By Rick Reutter Santa Monica
David Pisarra’s column (SMDP, Feb. 21, page 4) makes, at the very least, one interesting point: Homeless people have in effect “redefined” what “public” space is and the uses to which such space is put. The New York anthropologist Kim Hopper has actually gone further and used the term “redefined” in his own observations that when people, by unavoidable need, lay themselves down in doorways or on streets, on train or subway station platforms, on rooftops, on park benches or in park foliage, they claim the territory for uses other than that which the great city planners of Manhattan, or any other metropolis, had originally intended, and that “public space” now truly belongs to — and is of need to a significant segment of the “public.”
In fact, homeless people define and use space in ways that are vastly at odds with the definitions of the “housed” residents. Homeless people in effect make public space their own — they live in public virtually all of the time — and define its utility according to their own standards by virtue of their extraordinary familiarity with, and continued habitation in such space, as I suspect that people the world over have done for centuries under similar pressing circumstances. After all, a quake victim in Pakistan looks to set up a camp for himself and his family anywhere he can. Herein perhaps is not a question of “legal right” of property ownership but of how humans are to employ desperately-needed resources that are theirs by right of pressing and immutable and deprived need.
All of the issues above are no doubt of touchy legality, and I suspect that the Constitution is not really of much use here in clarifying the problem.
And certainly, city planners cannot be said to always anticipate human needs, either in their own times or in the future.
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on February 24, 2006. Read the original PDF.