Letting Die in the Warming City: AI, Leisure, and the Biopolitics of Urban Survival

This essay examines artificial intelligence (AI), urban governance, and homelessness through a biopolitical analysis of leisure amid technological intensification and ecological crisis. As AI systems become embedded in city management through predictive policing, biometric surveillance, environmental sensing, dynamic pricing, and algorithmic service allocation, urban life is increasingly organized through hierarchies of mobility, exposure, and risk. Drawing on Foucauldian concepts of biopower and panopticism, the paper argues that AI extends state and market rationalities that regulate marginalized populations, particularly people experiencing homelessness, while rendering these lives as disposable. Using theorizations of place, labor, and (im)mobilities, the essay demonstrates how AI-mediated governance privileges the circulation of desirable bodies while spatially containing unhoused populations. Under worsening climate conditions, AI-driven risk management often intensifies environmental inequalities. We conclude by considering how ethical reforms to AI might be insufficient, while commitments to housing justice and democratic accountability must be paramount.