Evicting Manchester’s street homeless

In November 2015 Manchester Metropolitan University (MMU), along with the Whitworth Gallery and Home, Manchester’s new £25 Million arts center, hosted events for the Homeless Film Festival. They billed it as "the first festival of its kind, dedicated to confronting and presenting homeless issues". Just a short walk away from the Homeless Film Festival programme, MMU and Manchester City Council (MCC) were forcibly evicting The Ark - a self built informal settlement set up by homeless people in Manchester and home to some of the poorest people in the region.

This chapter explores how the major public sector players in Manchester have violently disrupted homeless camps behind a mask of progressive politics, exploiting the social conditions of austerity and using their control of public space to violently marginalise some of the city’s most vulnerable populations for their own ends.