Race, Gender, Youth, and Urban Space: Young Men of Colour and Homelessness in the Greater Toronto Area

What are the relationships between race, gender, homelessness, and urban space? This research explores these relationships through the experiences of Canadian-born young men of colour in the Greater Toronto Area. Foregrounding their lived experience through ethnographic methods, I ask how does homelessness affect the lives of young men in different spaces of a large city and in relationship to race and gender? How do these young men’s experiences of the city help us understand the city? This research draws upon diverse bodies of theory in urban, cultural, feminist, and anti-racist geographies. I expand these literatures to illustrate connections between systems of socio-spatial domination such as racism, sexism, and classism. Through 40 interviews and 8 of what I call ‘Where-I-Live-Tours’, a tour of urban space I conduct with the participant, I explore the material and affective dimensions of space in the lives of these young men. By paying attention to the material and affective dimensions of homelessness, I illustrate how relationships between race, gender, homelessness, and urban space emerge in everyday experiences. In investigating the non-conscious affective dimensions of urban life, I combine representational and material understandings of the city to afford an understanding of the complex micro-geographies of urban space. I investigate the affective forces that shape how people live in the city, moving them through some spaces and attracting them and repelling them from others. Research findings indicate micro-geographic racial ‘vibrations’ that see race emerge differently around the GTA. Young men of colour also negotiate a variety of (in)visibilities in their lives in the city, including physical, imagined, political, and social. Their homelessness means they have atypical experiences of ‘home’ and they create multiple alternative forms of home or belonging. This research follows in feminist and anti-racist research traditions that examine marginalization and oppression to critique dominance and privilege. It allows us to see how marginalized actors can enact resiliencies and resistances and be creative and productive of identity and urban space. This research illustrates the multifarious relationships people have with city space and how an accumulation of forces shapes people’s everyday lives in the city.Ph