The Global Infrastructure of Camps
By Irit Katz
Whether located on remote islands in the Pacific Ocean or at the heart of European cities, whether created from prefab structures or from self-made shelters, camps today form an expanding infrastructure that facilitates the global geopolitical order. This infrastructure, in which the transnational movement of refugees, asylum seekers, and undocumented migrants is circulated, suspended and separated from society, is usually analyzed as part of the ever-growing international border apparatuses of walls, barbed-wire fences, and biometric identification systems that heavily fortify the “territorial containers” of the nation-states into which the globe is divided. This global infrastructure of camps, however, could also be seen as the opposite side of the more familiar infrastructures that support our daily lives by enabling the mobility of products, information, energy, and privileged populations across the globe. These two types of infrastructures facilitate the combination of the (unequal) movement of goods and capital on the one hand, and strict control over the movement of people and labor on the other,[1] creating complementary frameworks that serve the neoliberal capitalist planetary order. But while the role of the global infrastructures that facilitate movement is well recognized, the global infrastructure of camps that contains the mobility of the less privileged is hidden and forgotten — much like the people who cannot escape it.
Over the last decades we increasingly hear and read the testimonies of refugees, asylum seekers, and other people “on the move” who find themselves trapped in this global infrastructure, which consists of more than 1,000 camps inhabited by over 12 million people. Some are transferred from one camp to another, where they are suspended for periods of weeks or months during their long odysseys within and between states. Others live in refugee camps for years and even decades. In his journey from Eritrea to Sweden, Nataniel passed through refugee camps, detention camps, and traffickers’ camps in Ethiopia, Sudan, Sinai, Libya, Lampedusa, and Sweden. Beshwar Hassan, from Iraqi Kurdistan, passed more than 70 refugee camps in Europe while seeking asylum with his family, who eventually reunited in France, and again in the UK. These are only two of the innumerable accounts of the protracted, fragmented, and dangerous transnational and cross-continental journeys of forcedly displaced people who are suspended in and move between different camps while trying to reach safety.[2]
The ever-expanding vocabulary that describes camp spaces — detention centers, reception facilities, refugee camps, hubs, hot spots, jungles — fails to camouflage their rise as part of the same framework in which people’s freedom and rights are restricted. The growing collection of regional maps of camps, which documents their proliferation in and around Europe, Africa, the Middle East, Asia, Australia, and elsewhere, shows that these spaces are not only singular spatial products of certain regimes, but together create an encompassing global system. These are the spaces in between, which are often described as an archipelago of encampments.[3] But much as we think about international airport terminals as part of the global aviation infrastructure that enables mobility, so these camps form part of the opposite global infrastructure, in which unauthorized mobility is contained and internally circulated in different camp formations. Because many camp spaces are temporary and ephemeral due to their materiality and legal definition, the global infrastructure of camps is ever changing. Yet, similar to other global infrastructures, the infrastructure of camps constitutes an inseparable part of today’s interstate relations: it is a built network that reproduces the uneven global divisions between territories, populations, and recourses; it comprises the architecture of circulation that processes the mobility of unwanted populations; and while most of it is created and functions as part of an encompassing institutional arrangement, it is also “pirate” and informal in parts.[4]
Extreme spatial typologies
Today, if we look carefully enough, camps could be found all around us in multifaceted spatial formations. Makeshift camps are formed next to closed borders where a migration route is being blocked and a bottleneck is created, such as the Idomeni camp next to the closed Macedonian border (dismantled in May 2016), where over 10,000 people spent a cold winter in deplorable conditions. Self-built camps are also created in central cities, such as the Via Cupa camp in Rome or the makeshift camps in Paris, no less than 27 of which have been cleared by the French authorities since June 2015. The Jungle camp in Calais, which was recently demolished, is probably the most iconic example of such “bottom-up,” makeshift camps. This camp developed into a town-like environment with neighborhoods and a high street, in which shops, restaurants, and public institutions were built — many of them according to the architectural traditions of the refugees’ countries of origin. The nonprofit organizations, independent volunteers, and donations that support the people in many of these makeshift camps are a reminder of both the failure of states to absorb refugees in an appropriate manner and of the efforts of the civil society to step in and fill the gap.
Institutionalized camps — whose users do not participate in their initial creation and management — are formed by international, state, or municipal authorities as part of their attempts to absorb and control migration flows. These spaces are constructed from prefabricated units, they are surrounded with fences, and they are sometimes created in abandoned institutions and facilities such as factories, prisons, and airports located in remote rural areas or in the fringes of cities. The container camp that was opened at the heart of Calais Jungle and La Linière camp near Dunkirk in France; the camps functioning in Hungary; the urban refugee camps that were recently opened in Berlin and in Athens; and the two refugee camps that are planned to be opened in Paris are only a few European examples of such “top-down” created camps.
Makeshift and institutionalized camps are very different in their spatiality; while the first are informal spaces whose chaotic appearance is created because of the varied forms and materials used by their dwellers-fabricants, the second are often rigidly organized instrumental spaces that create “total order.” These camps create extreme, almost bipolar spatial typologies, yet they all make part of the same infrastructure, in which spaces exist outside the normal juridical and spatial order of the states in which they are formed. While camps that are created and altered by their residents sometimes create impressive examples of human agency, resourcefulness, and even resistance,[5] all camps make spaces where radical conditions of control and neglect, care, abandonment, and violence are mixed.
Over the last year alone there was a stream of alarming reports from camps in which vulnerable populations were exposed to horrid physical conditions and a lack of minimum protection, and were suffering from deterioration of both mental and physical health. The Nauru files exposed the chronic despair of asylum seeker children in the Australian offshore detention camp, where they are constantly exposed to the ongoing risk of abuse. A leaked UNHCR report on the camp on Manus Island shows that detention itself has contributed to the endemic mental disorders from which 88 percent of the assessed refugees and asylum seekers are suffering. Articles on the dire conditions in Amygdaleza, Greece’s detention center for child refugees, reported that, behind the layers of barbed wire, razor-strip fencing, and armed guards, much-needed toys, mattresses, sheets, and soap have become a scarce resource. Other reports documented the distress caused by the demolitions of Calais Jungle in March 2016 — after which 129 unaccompanied children remain missing — and the camp’s total destruction in October 2016, which again exposed children to neglect and danger.
Europe has experienced a sharp increase in such spaces since the beginning of the so-called “migration crises,” yet institutional, informal, and informalized camps are mushrooming globally, creating an expanding framework of containment. While the UNHCR envisages policies on “alternatives to camps” after recognizing the short- and long-term damages to the people who are suspended in such places, it seems that most states and municipalities still see the camp in its various manifestations as a preferred solution.
Containment by mobility
The fact that displaced populations are not only suspended in this global infrastructure of camps but are also transferred within it is not only due to the migrants’ own efforts to move and improve their reality but also because their containment is achieved by enforced mobility within the system. While camps contain people for various periods of time, they do so while simultaneously making these people more mobile, through dispersals, transfers, demolitions, deportations and biopolitical ordering mechanisms.[6] The internal ongoing movement within the camp infrastructure allows easier control of the individuals that are held and processed within it.
The internal ongoing movement within the camp infrastructure allows easier control of the individuals that are held and processed within it.
Stripping migrants of their particular identities and treating them only as biological bodies by preventing everyday social and cultural practices within the institutionalized camps renders them highly mobile, with no specific place-related ties and habits. Internal movement is also imposed by the constant demolition of makeshift camp environments, although these often pop up again in adjacent locations, making the camp system itself ever-changing and unstable. These actions destroy meaningful social connections that developed between the camp residents themselves and with the people who support them. They also demolish architectural environments that the camp residents created themselves with great dedication and effort, and to which many developed a strong sense of belonging. In addition, enforced mobility is often an active practice in which inmates in this camp infrastructure are managed; many countries, such as the US, Australia, the UK, Italy, and others, frequently move migrants within the system, disperse them, and transfer them between camps as part of the detention routine. In the US alone, from 1999 to 2008, over 1.4 million detainees were transferred between detention facilities. These practices separate migrants from families, communities, familiar environments, and other local forms of support, creating and maintaining them as temporary, depersonalized, mobile bodies, which are more transitory and can therefore be more easily processed continuously within this infrastructure.
Architecture and the infrastructure of camps
Architects are increasingly becoming interested in camps as a complex human condition and spatial reality; some are fascinated by the accelerated urbanization processes of camps and see them as the “cities of tomorrow,” while others are taking on the challenge in designing the ultimate refugee shelter. This interest is important not only because there is much to learn about camps and shelter design; it is primarily important because being interested in these spaces and developing an understanding not only of their spatial but also on their social and political meaning relates to a deep ethical question. As professionals, architects are granted by the State the responsibility for planning and designing the built environment, yet camps are considered to be outside architects’ domain. While the infrastructure of camps makes an integral part of the very political system that gives architects their authority and power, camp spaces are excluded from the normal juridical and spatial order that architects are signed on, and are therefore usually abandoned by them.
However architects are not merely agents of the state; the spaces they design are created for the benefit of the general public, and their professional integrity goes beyond the state’s narrow interests. Through their growing interest in camps, architects reclaim agency over these spaces, which form the other side of the familiar built environments. They reclaim these spaces into their area of concern, and by doing so show a wider responsibility not only to their specific architectural projects but to the broader area of human spatial existence. Yet the role of the architects in relation to camp spaces should not be limited to improving shelters, admiring their urban qualities, or making their facilities nicer for the ones who are stuck in them. The multifaceted and radical architecture of this camp infrastructure is not accidental; it is a symptom of the failure to design a place for the ones who are perceived as unplaceable. It portrays the limits of architecture to deal with a political reality that, rather than finding a sustainable solution to properly host and accommodate the vulnerable, chooses to suspend them as if the problem will resolve itself. By acknowledging the inherent problem in these spaces, which together create a global infrastructure of separation, containment, and suspension, architects should manifest their concern related to the very existence of camps, while proposing alternative ways in which their populations could become an integral part of our society and our everyday built environments.
[1] Massey, Doreen. For Space. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2005.
[2] On the different dynamics that cause and influence some of these journeys, see: Crawley, Heaven, Franck Duvell, Nando Sigona, Simon McMahon, and Katharine Jones. Unpacking a Rapidly Changing Scenario: Migration Flows, Routes and Trajectories Across the Mediterranean. Unravelling the Mediterranean Migration Crisis (MEDMIG), Research Brief no.1, 2016, accessed November 6, 2016, http://www.medmig.info/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/MEDMIG-Briefing-01-March-2016-FINAL-1.pdf
[3] Minca, Claudio. “Geographies of the Camp,” Political Geography 49 (2015): 74–83.
[4] On the politics (and poetics) of infrastructures, see Larkin, Brian. “The politics and poetics of infrastructure.” Annual Review of Anthropology 42 (2013): 327–343.
[5] See, for example, Katz, Irit. “From Spaces of Thanatopolitics to Spaces of Natality,” Political Geography 49 (2015): 84–86; Ramadan, Adam. “Spatialising the Refugee Camp,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 38, no.1 (2014): 65–77; Rygiel, Kim. “Bordering Solidarities: Migrant Activism and the Politics of Movement and Camps at Calais,” Citizenship Studies 15, no.1 (2011): 1–19.
[6] See Mountz, Alison, Kate Coddington, R. Tina Catania, and Jenna M. Loyd. “Conceptualizing detention Mobility, containment, bordering, and exclusion.” Progress in Human Geography 37, no.4 (2013): 522–541.
