It’s not as easy to be a free spirit as it used to be. These are the posted rules for Tent City in Oppenheimer Park, two blocks from my house.
Tent City Rules @ Oppenheimer Park
by Mobilizing Mouse on FearlessCity
Tent City Rules
raincoaster
49 degrees latitude, 360 degrees attitude!
raincoaster 
Well if the neighbours adhere to those rules i want to emigrate immediately :-)
You know, it’s probably a lot more civilized than where YOU went camping.
Also: you could translate for the guy who took the photo. He has one of those posh accents too, and I can hardly understand a word he says.
Oh my God. The whole point of living in a tent is to live outside the constraints of society. What are they thinking?
Well, in that particular place they’re living in tents primarily because they can’t afford housing, but there are also so many (tent CITY) that they need rules, and a way to exclude people who don’t obey them.
Yet another example of the fact that freedom isn’t really about the self; it’s about other people. Peculiar. And disappointing.
The relationship between freedom and safety is a complicated one, I agree. So’s the question of what constitutes public and private space when people are homeless.
I’ve worked with the tent cities that have come up in Vancouver over the years. Keeping drug-related trouble to a dull roar is a significant problem. And while I’d certainly argue that someone can smoke all the rock they want in the apartment next door to mine, the effect would be somewhat different if they were smoking it in the next tent, which creates real risk for the other people in the encampment. So they develop these rules in order to protect themselves from theft and violence: to some extent from other homeless people, but primarily from the cops, who are looking for any excuse to move in and bust heads.
I’d dispute the last statement there; they ARE looking for any excuse to lock these people up, but if they’re gunning for a fight it’s much easier to take someone on in a quiet alley, which is how Blood Alley got the name in the first place, than to wade into a group of maybe thirty people and start something.
So many things which are assumed to be fundamental human rights, like the concept of privacy, simply don’t exist in the absence of a critical mass of other people. The concept of privacy evolved when people started living in large cities, so large as to form a panopticon, should all the information everyone had about you be correlated. Well, now it can be.
The thing about Panopticons is, when there is always someone watching you and you know it the crime rate goes way down. Which is good. But the rate of violent insanity increases by something like 300%. Which is bad. Add crack and you get something beyond imagining.
Cops in Washington DC have a technique they call “the self-cleaning oven” which is that they essentially isolate a place, lock down the borders, and then wait it out while the violence within that lawless region reaches a critical pitch. Eventually, everyone who is going to die from drugs and violence HAS died, and then the streets calm down and the cops move back in.
For a long time in the Eighties and Nineties, this was the attitude towards the Downtown Eastside as well, and cops who didn’t get with that program got it rough from HQ. Just ask Kim Rossmo.
I agree that Oppenheimer isn’t the optimal place for the police to move in swinging truncheons, but that didn’t stop them at Woodwards, you know?
Funny that you mention the Panopticon – a couple of nights ago my friend and I were discussing the role of supported housing in extending the panoptic powers of the state. The context was a comment by a friend of mine who’s addicted to crack. He lives in supported housing, but he won’t use at home because there’s always someone at the front desk to see when he goes in and out, and they’ll know what he’s up to. That offends his sense of privacy and makes him very uncomfortable, so he smokes in relative privacy of…you guessed it…the alleys.
Those of us in regular apartment buildings, however, can enjoy our drugs in relative peace.
I could talk a lot more about housing and drugs and being constructed as an addict and what that means, but it’s Saturday and I’m going to drink wine and see Mongoose at the Railway club. Maybe something coherent later.
Ah, but living in an apartment does NOT mean you can use crack in privacy. If my neighbors smoked it, I’d know. When my neighbors smoked pot, I knew. Apartment buildings give only the appearance of privacy, not the actuality of it. Your downstairs neighbors know when you’re having sex, because they can hear it. Your next-door neighbors know when you’re having a party, because they hear everyone in the hallway…
The APPEARANCE of privacy is where the sense of comfort comes from, which is one reason I generally don’t say what I could about the limitations and how exposed people actually are. I refer you back to that violent insanity statistic.
If you want to see the illusion of privacy in full swing watch cars at a stop light.
Yeah, if you want the illusion of privacy come the UK, we’re packed tighter than sardines in a can. No wonder we’re so miserable.
That’s true. I don’t know why the island doesn’t sink!
And max, you’re right; the number of people I’ve seen in cars picking their noses is shockingly large. It makes me glad they invented tinted windows.
I’m going to donate some camping equipment. Rain, just because your Neighbour “knows” whoopie-ding! What could you say about them? What if they even squealed ? Paranoia will destroy ya! ‘Famous last words’!