A Heterotopology of Urban Margins: Publicness in the Space of the City

Abstract Urban marginality is generally considered through the lens of exclusion. Policing and public policies, underpinned by private NIMBY (not‐in‐my‐backyard) attitudes and actions, aim to remove marginalized individuals from urban spaces. Yet they remain and are visible. As such, individuals across the urban margins share in publicness, which is the connection between strangers unique to cities borne from their visibility to one another. We suggest that publicness provides the terrain for an impactful mode of urban study, one which attends to the transitory encounters that anthropology has traditionally tried to transform and thicken. The ways in which individuals perform when they are visible in public displays something of how they understand themselves in relation to others, a form of mutual subjectification in which we as researchers are also implicated. Drawing on fieldwork in Ottawa, Ontario, with individuals who use drugs and individuals who panhandle, we analyze urban margins as other spaces and publicness as other relations using Foucault’s concept of heterotopia. This resulting heterotopology shows a different version of marginality in the city in which urban margins are not separate from but connected to the urban experience.