Bulldozed - by Jessie Speer (Hardcover)

About the Book

Jessie Speer interweaves an ethnographic account of the lives of unhoused people in Fresno, California, with an investigation of why cities across the United States have turned to what she calls the "bulldozer approach" to homelessness.

Book Synopsis

California sits at the epicenter of the US housing catastrophe. Across the state, unhoused people have banded together to build shantytowns and encampments, providing autonomy and communal care they can rarely find elsewhere. Yet the rise of encampments has been met with a new and brutal response, in which cities no longer simply arrest unhoused individuals but demolish entire neighborhoods of tents and makeshift houses.

Jessie Speer takes readers inside the encampments, interweaving an ethnographic account of the lives of unhoused people in Fresno, California, with an investigation of why cities across the United States have turned to what she calls the "bulldozer approach" to homelessness. She tells the powerful stories of people on the margins, painting a complex and detailed portrait of everyday life in the camps. Speer shows how a combination of profit, punishment, and prejudice drives the bulldozer approach in ways that mirror the demolition of informal settlements across the globe. At the same time, resistance movements have risen up to challenge displacement and dispossession, proclaiming that all people share a right to the city. Combining national data with more than a decade of on-the-ground research, Bulldozed exposes the violence of US housing politics and offers a vision of a more equal city.

Review Quotes

Through research in an encampment of homeless people, this book thoughtfully demonstrates the range of experiences of people who may become unhoused and of those who so often advocate for the demolition of such communities. The work connects us to people living outside as actual full human beings. Speer's book offers an important intervention into the possibilities of dignity and autonomy in the lives of unhoused people.--Vincent Lyon-Callo, author of Inequality, Poverty, and Neoliberal Governance: Activist Ethnography in the Homeless Sheltering Industry

About the Author

Jessie Speer is an assistant professor in the Department of Geography and Environment at the London School of Economics and Social Science. She previously practiced law in California, working at legal aid clinics assisting people experiencing domestic violence and eviction.