Exploring homeless people’s identification with the city through visual and discursive narratives

Using a participatory qualitative approach and a people-place identification framework, this chapter explores the subjective relationship between homelessness and the city from the participants’ perspective. The empirical work focuses on Verona, a medium-sized city in northern Italy, and involves a purposive sample of 13 participants experiencing different forms of housing emergency. Homeless individuals were engaged as active social actors in data collection and interpretation. Participants portrayed their relationship with Verona through self-generated photographs and spoken narratives using a disposable camera, and later discussed the latent meanings in group settings. Findings show that their identification with the city encompasses relational, aesthetic, symbolic, emotional, affective, institutional and material dimensions, with only minor variations across groups. The city, as they perceive it, offers moments of healing within everyday urban experience. The study provides new insights into their vital needs, social aspirations and perceptions of the state in times of vulnerability.