It is all about George : Acts of Homefullness
This chapter, ‘It Is All About George: Acts of Homefullness’, traces the life and death of a man known only as George, who made a bench his home. Through his daily rituals – opening an invisible door – George enacted what this chapter calls Acts of Homefullness: small, deliberate practices of belonging and care that persist within conditions of exclusion. Using George’s story as a narrative thread, this chapter situates homelessness within broader social and spatial processes. It examines hostile architecture and exclusionary urban design as instruments of moral geography, drawing on homelessness research and Teresa Gowan’s framework of sin-talk, sick-talk, and system-talk to show how societies explain, pathologise, or moralise poverty. By weaving ethnographic storytelling with critical analysis, this chapter argues for a reorientation of attention – from what the homeless lack to what they make. In the fragile, everyday architectures of care that George created, we glimpse the enduring human capacity to build home in even the most precarious spaces.