Homelessness and nature across landscapes and disciplines: A literature review

Abstract

The complex social-ecological dynamics of homelessness in natural resource management have become increasingly apparent in recent years. Systematically understanding and engaging with these dynamics across sectors, disciplines, and landscapes has presented a conceptual and methodological challenge for both practitioners and researchers. Though some interdisciplinary research has expanded in recent years, the understanding it has fostered largely remains fragmented across disciplines, and its implications for practice are poorly understood. To help create connections across this fragmented dialogue, we reviewed 111 relevant academic journal articles, books, and reports across a broad range of disciplines. Across this literature, we observed an increasing focus on understanding homelessness drivers, impacts, and solutions through a coupled social-ecological systems lens, though key gaps remain. Research oriented towards urban studies, environmental justice, public health, political ecology, and Indigenous studies offered especially important methodological and conceptual innovations that promise to better confront and address justice in fluid, dynamic, and integrated social-ecological systems. We discuss opportunities for studies to better incorporate community concerns, attend to heterogenous homeless populations, apply multiple scales of analysis across disciplines, address market forces, incorporate diverse worldviews and researcher reflexivity, and address complex social-ecological challenges like climate change. To help mobilize around these needs and opportunities, we encourage researchers, practitioners, and people with lived experiences of homelessness to co-produce a research agenda, a process which could establish a shared foundation for increased collaboration across sectors and disciplines and identify priorities for better understanding and attending to the complex and contested challenges of homelessness across landscapes.

Citation

Land, Seamus R.; Derrien, Monika M. 2025. Homelessness and nature across landscapes and disciplines: A literature review. Landscape and Urban Planning. 255(4): 105254. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.landurbplan.2024.105254.