Luisa T. Schneider
What does a city demand of a body when it refuses to let that body stop moving?
Exclusion, displacement, and hostile urban governance come together to regulate and criminalize through law, policy, and space. The effects of this governance on those targeted are lived sensorially. They accumulate in bodies over time and are enacted not only symbolically, administratively, or practically, but also through pain.
Learning from houseless people’s sensory navigation, and from sensory criminology’s attention to how punishment and control operate through the senses (see Herrity et al. 2021 [sensory penalities]), reveals that Western cities govern houselessness through what I conceptualize as deliberate nociception. There is a pervasive, intentional production of sensory pain that functions as a mechanism of regulation. This governance is not primarily enacted at the level of spectacular punishment, but through mundane, everyday encounters that keep people on their feet, in their shoes, and on the move.
From hostile architecture to deliberate nociception
Urban design disciplines and excludes through hostile and defensive architecture. Work on The London spikes controversy by James Petty (2016) or by Roland Rosenberger on Callous Objects (2017), among others, shows how benches, spikes, dividers, and sound deterrents communicate who belongs in the city and who does not. These analyses tend to frame hostility as deterrence, moral signalling, or behavioural modification.
If we follow where those who are so “deterred” go, however, we realize that hostile architectures and associated regulations are not simply about discouraging presence. They are about hurting. Pain is not a side effect of urban governance; it is the technique.
How does this work? In Leipzig, where my research took place, people experiencing houselessness are systematically prevented from sitting, lying down, or remaining still for extended periods of time. Public order regulations criminalize “lingering,” “camping,” or Lagern which includes sitting on a jacket, rearranging space for comfort, or resting in place. Benches are segmented, surfaces slanted, sprinklers installed, and classical music is blasted for hours near transport hubs. Together, these practices form an urban environment that produces pain through enforced standing, walking, and sensory overload. Because there are no alternative places available, houseless people are forced either to keep moving or to endure these architectures despite the pain they cause. This is governance through nociception: regulation enacted by targeting the body’s capacity to rest, recover, and withdraw from stimuli.
Limbs as sites of governance
Theoretically, I move away from the abstract notion of “the homeless body” toward limbs as the primary site of governance. Feet, legs, backs, arms, and hands are not metaphorical here; they are infrastructural. They are the means through which people move, carry belongings, access resources, and maintain a fragile sense of home wherever they are (forced to) go. For people experiencing houselessness, home is embodied, mobile, and continually under threat. Home exists in backpacks, shopping bags, and on the body itself. As a result, limbs become overburdened, injured, swollen, infected, and exhausted. The city’s regulatory apparatus targets these very capacities. By prohibiting sitting, discouraging stillness, and enforcing constant movement, urban governance undermines the bodily conditions that make survival possible. This produces a particular form of spatial violence that goes beyond exclusion from space or participation but encapsulates structural violence and denial of bodily possibility. The right to rest, to take off one’s shoes, to withdraw from sensory assault, is effectively reserved for those with access to private housing.
Sensory citizenship and the criminalization of rest
Implicit in these practices is the deeply entrenched assumption that sensory regulation belongs in the private sphere. Housing is imagined as the space where bodies recover from exposure, where shoes come off, where pain can be managed, and where sensory input can be controlled. Public space, by contrast, is designed for movement, productivity, and consumption.
Thinking with Arendt (1958), we can see how deeply entrenched this private–public divide is, how long its durée, and ethnography shows us how it continues to structure contemporary law and urban governance. What is at play here is a violence of non-acknowledgement. Sensory needs need not be actively denied to people experiencing houselessness; rather, those needs are rendered unintelligible once housing is absent. The city refuses to acknowledge and to compensate for what housing would ordinarily provide. The result is a form of sensory citizenship in which some bodies are entitled to stillness, comfort, and recovery, while others are governed through exposure, noise, cold, hardness, and pain. Rest itself becomes suspect, and stillness becomes criminalized.
Methodological intervention: attuning to hostility on the margins
My argument draws on a five-year sensory ethnography with people experiencing houselessness in Leipzig. Crucially, in interviews, collaborators rarely spoke about feet, legs, or standing. Pain was normalized, unremarkable, often unnamed. What made these dynamics visible was sensorial co-presence: walking long distances together, standing for hours, carrying bags, waiting, navigating surveillance, and being repeatedly moved on. Having learned from sensory ethnography (Pink 2015) and work in sensory criminology on thick sensory environments most notably from Jason Warr’s writing on being trapped during a prison fire (2010), I remained with people attending to their sensory worlds, until pain emerged as an unexpected analytic focus. I describe this methodological stance as attuning to hostility on the margins. It involves tuning into absence as much as presence: the absence of places to sit, to lie down, to recover; the repetition of movement; the accumulation of minor sensations that become debilitating over time. This form of attunement requires staying with the ordinary, the mundane, and the taken-for-granted, where violence often hides most effectively.
It also highlights how risk logics translate care into threat. For example, nail clippers which are essential for preventing infections are routinely confiscated as potential weapons, illustrating how individual bodily care is reframed as a security risk, echoing broader transformations of risk and responsibility in penality (Hannah‑Moffat 2005).
What this data does for sensory criminology
What do the experiences of houseless people’s urban navigation give sensory criminology?
First, they shift attention from spectacular or acute pain to slow, attritional harm. The pain documented here is chronic, cumulative, and often invisible, resonating with work on chronic pain as something that resists recognition and legitimacy (Johnson 2019). Second, they expand sensory criminology spatially. Rather than focusing primarily on enclosed spaces of punishment such as prisons, cells, or detention centres, they show how open city streets function as punitive environments, governing through exposure rather than confinement. Third, they redirect analytic attention from sensing places to sensing conditions of possibility: who is allowed to rest, to recover, to withdraw, and whose bodies are instead governed through pain. This invites sensory criminology to engage more fully with questions of urban governance, citizenship, and inequality. Attuning to hostility on the margins reveals that, through these forms of governance, houselessness becomes a condition of being kept in pain, on the move, and in one’s shoes. Sensory criminology allows us to see how cities govern through sensation and how suffering is not only produced but carefully designed and hidden in plain sight.
Luisa’s chapter on this subject can be found here: Schneider, Luisa. (2026) ‘Dispossessed realities Houselessness and spatial violence’, in the Routledge International Handbook of Sensory Criminology. Herrity, K., Sharma, K., Warr, J. & Umamaheswar, J. (eds.) Vol1, Section 6, chapter 19.
References:
Arendt, H. (1998 [1958]). The human condition. Chicago, University of Chicago Press.
Herrity, K., et al. (2021). Sensory penalities : exploring the senses in spaces of punishment and social control. United Kingdom, Emerald Publishing.
Hannah‑Moffat, K. (2005). “Criminogenic needs and the transformative risk subject: Hybridizations of risk/need in penality.” Punishment & Society, 7(1): 29–51. https://doi.org/10.1177/1462474505048132
Johnson, Mark. (2019). “The landscape of chronic pain: Broader perspectives.” Medicina, 55(182):1–19.
Petty, J. (2016). The London Spikes Controversy: Homelessness, Urban Securitisation and the Question of ‘Hostile Architecture’. DOAJ, 5(1): 67 – 81
Rosenberger, R. (2017). Callous Objects. Designs against the Homeless. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Pink, S. (2015). Doing sensory ethnography. London, Sage Publications.
Warr, Jason. (2021). Fire! Fire! – The prison cell and the thick sensuality of trappedness. In Sensory Penalities: Exploring the Senses in Spaces of Punishment and Social Control, edited by Kate Herrity, Bethany E. Schmidt and Jason Warr, 19–34. Emerald Studies in Culture, Criminal Justice and the Arts. Bingley: Emerald Publishing.
Other published works:
Schneider, L. T., et al. (2026). Agency Beyond Confinement: Rethinking the Relationship Between Agency and Structure in the Contemporary World, Routledge. Taylor & Francis.
Schneider, Luisa. (2026) ‘Dispossessed realities Houselessness and spatial violence’, in the Routledge International Handbook of Sensory Criminology. Herrity, K., Sharma, K., Warr, J. & Umamaheswar, J. (eds.) Vol1, Section 6, chapter 19.
Schneider, L. T. (2025). Love and Violence in Sierra Leone: Mediating Intimacy after Conflict. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. OA: https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/love-and-violence-in-sierra-leone/4A94801CE53AD8DE995BE149CBE2926B#fndtn-contents
Schneider, L. T. (2024). Imprisonment seeking among rough sleepers in Germany: Rethinking disciplinary and control society through a temporal lens. Carceral Worlds Legacies, Textures and Futures. H. Stuit, J. Weegels and J. Turner. London, NY, Bloomsbury: 127 – 144.
Schneider, L. T. (2023). Rape, ritual, rupture, and repair: Decentering Euro-American logics of trauma and healing in an analytic autoethnography of the five years after my rape in Sierra Leone. Ethos: https://doi.org/10.1111/etho.12392
Schneider, L. T. (2022). “Humanising Through Conjecture: Recognition and Social Critique among Houseless People.” Ethnos: 1-19. https://doi.org/10.1080/00141844.2022.2093932
Schneider, L. T. (2021). “Let me take a vacation in prison before the streets kill me! Rough sleepers’ longing for prison and the reversal of less eligibility in neoliberal carceral continuums.” Punishment & Society https://doi.org/10.1177/14624745211010222
Schneider, L. T. (2020). “Sexual violence during research: How the unpredictability of fieldwork and the right to risk collide with academic bureaucracy and expectations.” Critique of Anthropology: https://doi.org/10.1177/0308275X2091727
Schneider, L. T. (2020). “‘My home is my people’ homemaking among rough sleepers in Leipzig, Germany.” Housing Studies: 1-18. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02673037.2020.1844157
Sensory Criminology 