Elwood Authors Paper on Digital and Emplaced Struggles over Urban Homelessness
Posted: 11/26/2025 (CSDE Research)

CSDE Affiliate Sarah Elwood (Geography) published a new article in Digital Geography and Society, titled, “Computational urbanisms & insurgent mediations of the city: Stop the Sweeps.” Elwood theorizes 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, Elwood shows 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.