Matthew Marr, PhD

I am an Associate Professor of Sociology in the Department of Global & Sociocultural Studies and the Asian Studies Program at Florida International University. My research focuses on homelessness in the US and Japan, exploring how urban marginality is shaped by social conditions operating at multiple levels, from the global to the individual. My first book is Better Must Come: Exiting Homelessness in Two Global Cities (Los Angeles and Tokyo) published by Cornell University Press.

I am leading the “US-Japan Service Hub Network,” an intellectual exchange project with scholars and practitioners working in service hubs in the US and Japan. Service hubs are neighborhoods where street homelessness, housing programs, aid efforts, and social movements concentrate. We are completing an interdisciplinary and multivocal volume called From Containment to Community: How Service Hub Neighborhoods Fight Abandonment in the United States and Japan. We argue that contrary to their notorious reputations, “skid rows” (yoseba or doyagai in Japanese) can serve as service hubs that sustain life and resistance in the face of displacement through multiple safety nets helping marginalized people meet survival, social, spiritual, and civic needs. This project has been funded by the Japan Foundation.

Here are links to the Neighborhoods of Refuge PhotoVoice digital gallery and film from a collaborative project in Overtown, Miami.

I am also a founding board member of the Miami Coalition to Advance Racial Equity (MCARE), an organization that aims to advance racial equity through advocating and organizing on issues of homelessness, health care, and civil rights.

Please follow me on Twitter (@mmarrvelous).

Recent research article on the Covid-19 pandemic and homelessness

Kaila Witkowski, Matthew D. Marr, Natália Marques da Silva, and John Vertovec (2023). “Safe but Stifled: Assessing the Impact of Space and Place on Risk and Adaptive Response among Shelter Residents During the Covid-19 Pandemic,” Health & Place (early online)

Recent research article on public assistance and homelessness

Hiroshi Goto, Dennis Culhane, and Matthew D. Marr (2022). “Why Street Homelessness Has Decreased in Japan: A Comparison of Public Assistance in Japan and the U.S.,” European Journal of Homelessness 16:1(81-99).

Recent research articles on spirituality and homelessness

Matthew D. Marr and Natália Marques da Silva (2022). “Religion’s Roles in Community Integration After Homelessness: Supportive Housing Residents’ Uses of Spiritual Practices amid Trauma, Discrimination, and Stigma,” Housing Studies (early online)

Marr, Matthew D. (2021).“The Ohaka (Grave) Project: Post-secular Social Service Delivery and Necropolitics in San’ya, Tokyo,Ethnography, 22(1):88-110.

Recent research articles on service hub neighborhoods

Marr, Matthew D. (2021) “Finding Security in Skid Row: Organizational and Social Ties in Service Hubs of the United States and Japan,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 693(1):301-320.

Geoff DeVerteuil, Matthew D. Marr, and Johannes Kiener (2022). “More Than Bare-Bones Survival? From the Urban Margins to the Urban Commons,” Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 112(7):2080-2095.

Geoff DeVerteuil, Matthew D. Marr, and Johannes Kiener (2022). “Managing Service Hubs in Miami and Osaka: Between Capacious Commons and Meagre Street-Level Bureaucracy,” Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space, 40(6):1256-1271.

Recent research article/chapter on gentrification

Marr, Matthew D. (2020). “Gentrification, Machizukuri, and Ontological (In)security: “Bottom Up” Redevelopment and the “Cries” of Residents in Kamagasaki, Osaka,” pp. 291- 313 in Jerome Krase and Judith N. DeSena (Eds.) Gentrification around the World: Gentrifiers and the Displaced. New York, NY: Palgrave.

マー・マシュー (2018).「ジェントリフィケーションと住まいの状況と不安:西成特区構想と地域の変化に対する釜ヶ崎住民の叫び空間社会地理思想 21:3-14.