If the house is the quintessential locus where the production of the modern subject takes place through everydayness, then homelessness, together with poverty and idleness, are modern anomalies par excellence. Consequently, the lack of a conventional home, whether intentional or not, is criminalized as the origin of a spiral of disobedience and deviancy. Since the dawn of modern urbanity, the discomfort, to put it mildly, of our society towards homelessness has nurtured a sophisticated architectural repertoire deployed to confine unhoused people. This repertoire embraces an inherent conjunction of care and control – sometimes consciously allied, sometimes clashing in open tension as manifest in housing norms, standards, architectural style and spatial organization.

Wavering between the carceral and the domestic, the sedentarization of unhoused people paradoxically relies on their displacement in shelter accommodations where housing standards are suspended under the aegis of emergency and alleged temporariness. In hindsight, these architectural responses appear painfully consistent across time. Nonetheless, diverse ecologies of care and control have dealt with homelessness in myriad different ways. How, for instance, does New York’s current reinstatement of street sweeps and involuntary homeless detainment echo vagrancy laws once designed to rid the early industrial city of trespassers, vagabonds, and idling derelicts? How are contemporary homeless shelters or camps emulating historical almshouses or workhouses? And to what extent do alternative settlements such as Portland’s Dignity Village resonate with historical intentional dwelling communes for and by homeless people?

This panel convenes around canonical and exceptional histories of homeless relief and incarceration, and especially the entanglement of both. We invite interdisciplinary proposals merging architectural history with homeless studies, prison studies, and carceral geography. Papers can present case studies from architectural and urban histories and explicitly reflecting on the relation between the built environment vis-à-vis homelessness and unhoused subjects.