“…Homelessness, a core element of the new urban poverty (Mingione ), has been visited upon vast numbers of urban proletarians since the late 1970s, particularly in parts of the world's so‐called global North. In encountering homelessness, authorities have often opened up new, rescaled regulatory spaces in each city, and in so doing fragmented the national‐scale poverty regulation embedded in the welfare state—wittingly or unwittingly (Hayashi , , ). Lefebvre (:128) would call this mode of regulation “a simulacrum of decentralization”, because its creed has typically been to emancipate urban regulators, without emancipating radical urban practices, by accommodating the uneven spatial development of urban poverty along with two general lines of regulation: policing and work‐first (or “workfare”).…”