The Geography of Survival and the Right to the City: Speculations on Surveillance, Legal Innovation, and the Criminalization of Intervention

The "geography of survival" describes the spaces and spatial relations that structure not only how people may live, but especially whether they may live. For very poor people, such as the homeless, the geography of survival is knitted together into a network of public and private spaces and social services. In this article we focus on three trends that are simultaneously restructuring this geography of survival—the rise of automated surveillance (CCTV), innovations in trespass law, and the criminalization of sharing food in public—to assess their impact on homeless people's geography of survival in particular, and their right to the city more generally.