Introduction

The struggle over the ‘Right to the City’ (Lefebvre, 1970), intensified through late capitalist developments of gentrification, privatisation and hyper-surveillance of public spaces, has markedly differentiated outcomes for homeless persons and other marginalised populations in the city. In this chapter, it will be shown how the management and criminalisation of perceived problem populations have intensified across contemporary cities and is achieved through an increasing array of different exclusionary legal mechanisms, interventions and technologies manifested in urban policy. While the historical continuities in both the criminalisation of homelessness and the deployment of urban policy to exclude marginalised populations is acknowledged, it is argued that contemporary developments have accelerated and extended the impacts of these processes. Across contemporary urban spaces, the contradictions of neoliberalism, manifested in the ‘centaur state’s’ (Wacquant, 2009a: 43) active deregulation and facilitation of private capital markets’ rights to the city, are clearly visible. Simultaneously, regulation, penalisation and behavioural management of the poor and the disenfranchised through more intricate legal and policing and urban planning mechanisms are expanded. These impacts are particularly experienced in what Manuel Castell's defined as the ‘Fourth World’ of urban poverty, where ‘people and places are characterised by the erosion of the welfare state and intense social and spatial exclusion’ (Castells, 2000: 168). Guiding the conceptualisation of the criminalisation of social policy in urban contexts is Loïc Wacquant's observation that areas of intellectual concern, namely class fragmentation in the city, ethno-national classifications and penal policy, have remained in separate silos amongst analysts but are, however, closely interdependent in shaping the experiences of the racialised urban precariat (Wacquant, 2014). Throughout this chapter, it will be shown how the ‘neo-liberal Leviathan’ projects its punitive powers through the three vectors of class, race and the deployment of punitive policies; how spatial regulations impact on every aspect of ‘agents in everyday life’, but particularly those marginalised by poverty, social class and ethnicity; and how social policies are enrolled by the state to help produce urban hierarchies through their ‘classifying and stratifying agency’ (Wacquant, 2014: 1699). The targeting of homeless populations through endlessly refined and new layers of civil ordinances excludes them from public spaces but also changes and loosens the protections usually accorded in legal processes (Ashworth and Zedner, 2014).