Research Proposal: Keeping the Camp Alive

KEEPING THE CAMP ALIVE

Reimagining Insurgent Spaces of Displacement in post-‘Jungle’ Calais.

[Extracted from the original essay submission]

In November 2019, Calais authorities installed a €4.5 million mechanical dragon in the city centre as part of a bid to reinvigorate its image as a tourist destination. Meanwhile, hundreds of migrants seeking refuge in Calais have been expelled from the city proper and pushed into its outskirts (InfoMigrants, 2019). As we see a global shift from the containment of migrants within camps to their dispersal throughout urban areas (Katz, et al., 2018), this project will evaluate the durability of insurgent spaces of displacement and propose a more inclusive and integrative approach to aid and shelter provision.

Since the 1990s, Calais has been a place of transit for those seeking asylum in the United Kingdom. This reached a climax during the so-called ‘European Refugee Crisis’ with the formation of a new Calais camp in 2015, informally known as the ‘Jungle’. By September 2016, it was estimated that over 10,000 migrants were living in the camp. One month later, the camp was demolished and around 6,000 people were relocated to temporary reception shelters. The rest found themselves dispersed throughout makeshift campsites in the urban cracks of northern France (Refugee Rights Europe, 2018).

The term ‘insurgent urbanism’ describes grassroots initiatives to develop vacant land in order to reinvigorate the urban environment where the authorities have failed to do so (Diguet, et al., 2017). This project shall apply insurgent urbanism to the ways in which migrants and aid workers occupy and appropriate the leftover cracks in the urban environment in order to create momentary spaces of shelter and aid in response to state interventions of hostility. Migrants who have made clandestine journeys through Europe to reach the UK often reject institutionalised shelter to avoid being obliged to apply for asylum in France or leave the country. Instead, they attempt to find shelter in peripheral industrial sites or wooded areas (Human Rights Observers, 2019). As of October 2019, there are approximately 2,000 people living precariously in these conditions (Help Refugees, 2019). Many sites providing natural shelter, such as spaces under bridges have recently been made inaccessible by the police. Tents in open areas are now their only form of shelter. Four makeshift migrant campsites have formed in the Calais area, pushed increasingly into the periphery by fences built by the authorities (InfoMigrants, 2019). The French state has suppressed the growth of makeshift campsites enforcing a zero-tolerance policy on migrant ‘fixation points’ (Human Rights Observers, 2019). To curb the number of migrants, they have implemented a systematic policy of deterrence through destabilisation, involving bans on the distribution of food, continued harassment and routine evictions by the police. Temporary evictions are carried out regularly on a forty-eight-hour cycle whereby tents and other essential belongings are confiscated, moved or damaged. Meanwhile, permanent eviction sites are barricaded by the police preventing re-occupancy (Human Rights Observers, 2019). Multiple NGOs provide migrant aid, some distributing food, sleeping bags, clothes and firewood, whilst others provide internet access, charging points for personal electronics and legal advice. In order to effectively provide these services, mobile teams carry out distributions in daily ninety-minute sessions from vans full of supplies at five pre-determined locations across the city, resulting in pop-up spaces of aid (Hagan, 2018). The result is a dynamic cycle of reactive placemaking which seemingly has no end. The 2015 Calais camp has been described as a new type of mobile, temporary ‘spatial formation’ which challenges the order of the nation-state and its geography (Katz, et al., 2018). Despite the fragmentation and dispersal of the Camp, these spatial formations remain in the form of the spaces of shelter and aid created by the aid workers and migrants, albeit in a much greater state of impermanence and precarity. Whilst essential, the daily re-enactment of these emergency responses to the ongoing crisis has little staying power in the long term. With daily evictions and aid organisations unable to set up permanent distribution points, the ability of the migrants and volunteers to establish continuity and create physical spaces which ‘stick and endure’ rather than ‘dissipate as if they never were’ has become severely limited (Zigon, 2017).

This project will readdress the post-‘Jungle’ migrant situation in northern France by posing the following three questions. Firstly, does the fragmented, dynamic spatial-temporal arrangement of these spaces of shelter, aid, and hostility still constitute a camp? Secondly, how does this arrangement affect the forms of social organisation created within the spaces of shelter and the effectiveness of aid provision? Finally, beyond the typical ‘emergency- shelter’ response to situations of encampment in forced migration, how can urban design be used to support or overhaul this process of insurgent space creation? This investigation will rely principally on primary observations from a period of fieldwork, where I will volunteer with Help Refugees and their partner organisations in northern France. During this period, I shall conduct mapping studies of the campsites, evictions and distributions, documenting location, time and number of people present. The processes of space creation by aid workers and migrants will be diagrammed and the spatiality and materiality of these interventions will also be documented through sketches, architectural drawings and photographs. These will be supported by ethnographic studies from my first-hand experience working in the different areas of aid provision and interviews conducted with the various actors involved, documented using a range of media. This investigation may relate to themes such as the camp, insurgent urbanism and grey space, and the right to the city.

A range of multi-disciplinary secondary literatures exist exploring the ‘camp’ as a specific social, spatial and political phenomenon. I shall begin by situating my work in reaction to Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer (1998), which defines the camp as a space of exclusion with its inhabitants reduced to bare life deprived of political agency. However, academics further investigating the spatialities of the camp have argued that following a strictly Agembenian reading of the camp risks delegitimising those who inhabit those spaces, not only as political actors (Ramadan, 2013), but also as people between whom new social relationships are created (Turner, 2016). Romola Sanyal reinforces these challenges by describing squatting processes as acts of rebellion (2011), and by explicitly linking spaces of displacement to their urban contexts (2014). The 2015 Calais camp has been described as a space of exclusion (Agier, 2018), disconnected from its urban surroundings (Katz, et al., 2018), where a lack of aid provision from the French authorities and international NGOs gave rise to a wave of grassroots humanitarianism (McGee & Pelham, 2018; Sandri, 2018). Another academic has addressed the material ‘precarity’ of the Camp (Mould, 2018). However, a significant gap has formed in the academic coverage of recent developments in the situation, where spaces of displacement have slipped into a limbo between both exclusion from and entanglement with the city. This thesis seeks to fill the gap by reading the spatial-temporal arrangements of the new spaces of aid and shelter within the context of insurgent urbanism and grey space. I shall expand on existing literature, which positions the pop-up as a ‘quick stimulus for regeneration’ and the result of ‘austerity urbanism’ (Harris, 2015), emerging in the interstices of urban order (Avdoulos, 2018; Brighenti, 2016; Hou, 2010). Calais has become a pop-up city for the migrants who inhabit it, where emergency interventions make up for the lack of state hospitality and aid. Furthermore, referencing Henri Levebre’s The Right to the City (1968) and David Harvey’s Rebel Cities (2013), I shall investigate the rights of those forcibly displaced in Calais to the city and the impact of contemporary views on citizenship. I shall also use The New Urban Agenda adopted at the Habitat III, for which the right to the city is a guiding principle (Saliba, 2017), as a benchmark.

Research outcomes will steer my design response, which will aim to navigate the difficult terrain presented by France’s ‘no-camp’ policies and depart from the commonly seen models of encampment, emergency shelter, and institutionalised reception centre. The scale of the response could range from a small intervention to a large urban scheme. Projects such as Morris+Company’s Hidden Homeless in London (Morris+Company, 2018) and Refugio in Berlin (Berliner Stadtmission, n.d.) will be used as precedents for alternative models of accommodation emphasising greater engagement with the local community. Initiatives such as these could be studied in conjunction with the ‘neighbourhood approach’ adopted by NGOs in Lebanon, where a similar ‘no-camp’ policy is enforced (Sanyal, 2019). Whereas London, Berlin and Lebanon are all destination places, Calais’ position at the periphery of the European continent and on the United Kingdom’s doorstep makes it a place of transit for migrants. The design response will address this distinction and interrogate whether these precedents can be adapted accordingly. The port of Calais already serves as a crucial artery for regular human movement between the European continent and the UK (European Commission, 2019). This project seeks to illustrate that embracing its position as a place of transit for so-called irregular migrants and adopting a policy of legitimisation, aid and hospitality could serve to bolster, rather than detract from its status as a major transit hub.

Through the MAUD course, I shall test my observations and hypotheses in order to put forward a thoroughly researched design project. In doing so, I hope to present an alternative, more humane and durable approach to the provision of aid and shelter to the forcibly displaced. Works Cited Agamben, G., 1998. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press. Agier, M., 2018. The Jungle: Calais's Camps and Migrants. Cambridge: Polity Press. Avdoulos, E., 2018. The Pop-Up City in a Time of Crisis: Experimental Strategies for Rebuilding Detroit. In: L. Ferro, et al. eds. Moving Cities – Contested Views on Urban Life. s.l.:VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, pp. 205-223. BBC, 2019. Why do people risk their lives to get to the UK?. [Online] Available at: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-50155073 [Accessed 29 December 2019]. Berliner Stadtmission, n.d. REFUGIO: Über uns. 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