Contribution short abstract:

Taking Berlin emergency shelters for unhoused people as a vantage point, I examine (in)accessibilities of vital infrastructures in the city. I follow the various collective bodies that emerge when un/doing health and sheltered space amidst housing crisis and welfare bordering.

Contribution long abstract:

In Germany, access to emergency medical services as well as to emergency shelter is, in theory, for everyone. In consequence, death and suffering of unhoused persons on the street are easily framed as individual tragedies rather than severe systemic failures to provide access to vital infrastructures. In this contribution, I draw on ethnographic fieldwork with staff in emergency shelters for unhoused people in Berlin to examine (in)accessibilities of vital infrastructures in the city. Demedicalizing health (Yates-Doerr and Carney 2015), I understand the shelter as a site of doing and undoing health. It is a place in which essential resources such as warmth, water, and food are provided, yet also a space of crampedness, contagion and shortage, positioned precariously and chronically makeshift at the margins of welfare provision and of the city.

I mobilize three examples of un/doing health at the shelter, that each trouble the notion of the shelter as a common space and health as a common good. First, Covid-19 protective measures, which conflicted with the fluctuating rhythms and crowded density of the shelter. Second, Hausverbot (expulsion), which challenges the notion of the shelter as universally accessible space. And third, the practice of calling medical emergency services, which exposes care gaps and highlights the layering of a medical emergency under conditions of housing emergency.

Along these limits and cracks of doing common health and sheltered space amidst housing crisis and welfare bordering, different versions of collective bodies emerge.