The Cardboard City Sleep Out: Performing Precarity for Middle-Class Youth

Unhomed, Unhoused, Homeless: An Interdisciplinary Conference, University of Notre Dame.

March 2024.

The cardboard shelter is one of the most recognizable images associated with housing precarity in American cities. Cardboard is both symbolically and materially central in the everyday lived experiences of many unhoused people. As such, the cardboard box has also become a prominent symbol in charitable initiatives meant to raise awareness of and funding to address homelessness. This paper examines the phenomenon of the cardboard city ‘sleep out’—a format of charitable event in which middle-class youth and families spend a single night in cardboard boxes. Organized by educational, non-profit, and religious groups, overnight sleep outs mobilize the cardboard box as icon and object of homelessness, endeavoring to cultivate empathy in middle-class children and youth through the performance of discomfort in inhospitable environmental conditions. The paper will consider how cardboard is variously figured as emblematic of housing precarity during these events, but also frequently positioned as a social ‘solution,’ in the case of design challenges meant to engineer inexpensive and durable portable shelters. Through this analysis, the paper will ask whether such charitable initiatives push toward social change or naturalize the structural conditions that make inequitable access to housing possible.