Computational urbanisms & insurgent mediations of the city: Stop the Sweeps

Abstract

This paper considers digital and emplaced struggles over urban homelessness, specifically the computational and sociospatial politics of municipal systems of tent encampment removal and of the efforts of autonomous collectives to resist sweeps and support encampment dwellers. I theorize municipal systems of tent encampment removal as a form of administrative-algorithmic governance structured around the logics and practices of computation urbanism and trace their entanglements with liberal poverty governance. Through a close reading of the City of Seattle's encampment removal system, I show how these overlapping logics enable a tightly integrated self-referential system of datafication, problematization and justification that overdetermines the removability of encampments and reaffirms property and propertied personhood as (the only) legitimate basis for claims to space and permanence. My analysis takes seriously ongoing calls for orienting to the incompleteness of such computational rationalities, reading for the presence and significance of insurgent mediations that refuse these logics and generate other possible urban futures. To this end, I read the digital activism and mutual aid work of a local collective known as Stop the Sweeps Seattle as insurgent mediations of the city, examining the social and spatial claims they advance in visual and narrative representations circulated via social media. My analysis of Stop the Sweeps Seattle's content reveals a public archive of sweeps that refuses dominant computational and poverty governance logics and circulates already-existing possibilities for urban inhabitations anchored around solidarities, mutual support, and staying put.

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