We Live in Public

Written by unhoused people and their allies, We Live in Public is an invitation to revolutionary care in a time of class war.

Los Angeles is one of the richest and most unequal cities in the world, where nine unhoused people die every day. As rent rises, evictions increase, and houselessness grows, the homeless encampment becomes both a symptom of organized abandonment and a site of insurgent knowledge and practice. We Live in Public was conceptualized and written by residents and organizers of one such encampment, Aetna Street, whose experiences offer strategies for solidarity and survival in the face of escalating state violence.

Many people's worst fear is to be homeless, equating it with social death. But within the encampment, we see people living with wisdom and maps to offer. Throughout this book, Aetna residents and organizers generously share such insights and analysis. We Live in Public insists that these histories provide crucial lessons in modes of collective living and must be at the center of public history and knowledge.

Centering those who care for others on the street, it is an invitation to revolutionary care in the time of war. That war is the more immediate criminalization of homelessness and the longer arc of the unrelenting settlement of the US. We Live in Public is a refusal of such settler-colonial logics in the making of home and place.

Carla Belinda Orendorff is a community organizer living in the suburban hell of Los Angeles.

Anthony Geronimo Orendorff is a street journalist and multidisciplinary artist born and raised in the San Fernando Valley, Los Angeles.

Lupita Limón Corrales is a poet, artist, organizer, and language interpreter born in Sinaloa, Mexico, and raised in the San Gabriel Valley.

Ananya Roy is Professor of Urban Planning, Social Welfare, and Geography and the Meyer and Renee Luskin Chair in Inequality and Democracy at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is the founding director of the UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy, which advances research and scholarship on displacement and dispossession in Los Angeles and elsewhere.

Marisa Lemorande joined the UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy in 2018 as deputy director and has supported the Institute’s continued growth in public programming, open-access scholarship, community-centered collaborations, and philanthropic relationships.

Robin D. G. Kelley is Professor of History at the University of California, Los Angeles. His books include Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination; Africa Speaks, America Answers: Modern Jazz in Revolutionary Times; Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original; and Black, Brown and Beige: Surrealist Writings from Africa and the African Diaspora (coedited with Franklin Rosemont). His essays have appeared in a wide variety of publications, including Nation, New York Times, frieze, New York Review of Books, Hammer and Hope, and Boston Review, where he is contributing editor.

• Publisher: Common Notions
  
• Publish Date: November 17, 2026
  
• Pages: 272
  
• Language: English
  
• Type: Paperback
  
• EAN/UPC: 9781945335761
  
• Dimensions: 8.9 X 5.9 X 0.6 inches | 1.1 pounds
  
• BISAC: Social Science / Poverty & Homelessness
  Social Science / Social Work
  Social Science / Sociology / Urban