The end of 2017 saw the release of Robert Rosenberger’s new book, Callous Objects: Designs Against the Homeless, with University of Minnesota Press.  The book is a short and polemical critique of the ways that cities design the objects of public spaces to push homeless people out of view.  With a focus on everyday public-space objects, like benches, garbage cans, and fences, Rosenberger highlights a pervasive strategy adopted by cities to hide the problem of homelessness through the re-design of public space.  He argues that this anti-homeless design trend works in accord with a variety of laws that cities pass to target homeless people, laws which homeless advocates claim make homelessness itself a crime.   

The book includes a catalog of many of the design strategies that target homeless behaviors, an analysis of anti-homeless laws, and an exploration of many specific cases, from anti-camping laws, to anti-homeless spiked ledges, to homeless advocacy art projects.  To think further about these issues, Rosenberger draws ideas from social theory, political philosophy, phenomenology, and feminist epistemology.  This pocket-sized book is written for a widely interdisciplinary audience.

See: https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/callous-objects

The book can be read online through the publisher’s Manifold project here:   https://manifold.umn.edu/project/989de0b5-8cc2-4e53-bbd9-98bad8ba3b43

For a selection of Rosenberger’s previous academic and public writing on the politics of public space see:

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00146-016-0674-3

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10746-014-9317-1

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/08/trump-tower-and-the-question-of-public-space/494027/

http://www.creativeloafing.com/news/article/13081526/the-politics-of-park-benches