Begging and belonging in the city: a semiotic approach

Abstract

Citizens develop routine spatial enunciations through which they “domesticate” both the intensity of transition and the extension of distance implied by moving across a city and smooth out the frontiers between environments of belonging (e.g. home) and environments of non-belonging (e.g. the streets). Yet urban “accidents” constantly threaten the impermeability of such routine spatial enunciations. Beggars represent, from the point of view of citizens, an instance of such urban “accidents”. The primary goal of urban beggars is to intercept the routine spatial enunciations of citizens, stop them, and convince them to donate part of their money. In order to achieve these goals, beggars develop a series of micro-strategies that can be analyzed as both semiotic practices and urban performances. At the same time, citizens constantly reabsorb these micro-strategies in their routine spatial enunciations, pushing beggars to the elaboration of new strategies, and so on and so forth, in a continuous struggle between the citizens’ desire to protect their feeling of sedentary belonging and the beggars’ need to invade it. From this point of view, routines of sedentary belonging are a manifestation of power. But why are citizens willing to have their routine spatial enunciations through the city be stopped by all sorts of agencies (for instance, the commercial agency of advertisement), whereas they cannot wait to expel beggars from the urban landscape? Perhaps this discrepancy depends on the elimination of the spiritual discourse of charity from the urban arena?

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