‘You’re making our city look bad’: Olympic security, neoliberal urbanization, and homeless youth

Drawing on ethnographic research with homeless and street-involved youth in Vancouver before, during, and after the 2010 Olympic Games, this article offers a portrait of neoliberal urbanization as experienced by a city’s most marginalized residents. Taking as paradigmatic the aspirational goals of Olympic host cities to enhance their reputation as ‘global cities’, the article explores what this means for homeless youth through three processes: city cleansing, city marketing, and self-regulation. Examining how each of these are imbricated with policing and security practices, the article offers an in-depth look at how these abstractions are lived by homeless youth in the everyday. The article concludes by suggesting that marginalized young people are not the beneficiaries of Olympic legacies, despite promises made by organizing committees. In contrast, findings indicate that homeless young people are further marginalized by the Olympics, providing support for previous research that aligns mega-events with neoliberal outcomes

Olympic Exclusions

Olympic Games are sold to host city populations on the basis of legacy commitments that incorporate aid for the young and the poor. Yet little is known about the realities of marginalized young people living in host cities. Do they benefit from social housing and employment opportunities? Or do they fall victim to increased policing and evaporating social assistance? This book answers these questions through an original ethnographic study of young people living in the shadow of Vancouver 2010 and London 2012. Setting qualitative research alo

Symbolic violence and the Olympic Games: low-income youth, social legacy commitments, and urban exclusion in Olympic host cities

Drawing on a five-year qualitative study on the impacts of the Olympic Games on homeless and marginally housed youth in two host cities (Vancouver 2010 and London 2012), this paper explores the instances of ‘symbolic violence’ perpetuated by the institutional infrastructure associated with the Olympics. Following Pierre Bourdieu’s use of the term, symbolic violence refers to the manner in which the young people turned dominant notions of what the desirable Olympic city looks and feels like into a sense of their own non-belonging and/or inadequacy, experienced bodily and emotionally. Feeling pressured to vie for elusive Olympic jobs and volunteer positions, and to be less visible to the thousands of tourist-spectators for the Games, youth in both cities reported a defiant mix of frustrated indignation and resigned acceptance that they did not ‘fit’ the image of the global Olympic city that organizers were trying to convey. The paper argues that this social harm, difficult to measure yet real nonetheless, is an important though unintended legacy of the Olympic Games for homeless and marginally housed youth living in its shadows. The paper also calls for a more sustained engagement with Bourdieu’s concept of symbolic violence in youth studies as a discipline

‘This Is the View When I Walk into My House’: Accounting Phenomenologically for the Efficacy of Spatial Methods with Youth

This article argues for the utility of phenomenology in accounting for the manner in which spatial methods yield insights into the everyday lived experiences of young people that are not as easily accessible through more traditional qualitative methods such as interviewing. Spatial methods, defined as methods that focus on the everyday spatial experiences of young people and methods that ask youth to position themselves in space, have been used by the author in a variety of research projects, and also incorporate certain visual methods. Phenomenological concepts such as the spatial perspective, the web of relations and opaque subjectivity are helpful in understanding not only that these methods work well but why they are so effective. The article also addresses Pierre Bourdieu’s critique of phenomenology, responding to his concern that phenomenology might be susceptible to ignoring or overlooking the social and political contexts that shape experiences

Urban masculinity, contested spaces, and classed subcultures: young homeless men navigating downtown Ottawa, Canada

This article seeks to address the lacuna in many academic and non-academic accounts of male homeless youth, which consistently overlook and thus fail to theorize the degree to which young homeless men’s experiences are shaped by gendered and classed youth subcultures. The theoretical contribution that this article seeks to make is to bring together culturally-infused analyses with a geographic focus on space and masculinity, in order to expand the repertoire of conceptual tools with which to understand young men’s experiences of homelessness in urban spaces. It does so through an empirical investigation of urban spatial navigations of young homeless and precariously housed men in Ottawa, Canada. Mobilizing the concept of territoriality, as developed by Phil Cohen of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, alongside the Bourdieusian concept of classification struggles, the article ultimately seeks to demonstrate that there is an internal logic of practice to young men’s navigations of urban space under conditions of extreme inequality, one that seeks to reconcile the deep contradictions of neoliberalism. Simultaneously, such logics may also serve to reinscribe and reinforce their marginal positions in the city, by exposing them to extreme violence by rival urban groups, and leaving them more vulnerable to expanded criminalization by the state

Sanitizing public space in olympic host cities: The spatial experiences of marginalized youth in 2010 vancouver and 2012 London

This article is based on a cross-national qualitative study of homeless and street-involved youth living within Olympic host cities. Synthesizing a Lefebvrian spatial analysis with Debord's concept of 'the spectacle', the article analyses the spatial experiences of homeless young people in Vancouver (host to the 2010 Winter Olympics) and draws some comparisons to London (host to the 2012 Summer Olympics). Tracing encounters with police, gentrification and Olympic infrastructure, the article assesses the experiences of homeless youth in light of claims made by Olympic proponents that the Games will 'benefit the young'. By contrast, the authors argue that positive Olympic legacies for homeless and street-involved young people living within host cities are questionable