Essay 1A: Choose Love

CHOOSE LOVE: Reformatting Calais as a City of Welcome

[Extracted from the presentation script]

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This project investigates refugees spaces in post-Jungle Calais focussing on reformatting the city as one of welcome. My statement of intent at the beginning of the term reflected on Calais’ position on the cusp of the English Channel. Regular ferry services to and from Dover as well as the opening of the Channel Tunnel nearby has facilitated the movement of people and goods through the region making it fundamentally a place of transit not just for tourists and workers but also for many undocumented migrants who have made clandestine journeys through Europe.

Over the past seven weeks, my work developed along three intersecting lines of enquiry into the themes of insurgency, status and borders. Each of these themes manifested in a matrix proposal, which I’ll be presenting to you today.

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Insurgency

As a result of the authorities’ no-camp policies following the demolition of the 2015 Calais Jungle, refugees and volunteer workers have been forced to adopt reactionary insurgent methods of space creation often in the peripheral areas of Calais.

Tents are put up by refugees to create temporary spaces of shelter at risk of being evicted days later. Meanwhile vans are deployed to distribute essentials in vacant plots of land creating momentary pop-up spaces of aid.

A series of four key artefacts of varying scales and varying levels of permanence were chosen to represent the precarity of the conditions in Calais today: the mobile phone, the van, the wall and the warehouse. Whilst the latter three represent the very tangible realities of the conditions in Calais, the mobile phone serves as a means to transcend these physical barriers.

Connecting refugees not just with families at home, but to volunteer workers providing aid and also to asylum information online. In spite of the dire physical conditions refugees face, charities such as Refugee Info Bus and Techfugees recognise the potential for the empowerment of people on the move through technology. Compared to the transience of the physical world, digital spaces are constant and can be accessed anywhere and anytime so long as the equipment is provided.

My first proposal builds on this mobile provision of digital access, community support and aid, comparing the set-up of the distribution site to the several tourists campsites also dotted around the outskirts of Calais.

Most of the volunteers are accommodated in mobile homes in one of these campsites. Here, there is an infrastructure of mobile homes which supports the accommodation of short-stay, albeit ‘legitimate’ individuals.

Whereas these mobile homes are inhabited, spilling out into the spaces around them to create new communal areas, in the distribution site, the vans are themselves not inhabited but serve as separated nodes around which people gather.

One key outlier to this was the School Bus Project, which operated a mobile school in the form of a bus providing an activity space and a reading space.

Building on this, my proposal imagines how separate vehicles with different functions // could be adapted and assembled to create larger occupiable spaces of aid providing access to the internet, computers and electricity as well as learning and other essentials such as food.

These spaces could then spill out into the surrounding area creating an informal ‘street’ which could then be packed up in a moments notice and disappear.

The contingent nature of life as a migrant in Calais led to a question of what objects would validate ones existence as a ‘nomadic’ person within an inherently ‘static’ world. We rely on documents of identification in order to prove the right to do this, do that or merely to be – as well as things such as clothing or body art to express ourselves.

Through the design of this quilt, I used a bit of self-reflection to collapse and pack my ideas of home and travel into a singular tool of identification.

In these instances, the acceptance of mobility and precarity is no solution, but more a commentary on the performative nature of aid provision today. It is a provocation that questions the legitimacy of some forms of transient space such as the trailer-park, over others such as the distribution site. This, coupled with my brief investigation into identity and identification boils down to one of the key issues in the discourse surrounding urban refuge – that of status.

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Status

Whilst Calais attempts to boost its image as a node through which millions of tourists and goods pass, through urban securitisation, the city has ironically also become an experiment in the restriction of the movement of migrants.

Calais markets itself as a seaside town and port city, but in reality, the city’s evolution as a walled settlement and its industrialisation in the 19th Century left behind vast areas of buffer zone isolating the city from its neighbouring bodies of water.

The difficulty in providing for and protecting the rights of the refugees who find themselves in Calais, is that they have no status. The limited rights afforded to those who have made an asylum claim in France are not even available to those who choose not to for fear of deportation. As such, they remain unidentified with no right to work and no right of abode.

My next proposal reimagines Calais as a city of welcome – that has come to terms with its role as a transition city for refugees. Policies of welcome would include the right to work and the right to accommodation – enabling refugees to live with agency and dignity and to contribute to the growth of the city. This proposal seeks to use the regeneration of post-industrial canal banks as opportunities to create inclusive districts of hospitality and welcome for refugees, first and foremost, but also tourists and residents. These areas would be developed by a partnership between the municipality and the aid organisations already supporting refugees in northern France.

The site identified was the old Chamber of Commerce warehouse, close to the ferry port and also within walking distance from Calais-Ville train station, where a majority of refugees will most likely arrive in the city. Shared by a number of the different organisations currently operating in Calais, the building would serve as a reception centre for new arrivals.

The warehouse itself would house a welcome area and community kitchen at the core surrounded by a flexible area with the scope for an indoor market, performance space and rentable units.

The proposal investigates the possibility of integrating an economic model that revolves around supporting the refugee. I envisaged building in revenue mechanisms that use rent and other payments by paying customers such as tourists, young professionals and volunteers to support and subsidise accommodation, food and other essential services for those who are unable to pay.

Accommodation would be provided in a variety of sizes and layouts and would seek to balance the non-paying and paying customer through an allocation system dependant not on status but on duration of stay. Refugees arrivals would still need to be prioritised and an emphasis would be placed on emergency accommodation with the view of progressing them to longer term homes as soon as possible, allowing them to find their feet throughout duration of their stay in the city.

Shared communal spaces would connect and mediate between the different types of room in a bid to balance different groups of people staying for different durations of time. Future development of this would really need to spatialise ways in which protection and support would need to be provided to those who are vulnerable.

Other spaces would seek to bridge the gap between refugee, tourist and resident. These shared facilities would be bimodal, serving different functions dependent on the user-group. For example, an essentials store would accept and process donations, distributing donated essentials to refugees who need them whilst also operating a charity shop to sell off the other items.

Meanwhile, the community kitchen would operate on a similar model of subsidisation to homes, where one person’s free meal would be subsidised by another person’s paid meal.

Tthe assumption of attitudes of welcome in Calais is perhaps an idealist provocation that defies the social, cultural and political realities of today, where in fact over £350 million has been spent by both the UK and France to securitise the port city and the border.

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Borders

The build-up of refugees in Calais can be largely attributed to the policies on other side of the English Channel: a lack of safe ‘legal routes’ into the UK and the increased securitisation and militarisation of the border.

The position of coastal cities such as Calais and Dover on the periphery of their respective states has made them cities of transit, unable to benefit from the large amounts of trade and tourism that bypasses them on their way to places like London and Paris. Current ferry services connect directly to motorways whisking traffic further inland, whereas the Channel Tunnel was not even designed to directly serve these coastal communities – bypassing them entirely.

In the Brexit referendum, Dover voted overwhelmingly to leave the EU in spite of their proximity to the European continent, highlighting an uneasiness with seeing the comings of goings of people and revenue without really benefiting from them. Unfortunately, the immediate impact of Brexit on Dover and the broader region of Kent, will not be a good one. Queues of up to 7000 lorry’s along the M20 threaten to turn Kent into the ‘carpark of England’, whilst the introduction of a Kent Access Permit scheme may create a de facto border separating the county from the rest of the UK.

My last proposal builds on the idea of a Kent newly separated from the rest of England post-Brexit, disillusioned by the build-up of queues and border infrastructures due to the hard border across the Channel. Here, I propose the creation of a new cross-Channel nation state encompassing the county of Kent, the department of Pas-de-Calais in France and the bit of the Channel in between.

In order to address the notion of Calais and Dover being bypassed cities as a result of their positions on the peripheries of their respective states, I attempted to flip the problem on its head.

This third state would be a Transmanche Republic positioning Dover and Calais as two banks of the city of Dovais – turning them from places of transit into a single destination city.

Primarily using infrastructure to build this enhanced connection between the two banks of Dovais, I proposed the development of a new fixed road and rail link plugging directly into the existing transport hubs in the Dover and Calais we know today.

These new infrastructures would be part of an inclusive urban regeneration programme in a bid to bring people on either side of the Channel closer to the sea. And there would be further potential for the development of the Channel itself as a site.

New stations such as Dover Beach and Calais Plage would deposit people right on the coast and could begin to build on and revitalise the idea of the pleasure pier as an attraction.

Whilst this proposal, as I’ve framed it, attempts to address the tensions that have arisen out of Dover and Calais being transit cities – I actually began by looking at the erasure of the border across the Channel. By allowing people to cross the Channel freely, the creation of this third state would create a buffer zone for refugees that could alleviate the bottleneck that has formed around Calais today.

But the question that remains is what happens to all the vast infrastructures of border control that we have built up to now. Do we allow them to become relics of a history of hostility or do we reframe and repurpose them entirely within a new context of welcome?

Conclusion

In reflection, these three proposals addressing insurgency, status and borders are optimistic in outlook, but also a serious look at the rapidly changing world. In terms of what excites me most, I think, as daunting as it is, spatialising welcome at the scale of the nation state will really challenge me to dive deep into the politics of migration before even beginning to look at how that would manifest at the scale of the city. But I also feel like there’s something in looking at the performance of space creation at the human scale.

In the end, all of these proposals have the potential to exist within one another, a bit like a Russian doll. I think next steps would be to really look into the implications of these proposals with a lot more nuance and try to understand the mechanisms and structures which could allow them to take shape.

This project isn’t about solving the ‘so-called refugee crisis’, but imagining Calais as a city of welcome, it specifically targets the narrative that countries and cities in the Global North are unable to cope with large influxes of migrant populations.