Poverty Olympic: Strategies of Banishment, Practices of Liberation for Unhoused Drug Users in Paris and Vancouver

Keywords: Radical housing; protest; resistance; Olympics; encampments
Abstract Type: Paper Abstract

Abstract

In 2023, Collectif SoCS Collective will be undertaking a comparative project tracing activism and resistance by anti-poverty, housing and drug users’ movements in anticipation of Olympic Games, and to articulate the effects of mega-events on unhoused drug users’ rights to the city and abilities to depend on public space for provisional shelter and survival. Drawing evidence from two “Olympic Cities” - Vancouver’s 2010 Winter Olympics and the upcoming Summer Olympics in Paris in 2024 - we demonstrate the necropolitical strategies of banishment and removal evolved to “sweep the streets” of unhoused peoples’ encampments, presences, and inhabitation of public space. Over the arc of a year, we anticipate that this project will involve developing opportunities for research and public events embedded in communities in these two cities, in order to facilitate both public awareness of these (often covert) governmental strategies, as well as knowledge exchange between activists and stakeholders in both cities. The project begins with preliminary research - archival and oral history of the “Poverty Olympics” organised in Vancouver by activist groups, and fieldwork with activists in Paris opposing ongoing (and evolving) strategies of decampment and removal. For this proposed session, we propose a presentation that will present preliminary findings and tell stories from the field in order to contemplate Olympics buildup as a time where both crisis and opportunities are articulated through the politics of the street, and to highlight how resistance was organized/will be organized from both sides and what changes resulted (if any) by these political actions.