The potential for urban surveillance to help support people who are homeless: Evidence from Cairns,Australia

Introduction

Since Orwell’s 1984 (1949), the dangers posed by state surveillance to people whose lives deviate from prevailing social norms has been a recurring trope in critical social thought (Haggerty and Ericson, 2000). In recent decades, studies have highlighted the role of surveillance in efforts to ‘cleanse’ urban public spaces of their homeless patrons, as authorities seek to redevelop inner-city areas as sites of consumption and leisure (Coleman, 2005; Doherty et al., 2008; MacLeod, 2002; Raco, 2003). Here, surveillance is linked to the politics of urban ‘revanchism’ (Smith, 1996), wherein authorities seek to ‘take back’ inner-city spaces for ‘respectable’ citizens/consumers through punitive treatment of the homeless and other marginalised groups. The result of this revanchist politics is the exacerbation of social and economic inequalities, as the governance of homelessness comes to privilege the economic and aesthetic interests of the affluent over the wellbeing of the marginalised (MacLeod, 2002).

The literature on urban revanchism has made a meaningful contribution to our understanding of the capacity of surveillance to perpetuate disadvantage and inequality. However, its focus on the links between surveillance and punitive practices risks obscuring how surveillance also has the capacity to assist the homeless. This reflects a broader tendency in contemporary homelessness research to focus disproportionately on the punitive dimensions of homelessness governance; a tendency that recent research has begun to challenge (Cloke et al., 2011; DeVerteuil, 2014; Johnsen and Fitzpatrick, 2010; Laurenson and Collins, 2007). These recent studies demonstrate how punitive responses to homelessness are almost always coupled with genuinely supportive practices, as well as how particular practices, such as shelters, safe injecting spaces and even police intervention, might serve both revanchist and supportive ends.

In this paper, we contribute to this recent literature by demonstrating how surveillance practices in particular are articulated to supportive as well as punitive/exclusionary ends. We do this through an ethnographic study of homelessness governance in the regional Australian city of Cairns. Like regional cities in other colonised nations, such as New Zealand and Canada (DeVerteuil and Wilson, 2010; Kearns, 2006), Cairns is both a destination for tourists and a service centre for Indigenous people who temporarily and permanently migrate there. Many Indigenous people who travel to Cairns experience homelessness or other forms of visible poverty, which leads to concerns from urban authorities about the impact this has on the city’s tourism-dependent economy. We demonstrate that, whilst urban authorities in Cairns deploy surveillance practices to monitor and engage the homeless population, these practices do not exclusively result in the punitive policing of homelessness. Surveillance is also used to support social services to access and engage with people who are homeless, for example by using CCTV as a means to locate rough sleepers and to coordinate supportive street outreach activities. Active surveillance of people who are homeless is thus used, in part at least, to overcome barriers that people experience in accessing resources.

Our analysis is informed by Foucault’s (1995) insight that instruments of power, such as surveillance, are never merely punitive/repressive; they also have productive functions that make possible particular ways of being for the individuals subject to them. Whilst these productive operations of power sometimes contribute to forms of domination, they can also (often simultaneously) contribute to improving people’s lives. As Valverde (2011: 279) points out, ‘governance techniques do not necessarily have a built-in or default politics; more generally, technologies of governance … are not “married” to specific rationalities of governance’. With these points in mind, our analysis explores the functions of surveillance beyond the punitive/repressive politics of urban revanchism.

After reviewing the literature on homelessness governance, and describing our study site and methodology, we present a threefold analysis of the role of surveillance in the governance of homelessness in Cairns. First, we describe the punitive/revanchist functions of surveillance, noting how these are animated by concerns about ‘antisocial behaviour’ and the impact it has on the city’s image. Second, we detail how surveillance is also used to coordinate outreach services with the aim of overcoming the systematic barriers that prevent people from exiting homelessness. Third, we critically evaluate the support services that are coordinated by surveillance to demonstrate the kinds of benefits that surveillance helps to produce.

Surveillance, social services, and punitive approaches to homelessness

Surveillance, particularly CCTV, is one of a suite of techniques identified in the urban studies literature as contributing to a punitive approach to the management of homelessness. Studies have linked this punitive approach to what Harvey (1989) termed the ‘entrepreneurial’ turn in urban governance (Coleman, 2005; MacLeod, 2002). Entrepreneurialism entails city authorities deploying market-oriented governance strategies, such as developer-led urban regeneration, and the hosting of prestige events (e.g. international sporting events), to boost local economic growth and competitiveness in the context of globalised inter-urban competition (Harvey, 1989). These strategies place a premium on maintaining an ‘attractive image’ for a city to compete for tourism, investment, and high-income residents (Hall and Hubbard, 1996). Homelessness is seen to undermine these efforts at image making; thus the homeless are subject to a range of exclusionary and control-oriented practices, including CCTV and other forms of surveillance (Coleman, 2005; Doherty et al., 2008; MacLeod, 2002; Raco, 2003).

The threat homelessness poses to a city’s image is framed in terms of its impact on the aesthetic quality and perceived safety of urban public spaces. Concerns about homelessness often inform broader campaigns to tackle ‘incivility’ or ‘antisocial behaviour’, which portray the conduct of marginalised groups as offensive, confronting or intimidating to ‘ordinary citizens’ (which is usually code for the white middle-class) (Amster, 2003; Coleman, 2005; Smith, 1996). These campaigns target disruptive behaviours such as panhandling, along with a range of ‘normal’ behaviours that are problematised because they are done in public rather than private, such as sleeping, drinking or toileting (Mitchell, 1997; Walsh, 2011). Following Smith (1996), studies characterise these campaigns as a form of ‘urban revanchism’ wherein city authorities use punitive measures to ‘reclaim’ public spaces for ‘ordinary citizens’. Surveillance is identified as a key revanchist technique, alongside anti-homeless laws (e.g. laws outlawing ‘camping’ or begging) and urban design practices that exclude the homeless from certain spaces (e.g. anti-homeless spikes) (Coleman, 2005; Doherty et al., 2008; MacLeod, 2002; Raco, 2003).

The deployment of surveillance in revanchist campaigns has demonstrable negative impacts on people who are homeless. Surveillance increases discrimination against the homeless, as camera operators target people based on their physical appearance as much as on their behaviour (Lomell, 2002; Williams and Johnstone, 2000). Moreover, surveillance is used to coordinate punitive policing practices that displace people from the inner-city where support services and other resources are located, and where people’s relative visibility affords them a degree of safety (Laurenson and Collins, 2007; Walsh, 2011). These policing practices also increase contact between people who are homeless and the criminal justice system, which can further entrench their disadvantage (Stuart, 2016; Walsh, 2011). These impacts are often worse for racial minorities, as highlighted in Australia where Indigenous people who are homeless are more likely to be targeted for police attention and experience a higher rate of charges for public space offences (Walsh, 2011).

Most studies associate revanchist uses of surveillance with actors invested in imposing the entrepreneurial definition of the city – namely municipal governments, property developers and business owners – and the enforcement agencies that support them – namely police and private security (e.g. Coleman, 2005; Doherty et al., 2008; Raco, 2003). However, studies from the USA suggest that social services are also implicated in the exclusion of the homeless from prime urban spaces, and in their ongoing monitoring and control (Speer, 2017; Stuart, 2016). They describe how punitive policing practices are deployed to compel people to engage with support services, such as shelters or supported accommodation. Once engaged with these services, clients are subject to surveillance and control practices including extensive rules, mandatory participation in behaviour change programmes, room checks, and monitoring by CCTV and security guards. This leads Speer (2017: 529) to assert that, ‘[p]aradoxically, shanties erected in the public sphere often afforded homeless Fresnans greater privacy than dwellings provided by the city, in that residents were not subject to intrusive screenings or ongoing case management’.

There is, therefore, substantial evidence that revanchist approaches to homelessness governance aimed at maintaining a city’s image for entrepreneurial purposes are widespread and detrimental, and that surveillance plays a key role in these processes. However, there is also an emerging body of evidence showing that support-oriented approaches are deployed alongside these more punitive ones, but tend to be ignored in accounts of urban revanchism (Cloke et al., 2011; DeVerteuil, 2014; Johnsen and Fitzpatrick, 2010; Laurenson and Collins, 2007). For instance, Laurenson and Collins (2007) show that, whilst New Zealand local authorities do enforce anti-homeless bylaws, they are also focused on working with homelessness services, increasing emergency accommodation for women and providing social housing to people who are homeless. Similarly, Johnsen and Fitzpatrick (2010) demonstrate how, in the UK, punitive policing practices are combined with supportive interventions that aim ‘to ensure that any needs for accommodation, healthcare and/or substance misuse treatment were met’ (p. 1715).

Furthermore, DeVerteuil (2014) demonstrates how social services, such as shelters and safe injecting spaces, do much more than support revanchist objectives of containing, monitoring and disciplining people who are homeless, as suggested by others (Speer, 2017; Stuart, 2016). DeVerteuil (2014) argues that social services are driven by three ‘intersecting imperatives’. First, they operate as ‘spaces of abeyance’ that remove people who are homeless from prime urban spaces by providing alternative spaces, such as shelters, where people can be warehoused. Second, they operate as ‘spaces of care’ where people receive ‘moral support’ and assistance with issues related to accommodation, health and substance dependence. Third, they operate as ‘spaces of sustenance’ where people access resources to meet basic needs (food, shelter, clothing, etc.). Whilst the first imperative is consistent with the revanchist project, the other two exceed it. These imperatives usually coexist within a service or system of services; however, their relative weight varies between different geographical contexts, as DeVerteuil (2014, 2015) shows through examples from London, Los Angeles, and Sydney.

There is also evidence that punitive practices can themselves contribute to positive outcomes for people who are homeless, notwithstanding the negative outcomes discussed above. Johnsen and Fitzpatrick (2010) found that the combination of punitive policing and social service support – which they described as ‘coercive care’ –‘could lead to positive outcomes for some individuals engaged in street activities’ (p. 1715), in part because the punitive dimension prompted people to engage with services when they otherwise might not. Whilst some might question the ethicality of coercive care, Watts et al. (2017) contend that the ethics of homelessness governance ought to be assessed by what it enables people to achieve, not whether a service is completely voluntary. Their argument is supported by studies that demonstrate how homelessness prevents people from voluntarily accessing services. For example, Parsell et al. (2018) found that homelessness engenders practical and symbolic barriers to access and benefit from health and social services (e.g. lack of money or mobility, stigma from health professionals), whilst at the same time negatively impacting upon people’s health and wellbeing. They conclude that direct intervention and support are necessary to overcome these barriers and enable people to take autonomous control over their situations in the long term.

Two studies of how punitive/controlling practices can support people who are homeless have looked specifically at surveillance (Huey, 2010; Parsell, 2016). They show how surveillance can contribute to positive outcomes by providing a sense of security to the homeless, particularly when deployed in the (semi-)private spaces of shelters and supported accommodation. Parsell (2016) found that people living in single-site supportive housing in Australia valued the surveillance provided by a concierge because it provided them with a sense of security and control over their lives and personal relationships that they had lacked on the streets. Huey (2010) made similar observations in relation to homeless shelters in Edinburgh, Toronto and Vancouver, where a significant proportion of both shelter users and operators stated that CCTV surveillance increases users’ sense of security. Huey (2010: 73–74) also found substantial support for public place surveillance (CCTV) amongst both shelter users and service providers because it increased perceived or actual physical security; although several shelter users did not feel safer because of CCTV.

Whereas these studies show how surveillance can provide a sense of security to people experiencing homelessness, we explore how it is used to facilitate non-security objectives, such as the provision of services and resources. Furthermore, we demonstrate the potential for surveillance to assist in overcoming some of the barriers faced by the homeless to accessing the resources they need to improve their situations, whist acknowledging its continued capacity to facilitate exclusion and punishment. In doing this, we contribute to the broader literature on the relationship between punitive and supportive responses to homelessness.

Study site

Cairns is a regional city located in Far North Queensland – around 1700 km north of the State Capital, Brisbane – which ‘developed predominately as a tourism and lifestyle centre’ (Bohnet and Pert, 2010: 240). Tourism in particular has played a central role in the recent urban development of Cairns, following the establishment of the Cairns International Airport and the listing of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park and Wet Tropics Rainforest – both located just outside of Cairns – as World Heritage areas in the 1980s (Daly et al., 1996). The Cairns economy relies heavily on foreign and domestic investment in tourism facilities, and the consumption activities of tourists themselves, which in turn promotes a culture of leisure and adventure (Cairns Regional Council, 2012; Daly et al., 1996). Whilst the growth delivered by tourism is celebrated, the reliance on this industry is also a source of anxiety for local actors given its ‘[v]ulnerability to external market forces’ (Cairns Regional Council, 2012). This anxiety also manifests itself in discussions about the impact of the city’s large homeless population on its image and the experience of tourists.

The rate of homelessness in Cairns is 98 per 10,000 people, almost double the national rate of 50 per 10,000. ¹ Cairns’ homeless population includes a large number of Indigenous people, many of whom have travelled to the city from remote communities in the region. Cairns is the main administrative hub for Far North Queensland, which means that people from remote communities often travel to the city to access essential services, such as health, housing, education, and income support (Queensland Council of Social Services (QCOSS), 2016). Migration to Cairns is also driven by the high levels of social and economic disadvantage in remote communities (Phillips et al., 2013).

Many of those who travel to Cairns find themselves homeless, as housing costs far exceed the income support payments that many people from remote communities are reliant upon, and because the region ‘has a significant shortage of crisis, short-term and social housing options’, QCOSS, 2016: 12). Many also have issues with substance abuse, mental and physical illness and domestic violence that contribute to their homelessness (Phillips et al., 2013). Not everyone who is homeless in Cairns is Indigenous; and not everyone who is Indigenous and homeless is from a remote community. However, it is this group of ‘itinerant’ Indigenous people – or at least those assumed to belong to this group – who attract the most attention from the public, media and governmental authorities.

The disproportionate rate of Indigenous homelessness, together with its function as a service-centre hub for Indigenous people, locates Cairns as part of a wider phenomenon. In Darwin in Australia’s far north (Parsell and Phillips, 2014), Northlands in New Zealand (Kearns, 2006), and Winnipeg in Canada (DeVerteuil and Wilson, 2010), for instance, Indigenous homelessness and other forms of disadvantage are prevalent alongside a concentration of services that have developed to respond to the deprivation on display in the public realm. Indeed, these cities endeavour to mitigate Indigenous disadvantage through services, frequently operated by non-Indigenous organisations (DeVerteuil and Wilson, 2010), and at the same time promote their Indigenous culture and histories as a means to boost tourism. These cities are faced with the complex balance of articulating an homogenised image of indigeneity that is attractive to visitors (Amoamo and Thompson, 2010), at the same time as managing overt forms of Indigenous exclusion considered a blight on a city’s image.

Methodology

This paper is based on ethnographic research we conducted into service system responses to homelessness in Cairns. The ethnography examined the multiple ways that the problem of homelessness is understood and responded to, and the different actors, practices and discourses involved in these processes. Our research participants were people who were homeless (n = 4), or people who had recently exited homelessness and accessed housing (n = 8); a local council officer; a police officer; and social service and health service providers (n = 26). The latter group represented eight distinct organisations or government departments operating in Cairns. We purposefully sampled people on the basis of their professional roles in the Cairns service system, or because they were current or potential clients of homelessness services.

During three field site visits in 2016 and 2017, we carried out in-depth qualitative interviews, focus groups, and participant observation. The interviews and focus groups with service providers focused on how they understood the problem of homelessness in Cairns (including who experienced homelessness and what aspects of the phenomenon were most problematic); the aims and strategies that guided their service delivery practices; their relationships with other actors who engaged with the homeless population; and their experience of delivering services to people who are homeless. Our interviews with people who are or were homeless focused on their experience engaging with services (including police and council officers) and how the practices of service providers affected them. Nine of the participants were interviewed twice or more.

Participant observation was carried out on each field-visit to Cairns and focused on how the service system operated on the ground. This included shadowing outreach workers as they searched for people who were homeless in public spaces, and as they delivered services to people both in public places and in their offices. It also included observing the monitoring of CCTV by council security personnel. We conducted observations and interviews concurrently. Both methods constituted a means to examine how particular strategies for responding to homelessness were described as an ideal model, how they were enacted on the ground, and how they were experienced by both service providers and services users. Alongside our fieldwork, we also analysed local media reports to gain a sense of how the problem of homelessness was represented in the city’s public discourse, and the debates and concerns surrounding the issue. This provided important insight into the broader discourses that inform the work of service providers.

In-depth interviews were transcribed verbatim. We recorded our participant observations in note form that we transcribed soon after exiting the field. Both of these data sources, along with the news articles we collected, were analysed by both authors in an inductive fashion, using a thematic analysis strategy. The supportive function of surveillance in the Cairns service system was an unexpected finding identified through the inductive analysis of our data after our first field-visit, which we further investigated and refined through subsequent fieldwork and data analysis. We received full university human ethics approval and all participants provided informed, voluntary consent. To support the ethicality of our research we conducted all participant observations overtly, and we continuously advised people in fluid public places of our status as researchers. The names of participants have been replaced with pseudonyms to ensure the confidentiality of their contributions to the study.

Surveillance and revanchist responses to homelessness in Cairns

Although the contribution of this paper is to demonstrate how surveillance is used to facilitate service provision, we first show how a principal function of surveillance is to monitor and police the conduct of people who are homeless. Public debate around homelessness in Cairns is strongly influenced by revanchist discourses that associate homelessness with ‘antisocial behaviours’ that offend or intimidate tourists and residents. Particular concern is expressed about the behaviour of people from remote Indigenous communities, who some local actors refer to as ‘itinerants’. This group is associated with a range of antisocial behaviours in public discourse, such as public drunkenness, offensive language, fighting, and begging.

Concerns about the behaviour of people who are homeless are particularly prominent in media reports and the accounts of the politicians and interest groups that they quote. For example, in June 2016 the Cairns Post reports concerns of local business people that a food-van operating in the Central Business District (CBD) has created a hot spot for antisocial behaviour.

Property manager Danny Betros said that since the van, which gives out food to homeless and other people was shifted from Munro Martin Park to the City Library site, the ‘appalling’ behaviour of itinerants had become more noticeable and worse. ‘The large groups of drunks have been on the Esplanade most nights, drinking from soft drink bottles and fighting among themselves,’ he said. ‘The scenes are disgraceful. Their behaviour is disgusting. It’s the anti-social behaviour, the swearing, the drinking, the vulgar language and the fighting. It is very intimidating’. ‘The language and behaviour is appalling and so embarrassing for our city, especially right now with all of the (Ironman) athletes in town’ … ‘We struggle to get the CBD revamped and are trying to get life back in and we invite the itinerants to come into town’. (Dalton, 2016)

Another article from October 2016 quotes a local politician who echoes the concerns of business people about antisocial behaviour, relating the problem to the impact on tourists’ perceptions of Cairns.

Cr Bates said police needed support and he could understand the frustrations of business owners sick of offensive behaviour outside their premises. ‘It’s not a standard we should accept anywhere,’ he said. ‘We take a lot of pride in the CBD and how it appears to visitors’. (Mason, 2016)

Both reports emphasise the ‘antisocial’ quality of the conduct of people who are homeless vis-à-vis the moral sensibilities of business owners and the ‘visitors’ whose custom they rely upon. Not only is this behaviour seen to risk marring the perception of Cairns in the minds of tourists, it also threatens to undermine local entrepreneurial initiatives aimed at boosting the local economy; a concern which mirrors the findings of previous studies (e.g. Coleman, 2005; Raco, 2003). This is reflected in the first excerpt, where the business person quoted laments the negative impact of ‘itinerants’ on the place-marketing potential of the Ironman triathlon (an international sporting event), and the city’s efforts to ‘revitalise’ the CBD.

Surveillance of people who are homeless in Cairns is clearly oriented to this revanchist conception of the problem. Surveillance is primarily carried out by a Cairns Regional Council unit called ‘CitySafe’. The unit operates just under 200 CCTV cameras with the support of contracted private security personnel who operate the cameras, patrol the streets, and respond to incidents. CitySafe uses its surveillance capacity to detect, record, and facilitate a response to instances of antisocial behaviour. Describing CitySafe’s focus, a Council representative asserted that people who are homeless are ‘our biggest problem every month’. Examples of behaviour targeted include ‘public sleeping’, ‘public drunkenness’, ‘threatening behaviour’ and ‘begging’. ² In these instances, surveillance usually leads to a fairly standard enforcement response, such as moving on rough sleepers.

Our focus has predominantly been to try and remove the people in the early hours of the morning, if they’re sleeping outside businesses or inappropriate areas. You get generally police and security trying to move people on from these locations before the businesses come in [and] start having to complain. (Dwayne, Cairns Regional Council)

Although CitySafe will sometimes send its own security personnel to respond to antisocial behaviour issues, it often relies on support from the Cairns City Police, who have greater enforcement powers.

The Cairns City Police are also heavily invested in managing antisocial behaviour, particularly that committed by the homeless. In 2015 the police launched the Cairns Antisocial and Public Space (CAPS) team comprised of two officers whose sole function is to respond to incidents of antisocial behaviour. As Clive, a police representative, explained, the majority of the CAPS team’s enforcement work is targeted at the homeless population.

[It’s] the homeless cohort, the rough sleepers that engage in that behaviour. I’m not saying that no one else does it, there’s other people that do it, but [the CAPS team’s] concentration is that group of people.

The CAPS team works closely with CitySafe to proactively detect instances of antisocial behaviour. As Clive explained, they make regular use of CitySafe’s surveillance capacity.

So [we] have a crew starting at 6:00 am in the morning and the first thing they do is … a run to look for what location they’re at, whereabouts they are. We use the CCTV cameras available to us … So we use them to basically track them, engage with them, see if there’s any offences being committed, see what their behaviour is like.

The enforcement practices of CitySafe and the Cairns City Police, and the revanchist discourse that drives them, are consistent with the findings of previous research wherein surveillance is deployed to monitor the behaviour of the homeless, and to coordinate a punitive or exclusionary policing response (Coleman, 2005; Doherty et al., 2008; MacLeod, 2002; Raco, 2003). However, this far from exhausts the functions of CitySafe’s surveillance operations, which are also connected to a range of other agencies, practices and objectives, as we shall now demonstrate.

Surveillance and support services

Our fieldwork revealed that, whilst surveillance of the homeless in Cairns is articulated to punitive policing practices, it is also implicated in supportive responses to homelessness, such as coordinated street outreach. This more positive use of surveillance – which we shall describe below – is motivated by a recognition amongst local stakeholders that policing responses alone are unable to provide long-term solutions to the problem. For instance, a local politician is quoted in a Cairns Post article calling for a ‘holistic’ response to the ‘itinerant population’.

Cr Richie Bates said he was well aware of ongoing issues involving the itinerant population which has spiked in the past few weeks. He described them as ‘living lifestyles that were dangerous to themselves as well as other people’ and said the eventual solution would take a holistic approach involving multiple agencies and not just police responding to bad behaviour … ‘It’s just an outrageous situation of them being constantly moved on. We’ve got to go deeper than that’. (Mason, 2016)

Whilst the Councillor quoted in this article sees policing ‘bad behaviour’ as a necessary part of governmental response to homelessness, he asserts that it is ‘outrageous’ for policing to be deployed without a complementary social service response. This resonates with Johnsen and Fitzpatrick (2010) and DeVerteuil’s (2014) claim that policing responses to homelessness are often only deemed legitimate when they are combined with supportive responses.

The limitations of enforcement and the need for supportive responses are also acknowledged by the Council’s surveillance unit, CitySafe. Dwayne, the representative from CitySafe quoted earlier, stated that whilst policing ‘the antisocial side’ of homelessness is central to CitySafe’s remit, this cannot provide a long-term solution to the problem unless it is accompanied by the supportive work of social services.

We’ve got our core business, which is the security aspect, and that deals with the antisocial side of [homelessness]. So we’re out pushing somebody from one spot to another, but we’re not really helping the people, are we? We’re just pushing it from my house to your house to your house … And that’s how it exactly works, and that’s fine because you’re meeting an immediate demand from the complaints, but that has to also go along with the hard work from the services and the experts in that space … Because if we meet the needs of the people on the street and address those issues and we chip away at that, that reduces the problems.

Importantly, CitySafe’s endorsement of supportive responses to homelessness is not only about mitigating problems associated with the homeless population. According to Dwayne, it is also driven by a commitment to the rights of people who are homeless to occupy public space and to receive adequate support from government and voluntary sector agencies.

I’m the CitySafe officer. My job is to try and ensure the city is safe, not just for those [people], but for these people as well. These people have a right to be in this space, these people have a right to be able to express [themselves], and these people also have some severe problems that need to be addressed. So, for me, anything that we can do that works together, that makes everybody safer, is what we’re about. (Dwayne, Cairns Regional Council)

One way that CitySafe actualises these commitments is by using its surveillance capacity to facilitate the supportive outreach activities of local social services through an initiative called Cairns Assertive and Integrated Street-based Outreach (CAISO). CAISO involves support workers from two local services carrying out assertive outreach at dawn on a fortnightly basis. As we describe in more detail below, this outreach provides services with the opportunity to identify and build rapport with people who are homeless, provide them with short-term shelter options and health care, and/or enrol them in a local Housing First programme.

CitySafe contributes to the CAISO outreach by providing information to outreach workers about where they can find people sleeping rough. Dwayne explained that CitySafe personnel compile a list of where people are sleeping the night before outreach takes place, and then monitor people’s movements using their CCTV cameras.

So the guys will come on, they’ll make the list, and what we do is instead of moving them we’ll … leave them in place … [Then] they pass that information back to the CCTV … So they’ll let the CCTV guys know that at such a time this group is here, there’s four here, there’s three here, there’s one here, there’s two here, and they build a little list up.

The outreach workers then use the list compiled by CitySafe, as well as live updates from camera operators, to target their outreach activities, as explained by Milo, a homelessness service provider.

[We] collect the list and the walkie-talkie and then we’ll go out and hit those spots that they’ve identified … If they’ve identified a spot and they’ve started moving on they’ll let us know. So it’s pretty effective for things like that.

As well as facilitating street outreach, CitySafe also uses its surveillance capacity to assist service providers to link up with clients on a more ad hoc basis. For example, Milo spoke of a case where he sought the assistance of CitySafe to track down a client who was about to miss out on a vacancy in a supported accommodation facility because he could not be found.

I remember there was one guy whose house – Yeah, it was the last day that we could get him into [supported accommodation]. They’d held it open for a while and we went, ‘Right. [CitySafe], can you look?’ and [they] tracked him down … That one occasion it was, ‘Yep, he’s on the Esplanade near the barbecues.’ We’d been looking for him for two days and [the supported accommodation facility] – Well, they’ve got 10 days to fill that vacancy … So we went … found him, and got him signed up and got him in. (Milo, service provider)

In situations such as this, surveillance assists social services to overcome the challenges of distributing resources and providing services to vulnerable people with no fixed address. As Milo explained, surveillance helps make supportive practices such as outreach more targeted and efficient: ‘We do outreach, but I don’t want people just walking the street … I want it to be efficient and targeted and that’s what we got.’ Of course, improving the targeting and efficiency of service provision is not an unqualified good; rather, its value depends on whether service providers provide meaningful outcomes for people who are homeless, as defined by them. For this reason, we will now provide an analysis of the services augmented by CitySafe’s surveillance operations.

The functions of the services that surveillance supports

The value of strategies wherein surveillance facilitates the work of social services depends on the outcomes that those services produce for people who are homeless (Watts et al., 2017). As previous studies have noted, social services are sometimes implicated in the revanchist project of removing people who are homeless from prime urban spaces (Speer, 2017; Stuart, 2016). Our findings suggest that the Cairns social services that are supported by CitySafe’s surveillance practices do in fact contribute to this revanchist project to some extent. This is particularly true of a local ‘sobering-up’ facility used primarily by the homeless. Police will regularly transport people who are homeless and intoxicated to the facility instead of detaining them in the watch-house. With the assistance of CitySafe’s surveillance operations, the organisation also carries out daily outreach where staff engage people who are sleeping or drinking in public and offer to transport them back to the facility. As a service provider from another organisation explained, this outreach work is part of a broader strategy to limit visible rough sleeping in Cairns.

So the … bus would go around in the afternoons, pick all the rough sleepers up, because we’re doing a big thing in the city about not having so many rough sleepers. Everyone goes back to [the sobering-up] centre. (Stacy, service provider)

The sobering-up facility thus functions as a ‘space of abeyance’ (DeVerteuil, 2014). Although a positive alternative to police custody, the facility similarly functions to warehouse people who are homeless to mitigate the impact that their presence and behaviour have on other users of public space and perceptions of the city more broadly.

Notwithstanding this, consistent with DeVerteuil’s (2014) claim that social services are animated by multiple imperatives, we found that the services who made use of surveillance were also invested in providing genuine support for the homeless. First, the sobering-up facility provides people with temporary access to a bed, food and hygiene facilities free of charge. It therefore also operates as a ‘space of sustenance’ (DeVerteuil, 2014) where people can go to have their immediate needs met. People who are homeless are aware of this and therefore make regular use of the facility as part of their day-to-day survival strategies. Indeed, many people use the sobering-up facility as a quasi-homeless shelter. During participant observation, we observed people congregating in the CBD and waiting for outreach workers from the facility to come and collect them; and several people we interviewed stated that they sleep at the facility on a regular basis, with one man stating that he had been staying there on-and-off for ‘a couple of years’.

Second, alongside the sobering-up facility, CitySafe also facilitates the outreach work of another charity organisation who provide specialist housing support for people who are homeless. This service employs a ‘Housing First’ approach (Padgett et al., 2016) wherein they prioritise accessing secure, long-term housing for people who are sleeping rough or experiencing chronic homelessness. As well as participating in CAISO outreach, the service’s case workers assist clients to prepare and apply for housing (attaining necessary documentation, attending to outstanding debts, etc.), advocate on their behalf to community and public housing providers, and provide ‘wraparound’ support to clients once they are housed (e.g. teaching cooking skills, or the management of personal finances). The service has also recently employed a small team of clinical health workers to assess clients’ unmet health needs, provide in situ health services (e.g. wound care), and facilitate clients’ (re)engagement with mainstream health services.

In these ways, the service functions to create what we might call, following DeVerteuil (2014), ‘spaces of care’. However, the service provides a form of care that exceeds DeVerteuil’s (2014) somewhat narrow conception of it as practices focused on supporting people to endure their homelessness, for example by providing ‘sanctuary, moral support and essential subsistence needs’ (p. 881). Indeed, the service described here strives to overcome the systemic barriers that people who are homeless face in accessing housing and other valuable resources such as health care. As such, they do far more than simply support people; they seek to circumvent the structures that make and keep people homeless. We therefore extend DeVerteuil’s (2014) notion of care to reflect this.

The care work carried out by the Housing First team is highly valued by other actors involved in the homelessness service system. Dwayne from CitySafe stated that the Housing First team is ‘probably one of the most valuable resources that we’ve got’. Another service provider discussed the value he derives from having the Housing First team’s health workers participate in street outreach.

It’s been such an advantage [having them on] outreach, to have a look at wound care. Scabies is a big thing for us. So to have them guys on-hand, look at it, check it out. Working with them, advising me – because I can see if something is wrong, but they’re the experts and I get them to advise me what needs to happen. (Joseph)

Statements such as this reflect a common perspective reported by service providers that the Housing First team performs an essential care function in the Cairns homeless service system; one that goes beyond containing people in abeyance or even providing immediate sustenance.

Crucially, clients of the Housing First service also stated that they valued its care practices and the outcomes it helped them to achieve. They described how the service had assisted them in overcoming the systemic factors that contributed to their homelessness. Manny, who spent around five years sleeping rough with a serious mental illness before being housed through the Housing First programme, described how its case workers helped him navigate various practical and institutional processes that he felt incapable of doing himself at the time due to his illnesses and disconnection from ‘normal’ social practices.

When I needed a new Medicare card they took me to the Department of Human Services. I never would have even found the shop, let alone scored a new Medicare card. Their local knowledge, plus they have the knowledge of government services and business that I have no knowledge of … [My case worker has] been invaluable, helping me look for furniture, helping me buy a wallet and stuff … I was unaware how complex society is for people who are critically ill like I was. It was necessary assistance. (Manny, male, non-Indigenous)

Other participants described the value of the support that they received from the Housing First team’s health workers. Eliza, an Indigenous woman who along with her partner, Neil, had been housed through the programme, described how a health worker visited her daily to attend to a wound on her foot, stating ‘He always come every day to do my dressing.’ The wound had become infected through neglect and because Eliza was forced to constantly walk on it when she was homeless. However, following the advice of the health worker, and enabled by her newly acquired apartment, Eliza limited the amount walking she did, as she and Neil explain in the following interview excerpt.

Another client, Craig, explained the benefit of having a health worker from the Housing First team attend his medical appointments with him.

It definitely was a help, because I have trouble with concentration now as well and trying to remember stuff. The doctor’s trying to say, ‘Look, do this and that.’ Like, I’m just not organised. [The health worker would] be jotting notes down and doing all sorts of stuff like that, addressing certain criteria that needed to be addressed. I’m embarrassed to say it, but I’m a bit of a scatterbrain these days, mate. My brain’s just all over the place. He’s been a huge help. (Craig, male, non-Indigenous)

As well as helping people navigate complex welfare and health institutions, the Housing First team achieved impressive housing outcomes for their clients. According to research commissioned by the service provider, between 2010 and 2016 it secured housing for over 70% of its clients, 88.22% of whom maintained their tenancies at least until they were exited from the programme. Participants reported that securing permanent housing had an immense positive impact on their lives. Craig, who lived in the back of his utility vehicle for two and a half years, described the impact that achieving stable housing had on his life as follows.

Now that I’m here I’m just really, really glad at the way it all fell into place, mate. You’ve got a roof overhead, dry, you’ve got the kitchen – all the stuff that people take for granted – a shower, bed, fridge, everything. I just think, ‘Fuck.’ After living two and a half years in a truck, mate, this is a palace … It was good for me to find happiness with just me. It made my world something that I never thought I’d have again.

Craig’s experience is consistent with the Housing First literature which demonstrates that targeted street outreach linked to secure and affordable housing constitute the necessary ingredients to enable individuals to make immediate exits from homelessness to housing (Padgett et al., 2016).

It is clear, then, that the services supported by CitySafe’s surveillance practices do much more than assist in removing the homeless from prime urban spaces (cf. Speer, 2017; Stuart, 2016); they also provide valuable support in the form of care and sustenance (DeVerteuil, 2014) that enables people to survive on the street and to overcome systematic barriers to exiting homelessness. As we demonstrated in the previous section, surveillance plays a small but beneficial role in the provision of these supportive outcomes by facilitating the outreach activities of support services, thus enabling them to deploy their limited resources in a more targeted and effective manner.

Conclusion

It is clear from our findings, and those of numerous earlier studies (Coleman, 2005; Doherty et al., 2008; MacLeod, 2002; Raco, 2003), that surveillance is implicated in revanchist responses to homelessness that employ punitive practices to exclude marginalised people from prime urban spaces. However, we have demonstrated in this paper that surveillance can also be deployed to facilitate supportive responses that aim to help people who are homeless overcome the barriers to accessing services and resources. Our findings show how surveillance can be used to augment the outreach activities of social services by providing them with valuable information about where people who are homeless are sleeping or hanging-out. This allows service providers to operate in a more targeted and efficient manner, which in turn facilitates people who are homeless in accessing services and resources that they might otherwise have missed out on.

It is important to emphasise that we are not claiming that surveillance is some kind of panacea for homelessness or that it will necessarily lead to positive outcomes in each and every context. The value of surveillance in homelessness governance is contingent upon the extent to which it facilitates supportive rather than punitive interventions. As previous studies show, the combination of surveillance with punitive policing can further disadvantage people who are homeless (Doherty et al., 2008; Lomell, 2002; MacLeod, 2002; Williams and Johnstone, 2000). Notwithstanding this, we would stop short of completely denouncing combined surveillance–policing responses; for, as Johnsen and Fitzpatrick (2010) show, a degree of enforcement can prompt people to engage with support services and achieve outcomes that they themselves consider beneficial. For us the question is, rather, what type and quantity of enforcement is required to optimise supportive outcomes, and what role should surveillance play in the facilitation of these enforcement responses? Further research is required to answer this question.

We also stress that the supportive value of surveillance is contingent upon whether the support services it facilitates produce meaningful outcomes for people who are homeless, as defined by them, and do not only function to contain them or subject them to moralistic and disciplinary interventions, as has been observed in some American studies (Speer, 2017; Stuart, 2016). Our findings suggest that surveillance will have the most value when it is articulated with programmes based on Housing First approaches that have been shown to help people to permanently exit homelessness (Padgett et al., 2016).

In terms of theoretical import, our findings suggest that critical urban scholarship should take heed of Foucault’s insight that instruments of power are productive as well as repressive (Foucault, 1995), and that they have no essential function or politics (Valverde, 2011). We therefore should be wary of theoretical accounts that posit a necessary relationship between practices such as surveillance and particular political discourses/rationalities, such as urban revanchism or entrepreneurialism. Whilst surveillance is often articulated to revanchist discourses and objectives, including in Cairns, our empirical work demonstrates how it can also serve other, more supportive functions that are often missing from prevailing critical narratives (DeVerteuil, 2014). Highlighting these supportive functions has important implications for the politics of homelessness research and urban studies more broadly. For, it enables us to move beyond denunciatory critique of revanchist politics and point to how existing governmental practices can be reconfigured and reoriented to support marginalised groups. Cities in the developed world have already made significant investments in surveillance infrastructure using public money; once we realise that this infrastructure has no fixed essence or function, it makes sense to seize these public assets and harness them to progressive political objectives, such as helping provide supportive responses to the homeless.