Served but unsettled. The Contentious Side of Services for the Homeless

Services for the poor are often ambiguous. Offering help to get by but not necessarily to get out of poverty, they manifest a distance between mainstream society and recipients. For those who live in severe poverty, the distance often comes with a particular place: the shelter. Shelters are places of transit and by their very nature contentious, they cannot replace a home. They often become risk factors themselves that prevent their users from settling and stabilizing; experiences of stigmatization, shame or denial are common. This paper opens by offering a concept of ‘welfare space’, and then focuses on the landscape of homeless services and shelters in Europe. Drawing on current ethnographic studies and our own research in Hamburg, Vienna and Milan, we illustrate how the state of being unsettled plays out in the everyday life of people experiencing homelessness and the role of shelters and social services in it.