An increasingly prominent and disturbing feature of ‘life in capitalist ruins’ (Tsing, 2015) are encampments of homeless people, slums and shantytowns in some of the world’s supposedly most prosperous cities. In Paris, the birthplace of modern democracy, homelessness is rife amongst destitute sub-citizens who live extremely precarious lives. At the beginning of 2019, an unofficial camp near the AI motorway at Porte de la Chapelle was occupied by about 800 homeless people. In a smaller camp at Porte de la Villette, a group of mainly Sudanese migrants were ‘camping out literally in the middle of a roundabout, surrounded by traffic fumes, rubbish and rubble11’. Since then, police have removed these people forcibly. Camps of the destitute have become a routine feature of the urban landscape of the cities of the United States of California, which accounts for half of the country’s homeless population. There too forced demolition of camps has also become routine. In a news bulletin on the bulldozing of the assortment of shacks and tents in Oakland known as ‘the village’, one former resident is reported as saying ‘I think it helps clean up the garbage, but we’re not garbage22’.