Paper short abstract:

Regimes to dismantle unauthorised homeless encampments in North American cities constitute webs of exclusion from urban citizenship. Their advocates assert an illiberal right to the city and construct the homeless as an “internal enemy”, echoing other contemporary illiberal movements.

Paper long abstract:

Like cities across the American west coast, in recent years Seattle saw its housing crisis—already steadily metastasizing over decades—cross stratospheric new thresholds. Most conspicuously, unauthorised homeless encampments grew to a scale not seen in generations. In response, cities like Seattle have developed multi-million dollar regimes of urban enclosure, popularly called “sweeps,” to dismantle these encampments. This paper argues that, through juridical loopholes, extralegal Memoranda of Understanding, digital collusion with housed residents (via apps and social media), and outright dispossession by the police, these regimes construct webs of exception and exclusion from urban space and citizenship that force the unhoused into either quasi-carceral shelters or permanent mobility. Further, the resulting tensions have pitted campers and their advocates against NIMBY coalitions whose rhetoric often accuses the homeless of taking their city. Rhetoric in social and broadcast media campaigns, like “Seattle Looks Like Shit” and “Seattle is Dying”, asserts an illiberal right to the city on the part of homeowners, businesses, and conservative elites alike—one which constructs the homeless and their allies as an existential threat that Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt might have recognised as an “internal enemy,” comparable in tenor and content to other scapegoated communities singled out as political threats by analogous populist and illiberal discourses. This paper therefore argues that current antihomeless measures and coalitions echo in key ways both the contemporary rise of illiberal political movements in other arenas, and the current globalized, often urbanized crises of liberalism and capitalism that give rise to those movements.