Reclaiming Placemaking for an Alternative Politics of Legitimacy and Community in Homelessness.

This study is about the struggle for legitimacy in place among a group of people often assumed to have neither. It examines the roll of informal placemaking and community building in struggles for settlement among people experiencing homelessness. It does so through ethnographic observation, photo-documentation, and participatory action research at three sites in Oakland, California, on which unhoused people (and some housed members of the surrounding community) have demonstrated bold forms of grassroots placemaking on public land.