The daily experience of the homeless among us says a lot about our own sense of being at home in the city.
In the space of a year – with the devastating confluence of an economic crisis, a death in the family, a sudden breakup and an even more sudden breakdown – Londoner Alex Andreou went from a six-figure income to sleeping rough.
Homeless and adrift, he experienced one of the most sophisticated cities of the world at its most inhospitable.
“It was only then,” he wrote in an engaging account in The Guardian earlier this year, “that I started scanning my surroundings with the distinct purpose of finding shelter”, and discovered instead “the city’s barbed cruelty”.
Listing, among other things (in London and elsewhere), “ubiquitous protrusions on window ledges, bus-shelter seats that pivot forward, water sprinklers and loud muzak, hard tubular rests, park benches with solid dividers and forests of pointed cement bollards under bridges”, he concluded that too often “urban spaces are aggressively rejecting soft, human bodies”.
Cape Town has its share of such unedifying features, some – like the benches in the Company’s Garden with the solid dividers noted in London by Andreou – conceivably intended as much to dissuade the homeless from bedding down as to urge them on to the nearest shelter instead, for their own benefit, the rationale might be, and not unreasonably
But one can’t shake the idea that unyielding street furniture, spikes on windowsills or other subtle or unsubtle discomforts for those living in public spaces overlooks a larger question about modern urban life; homelessness is as much about not being “at home” where we live.
It begins, though, with considering the actual - rather than abstract - homelessness in our midst, since the one says a lot about the other.
Fifty-nine-year-old granny Bronwen Hunt, formerly of Table View, a one-time marketing exec and, latterly, a street sweeper among other things, is a spirited survivor of homelessness and some three and a half years living in the Napier Street shelter in Green Point. When, at 55, her life unravelled under the pressure of a succession of crises, there came a frightening moment when she walked out of her front door with nothing and no idea of what lay ahead.
“It took about a year. Gradually, I seemed to lose it without realising it. You are desperately trying to pull the threads, and you are telling people you aren’t coping… but it’s as if nobody is listening, nobody wants to get involved. That was one of the biggest betrayals.”
She spent her first night as a homeless person on Table View beach. “I remember walking down the road, looking at the lights in people’s houses, wondering if I’d find a dune to shelter behind. When you are thinking thoughts like that you are in a state of trauma.”
It was just the start of a long haul back to a liveable life. “What you think you won’t face you will face.”
Hunt is still in assisted living, and has counted on a succession of Extended Public Works Programme jobs through the city, a programme she praises for enabling her to regain her self-worth.
She says that among the homeless, Cape Town is rated as “the best city to be homeless in… the service deliveries are good, health, hospitals, that sort of thing, and Sassa (the social security agency)”, but it’s the sense of social rejection that’s hardest to deal with.
“Life is still tough. In the back of your mind, you are still traumatised. It does not matter how far you have come. It’s like grief, you’re grieving; when you’re down and out things happen that push you further down. It’s not just a once-off thing.”
And yet this is, Hunt implies, a story of ordinariness, something closer to us than we think.
“One of the hardest things for me is that people think I am lying… they just don’t believe this happened to me.”
The disbelief contrives to compound the “feeling of rejection” that is common to the homeless.
In some measure, that incredulity wells from an urban setting so matter-of-factly defined by the tension between public and private spaces that measures taken to delineate the divide seem acceptable or even invisible.
If the homeless are most conscious of the real character of our public space, it impinges on all of us.
I was reminded of this recently when my young son announced in a tone of judicious reproof, “I don’t like security”, which I initially took to be a comical semantic misstep, the kind of cognitive imprecision one might expect in a seven-year-old.
“No,” he hastened to correct me, “I don’t like it because it’s not nice.”
Here was, in its way, a blinding insight. The presence of “security” (a capacious noun brought impulsively to mind as we passed and waved at a uniformed neighbourhood familiar on his routine bicycle patrol in our quiet streets), was, I understood his reasoning to go, proof of a pervasive insecurity. If we felt safe, not least for having earned a friendly wave from the patrol man freewheeling by, the feeling had somehow to be false, for what the always-there security man stood for was the always-there threat, unseen and, almost by definition, uncontainable.
Crime is high; who would dispute that 24-hour “security” is rational? Yet – as central Cape Town’s regeneration shows – it is vibrant, accessible and shared public space that makes cities safer, and helps societies appreciate their shared interests.
One of the consequences of ubiquitous “security” – at school fete and shopping mall, office block, parkade and suburb – is an implicit definition of belonging (who is in, who is out) on the grounds of a perception of permissibility, a right to be present. It contrives to make public spaces private ones. Access, presence, is a kind of ownership. It is indiscriminate in the way that hostile street furniture appeared to Andreou as “measures that do not and cannot distinguish the ‘vagrant’ posterior from others considered more deserving”.
“When we make it impossible for the dispossessed to rest their weary bodies at a bus shelter,” he wrote, “we also make it impossible for the elderly, for the infirm, for the pregnant woman who has had a dizzy spell. By making the city less accepting of the human frame, we make it less welcoming to all humans. By making our environment more hostile, we become more hostile within it.”
There is an arguably softer side to this which every suburban motorist will know, though perhaps will not have thought much about; the phenomenon of landscaped pavements and, the corollary, pedestrians walking in the roadway.
It is obvious – and a delight, too – that as much effort goes into tending the pavement as the garden hidden behind the wall. But, beautiful as they may be, the beds of dietes and banks of plectranthus are not for walking on. In this way, kilometres of public space have been privatised – and the result, sometimes hazardous, is a distinct atmosphere of alienation for an undefined and quite disparate range of people, from domestic workers to runners, beggars to work-seekers, all of whom may well have a sense of not being at home there.
It is striking, talking to Bronwen Hunt, how many distinctions she herself draws between diverse categories of “homeless” people. There are those who want to work, there are those who just want the freedom of the streets… “they’ll be there all their lives and you don’t have to feel sorry for them, they know how to survive”. There are even some young people, she says, who pretend to be homeless so they can get into a shelter, “and in a week or two, they’re out jolling… until their parents track them down.”
But the loss, and suffering, of most homeless people is genuine, and the adjustments, the shared dispossession, are hard.
It’s tough, she says, the packed dormitory of the shelter a mix of souls, constant noise, arguments, despair, hilarity, people of sometimes abrasively incompatible backgrounds, and the constant challenge of overcoming one’s sense of worthlessness.
“You learn a lot… about yourself, too.” She recalls expressing disgust once at another woman’s table manners, “and I saw her turn to me with a look on her face that said: ‘What the frikkadel?’ So you try to learn from each other.”
Some are defeated by the experience, “but if you are a person to make the best of it, you come out of there so blessed… you can jive with anyone”.
In that way, “poverty is a huge leveller”.
“I have seen many dirt poor people give up the last of what they have to help somebody like me. And it kills me when I’m back in the suburbs and I have to listen to people complaining, and I think to myself: ‘You don’t know just how good you’ve got it, you have no idea.’”
Equally, they might be oblivious of someone they know being near to falling through the cracks: “It may be that person who doesn’t want to go to the birthday party… because the truth is she has no money for petrol, or for a present. She could be on the way to losing it all.”
It’s no surprise when Hunt says: “If I won lots of money, I wouldn’t hesitate, I’d open a shelter. And the key thing would be encouragement, from the time you came in the door, to make you feel you’re worth something, and to take away that feeling of rejection.
“It would be nice,” she muses, “to have a doorway with a sign saying, ‘Welcome, you are worth something. Please sleep here.’ That would be so cool.”
This insider’s impulse stands in stark contrast to what Andreou described as “unkindness that is considered, designed, approved, funded and made real with the explicit motive to exclude and harass”.
As if in reply to Andreou’s question, “Can our response as a civilised society really be limited to moving people on from our doorsteps?”, Hunt observes that when you’re homeless, “you cannot sit still… the world is not a friendly place.”
In a recent essay, The Entanglements of Humans and Things, archaeologist Ian Hodder writes that while “it is accepted that human existence and social life depend on material things and are entangled with them… there is a darker side to the entanglements of humans and things that is often missed (because)… our relations with things are often asymmetrical, leading to entrapments in particular pathways from which it is difficult to escape.”
It may seem perverse that the homeless person who has nothing feels this entrapment all the more acutely. Such people would cheer Hodder for arguing that the long view of “increased entanglement offered by archaeology and human evolution suggests the need to look deep inside ourselves and into what it means to be human.”
In light of the compelling milestone of 2008, when, for the first time in history, the number of people in cities overtook those in the countryside, any reappraisal of humanness must weigh the quality of urban life.
In this context, Andreou noted perceptively, it was ironic that the whole gamut of defensive architecture was failing in its “basic goal of making us feel safer” since “there is no way of locking others out that doesn’t also lock us in. The narrower the arrow-slit, the larger outside dangers appear. Making our urban environment hostile breeds hardness and isolation. It makes life a little uglier for all of us.”
If a home is a homely place, safe, nurturing, scaled to our humanness, it could be said that in cities of designed or even careless hostility, all are homeless.
Weekend Argus
* Michael Morris is a senior writer on the Cape Argus.