Contours of a Spatialized Politics: Homeless Vehicles and the Production of Geographical Scale

Abstract

The Homeless Vehicle is a jarring intervention in the landscapes of the evicted. Designed by Krzysztof Wodiczko, a New York artist, the vehicle was first exhibited in 1988. The prototype was constructed in consultation with homeless men and subsequently women; it was first tested in the streets of New York's Lower East Side, then elsewhere in the city and in Philadelphia. An ongoing project, it has undergone continual revision and modification, and there are now four variants. Its design and development has been funded by several art galleries and public art councils as well as by the artist himself, but it is more than simply a critical artwork heavy with symbolic irony; the Homeless Vehicle is deliberately practical. Indeed it works as critical art only to the extent that it is simultaneously functional.1 In this symbiosis of the functional and symbolic object, the Homeless Vehicle reveals a vital dimension of a spatialized politics, namely the importance of scale. Wodiczko's Homeless Vehicle and the Poliscar that followed it vividly express this politics of scale, and I begin with a discussion of these projects. There follows a brief discussion arguing more broadly that we lack any sophisticated language of spatial differentiation, and this theoretical project is taken up in the third section where I elaborate upon a schematic theory of the production of scale.