.”1 This localized governmentality was forged within and against presuppositions of homeless deviance and difference but became something more. Governance in the tent city was an ever evolving system of contextual negotiation that occurred through and within intimate, embodied, and contextual relationships. These practices were exercised through the collective management of the camp, the selection and operations of the camp executive committee and the creation, application, and enforcement of camp rules. When taken together, the governmental practices of Tent City 3 refuse colonial hierarchies and modernist monocultures of knowledge through an anticolonial art of governance based on contextual fluidity and negotiability.

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