From The House of Joshua: Mediations on Family and Place
...places are assigned by power relations, and the "quality" of a place is derived from the "quality" of people assigned to be there. The places of the poor are regarded as "bad" places, the places of the rich as "good" places, without regard for the actual constituent elements of the place itself. Thus, urban renewal can dismantle tracts of housing, simply by establishing that they are places where poor people live. The odd planning strategy of displacing the poor--without regard for where they will go--makes sense only in a model of the politics of place that assumes the poor are not entitled to a place, that they are, by appellation, placeless, and hence do not require dedicated territory. The growth of homelessness in the United States and the parallel growth in displaced peoples around the world support the sense that the politics of place has been transformed into a politics of no place. This is, essentially, a strategy of genocide, however cleverly it may be disguised.