PUBLIC SPACE AND THE BANNING OF HOMELESSNESS IN COPENHAGEN. EVERYDAY SPATIAL PRACTICES AGAINST THE COMMODIFICATION OF LIFE

Sammanfattning: Since April 2017, legislation fining people in ‘encampments’ in public spaces was enacted in Copenhagen. This regulation was tightened by July 2018 be-coming an effective ban, where the subject of the fine was expelled from the administrative limits of the municipality. The measure comes as an ineffective way to deal with homelessness as it does not address the conditions that lead to it, working as a de facto ban on homelessness, displacing people from one local area to other, in a country where homelessness has been slowly but steadily rising (Benjaminsen, 2017). To analyse this phenomenon in what is deemed to be the post-welfare Nordic States in transition (Beaten et al., 2016), a series of interviews to different in-termediate organization representatives who deal with homelessness-related issues on a daily basis have taken place, as well as interviews with homeless and ex-homeless people. In addition, an analysis of official documents from Co-penhagen municipality linked to their urban life strategies for the period 2009-2015 and 2015-2025. The research is framed under the ideas of ‘actually existing neoliberalism’ (Brenner, 2002) encompassing austerity measures, rollback neoliberal ap-proaches to social services and the framing of neoliberalism proposed by Wacquant (2012) which stresses the penalization of society. These processes have been identified as enclosure strategies, which have been divided into strategies of the annihilation of space by law (Mitchell, 1997) and strategies of commodification, raising questions in relation to who has the right to the city and what is the place of the homeless in this new landscape. In this paper, I argue that the criminalization of homelessness forces homeless people to re-think their relation to public space and develop alternative spatial practices., not just as a form of survival but as well as tools of everyday resistance (Scott,1989).