‘Somebody’s street’: Eviction of Homeless Encampments as a Reflection of Interlocking Colonial and Class Relations
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Homelessness, as a construct, is premised on settler colonial technologies of land ownership and private property. Encampments, as one of the most visible forms of homelessness, compel us to confront how our socio-legal processes undermine human rights and perpetuate inequity and oppression. How municipalities engage in the legal governance of encampments, often through eviction, exclusion, and criminalization, is a result of interlocking colonial and classist political economies. Borrowing from Collins’ “matrix of domination” and Smith’s “ruling relations”, this article examines the management and ultimate eviction of No Place Like Home, a tent encampment in a mid-size city in Western Canada. Drawing on fifty-four interviews with people experiencing homelessness, law enforcement, and other community members, as well as legal documents that ultimately led to the eviction of the encampment, we unpack the political domination of encampments that legitimize and prioritize the desires and social position of the housed population over the human rights of encampment residents. We argue that in their efforts to retain public property as an exclusive commodity for housed people, political actors used three tactics through which to justify the displacement of unhoused people and ultimately the denial of encampment residents as rights holders: 1) the invisibilization of Indigenous Peoples, and Indigenous women specifically, experiencing homelessness; 2) the construction of fire safety in the encampment as a public concern; and, 3) the prioritization of perceptions of safety among the general public to the detriment of the safety of encampment residents. Illuminating the intersection of colonial and class-based regimes embedded in the legal governance of encampments provides an avenue through which to advocate for the human rights of encampment residents.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.028 | 0.050 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".