Improvising Infrastructure: Infrastructure Practices and Social Exclusions of Unhoused Persons in Berlin

Abstract

The thesis explores how unhoused Berliners living in public spaces or using temporary emergency shelters use or replace infrastructures for water, energy, communication, and mobility. It is based on a qualitative empirical study conducted between September 2020 and April 2023. As provision and use of infrastructures are commonly tied to accommodations and most services need to be paid for, access for unhoused urbanites is impeded. The study shows how unhoused persons achieve limited access via assistance services, at the homes of friends or family, in public spaces (e.g., public toilets, in cafés), or relying on portable or improvised solutions. As infrastructures form a basis for social practices, limited infrastructure access can be understood as social exclusion. The contribution explores this concept, identifying social interdependency, material participation, and participation in rights and norms as core aspects of social inclusions/exclusions. Based on work by Marx, Bourdieu, and authors in their wake, the study examines these aspects within infrastructure practices, focusing on different actors’ spatial and temporal strategies, material objects, and the body as a basis for and shaped by practices. It illustrates how infrastructure access is enabled and limited by conflicting spatial and temporal strategies of unhoused persons and other actors, including the implementation of statutory regulations in specific spaces, temporal limitation of access to services, or covert practices of unhoused persons. As a result of curtailed access, unhoused persons often experience grave effects on their bodies, while their marked bodies and material objects reinforce and naturalize their social exclusions, e.g., when persons with disabilities cannot use services due to physical barriers or ‘dirty’ or ‘malodorous’ persons are banned from using public transport based on the provider’s terms of use. In summary, the study demonstrates that all identified ways of infrastructure access are marked by social exclusions, while access options are differentiated by aspects like levels of social interdependency, material comfort, or legal exclusion. The text ends with a discussion of how to achieve infrastructure access for unhoused persons, arguing for housing against homelessness and limited infrastructure access, the democratization and decommodification of basic infrastructures, and political alliances between different social groups to achieve this change.