A place to find community: the role of autonomy and care in managed encampments
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper explores the longest ongoing managed encampment of people experiencing homelessness in Canada: A Better Tent City (ABTC). Located in Kitchener, Ontario, ABTC hosts 48 residents, with another 50 guests and visitors regularly on site. Since ABTC was initiated in 2020, several other managed encampments have emerged in Canada. Yet, as a relatively new policy intervention, little is known about managed encampments as a crisis response to homelessness in Canada. Drawing on survey data, interviews, and personal observations, we apply Orr et al.’s (2024. Beyond revanchism? Learning from sanctioned homeless encampments in the U.S. Urban Geography, 45(3), 433–459) sanctioned encampment typology (SET) to ABTC to understand ABTC’s role in homelessness service provision. We find that ABTC falls into the autonomy/care quadrant of the SET framework, a classification that challenges dominant, hierarchical models of homelessness management. Unlike the more prevalent control/care encampments, ABTC fosters a flexible, relational mode of governance grounded in mutual support, minimal rules, and high resident agency. At the same time, its location on marginal land and reliance on informal relationships underscore the limits of autonomy under insecure tenure. By examining ABTC’s model, we offer refinements to the SET framework and highlight the potential – and constraints – of grassroots, care-oriented encampments to expand conceptions of home and belonging.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.017 | 0.041 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.011 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".