Melora KOEPKE, Simon Fraser University, Canada
Muriel FROMENT-MEURICE, Université Paris-Nanterre, France
Démantèlement is a French term (akin to “camp sweeps” in English) to describe the destruction and removal of encampments inhabited by marginalized people in cities. In this paper, we theorize démantèlement as more than merely a necessary and banal feature of urban governance of public space. We argue that it actually constitutes domicide, violent processes of un-homing that involves egregious destruction of private property through strategies such as tent-breaking and the “evacuation” of inhabitants that can be understood as political technologies of socio-spatial control in which the destruction and removal of material survival structures underscores the “undesirability” of their inhabitants and entrenches their exclusion. Drawing from research undertaken separately by the authors between 2011-2019 in the north of Paris, we consider démantèlement from the vantage points of the encampments and their inhabitants as well as from the city officials and workers who engage in removing them. We begin by exposing paternalistic discourses of humanitarianism and “undesirablility” that foreground a concern for “best uses” of certain urban spaces - i.e. financialization - through which certain populations are banished from the city. We then demonstrate how these processes of forcibly removing provisional shelters also perennializes them by locating the cause multiple ongoing “urban crises” in the materialities of encampments and the bodies of inhabitants rather than the insufficiencies and failures of the State. We conclude by proposing that encampments themselves can be understood as forms of endurance, futurity and dwelling-otherwise that work to mitigate the violence of the permanent temporary. Our contribution to this session focuses on démantèlement as a form of dispossession that entrenches spatial injustice, and on encampment inhabitants’ rights to presence and to remain in the city as a less-examined form of urban spatial justice and rights to the city and to life.
Mots clés : Disposession|Urban Migration|Encampment|Urban Politics |Domicide
A104108MK