Irit Katz

The Common Camp underscores the role of the camp as a spatial
instrument employed for reshaping, controlling, and struggling over
specific territories and populations. Focusing on the geopolitical
complexity of Israel–Palestine and the dramatic changes it has
experienced during the past century, this book explores the region’s
extensive networks of camps and their existence as both a tool of
colonial power and a makeshift space of resistance.
Examining various forms of camps devised by and for Zionist settlers,
Palestinian refugees, asylum seekers, and other groups, the book
demonstrates how the camp serves as a common thread in shaping
lands and lives of subjects from across the political spectrum.
Analyzing the architectural and political evolution of the camp as a
modern instrument engaged by colonial and national powers (as well
as those opposing them), the book offers a unique perspective on the
dynamics of Israel–Palestine, highlighting how spatial transience has
become permanent in the ongoing story of this contested territory.
The Common Camp presents a novel approach to the concept of the
camp, detailing its varied history as an apparatus used for population
containment and territorial expansion as well as a space of everyday
life and subversive political action. Bringing together a broad range
of historical and ethnographic materials within the context of this
singular yet versatile entity, the book locates the camp at the core of
modern societies and how they change and transform.

This edited collection focuses on past and present camp geographies, discussing the camp, in its multifaceted functions and spatialities, as an ever-present exceptional spatial formation characterizing many authoritarian regimes as well as contemporary democracies.

https://www.rowmaninternational.com/book/camps_revisited/3-156-e104fe5a-c986-4af3-bbf8-b5f8ad82594c

Endorsements and reviews:

Reflecting on the development of camps the world over, Camps Revisited offers an important and extremely timely analysis of how to understand the formation, mutation, potentiality, and limits of the camp as a political and spatial technology. Addressing questions of governance, activism, informality, and insurgency, this collection offers a rich source for developing a critical politics of the camp.
Jonathan Darling, Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography, Durham University

For containment, control, protest, or protection, camps have become an ubiquitous presence in contemporary world. This must-read collection offers a theoretically astute and empirically rich exploration of camps, their functions and purposes across continents and time.
Nando Sigona, Reader in International Migration and Forced Displacement, University of Birmingham

This book is an urgent intervention into the spatial, political and juridical spaces of camps. It analyses camps as historical and contemporary structures, as a space that is contingent and ubiquitous, urban and makeshift. Above all, it makes us recognize how camps are now a central feature of our political and geographical lives.
Shailja Sharma, Professor of International Studies and Director of Refugee and Forced Migration Studies, DePaul University

This is a must-read collection that will stand as a pivotal reference point in the field. Camps Revisited is innovative in its theorisations of the camp as a key political technology and comprehensive in its geopolitical mapping of the globe’s camp archipelagos. This book reveals the camp’s entangled complexities, multidimensional uses and its contested relations of power.
Joseph Pugliese, Professor, Department of Media, Music, Communication and Cultural Studies, Macquarie University

Camps Revisited is a much-awaited and timely book...an impressive set of scholars at the cutting-edge of their fields...fascinating collection...essential reading for scholars and students of camp geographies for years to come.
Hanno Brankamp, University of Oxford
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14649365.2019.1643587?journalCode=rscg20

The increasing fortification of borders produces new urban forms of irregular migration. This paper invokes the concept of "borderzone departure cities" as urban constellations created where global migration routes meet blocked borders in cities which become jumping-off points from which migrants try to depart. The paper examines Athens and Calais as borderzone departure cities located at both sides of the EU Schengen area. By focussing on the Athenian City Plaza squat and the makeshift Calais Jungle camp as emblematic yet relational spaces of departure, the paper moves beyond the squat/camp divide to better understand how irregular migrants struggle against hostile bordering apparatuses through urban practices of meanwhile inhabitation and mobile commoning. The paper illustrates how these spaces were variously assembled, run, and experienced to form the conditions for movement and stay, each holding different potentials for creating solidarity infrastructures and negotiating forms of migrant citizenship to support the uncertain urban realities of those stuck on the move.

Detention camps, 'hospitality' centres and other carceral facilities created to contain people 'on the move' are usually formed in familiar spatial arrangements such as prefabricated shelters organised in a grid layout. Over the recent years, however, a number of these facilities were architecturally designed in distinct formations while being presented as attractive spaces of care and support. By examining two such facilities created in different contexts and scalesthe Holot detention camp in Israel's Negev desert and the French urban Centre Humanitaire Paris-Nord this paper analyses their spatial and political meaning in relation to the ways they were designed, managed, and presented to the public. Unlike minimal spaces of provision or spaces of participatory design in contexts of displacement, which might encourage the spatial agency of displaced people and the reworking of their political subjectivities, the paper shows how these architecturally designed facilities, with their spectacular form and infrastructural function, doubly objectify their residents. While the spectacular designs of these facilities frame irregular migrants as separated and temporary 'guests' who become the objects for the distant gaze of their 'hosts', their infrastructural spaces produce the migrants as constantly moving racialised bodies which are the objects of ongoing processes of concentration, categorisation, and circulation. These designed facilities, the paper argues, create visually identified and clearly defined spectacles of both hospitality and hostility, or in Derrida's term, of hostipitality, through which irregular migrants are included by their receiving societies as only objectified, distant, and temporary guests.

Grounded in space yet facilitated by mobility, settler colonialism has adopted distinct architectural devices. Tents, prefabricated shelters, mobile homes, shipping containers, and other portable structures, have created the scaffoldings of new colonial settlements, allowing for rapid territorial expansion. These mobile spatial objects have also served as instruments of expulsion and expropriation, facilitating the creation of spaces of counterinsurgency and displacement for the containment of rebellious and expelled locals, who themselves used mobile architecture as an instrument of resistance. From the historical British ‘Portable Colonial Cottage for Emigrants’ to the caravans used by Israeli settlers in the occupied territories and the creation of humanitarian spaces, these mobile structures have been part of the toolkit enabling colonial powers to rapidly rearrange people in space. This article draws on critical mobility and architectural studies to examine settler colonialism’s mobile architecture in both historical and contemporary contexts through the case of Israel-Palestine, from Mandatory Palestine’s British and Zionist camps, through early statehood’s spaces of displacement and emplacement, to current colonial environments. By doing so, the article highlights how settler colonialism’s rapid spatial actions and counteractions require mobile spatial forms and their related infrastructure for the abrupt and often racialised territorial and demographic alterations and for related swift counteracts of resistance, protest and decolonisation.

In light of the recent proliferation and co-presence of institutional and makeshift camps and encampments in Europe, this article explores the current multifaceted geographies of the camp and their formal and informal spatialities. By engaging with key work in 'camp studies' we analyse contemporary institutional and makeshift refugee camps in their complex relationship. While the review of the existing literature is a fundamental starting point for our analysis, in this article we propose to depart from a perspective exclusively focussed on institutional camps to incorporate a reflection on the informal encampments that have recently proliferated in Europe. In particular, we reflect on how these makeshift spatial formations are associated with the presence and workings of institutional camps, at times in a complementary, almost symbiotic relationship. We conclude by suggesting that camps should not be studied in isolation and that both institutional and informal camps should be examined as dynamic spaces that may be transformed and appropriated by their residents, becoming part of the current fragmented mobilities of irregular migrations across Europe and of the related political geographies of bordering, smuggling, and humanitarian care.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0309132519856702?journalCode=phgb

For a copy of the full article, please send me an email to i.katz@sheffield.ac.uk

The migrant and refugee camps that proliferated in Europe over recent years reflect extreme, if not bipolar, architectural conditions. While fenced carceral camps with prefabricated units were created top-down by state and municipal authorities, informal makeshift camps of tents and self-made shelters were formed bottom-up along Europe's migration routes. These contrasting spatial typologies often appear side by side in the open landscapes of rural fields, in urban landscapes at the heart or in the fringes of cities, and in the architectural landscapes of abandoned institutions and facilities such as factories, prisons, airports, and military barracks. The different ways in which camps are created, function, and are managed by multiple and changing actors and sovereignties, substantially influence the form of these spaces. So far, however, the radically different spatial typologies of the camp and the intersections between them have not been comparatively analysed. Based on empirical studies of the recently created migrant camps in Europe, this paper sets out to investigate their various configurations, what they reflect, and how they correspond with the culture and politics that shape them. While this paper mainly focuses on three particular camps in northern France – the container camp in Calais, the makeshift camp in Calais known as the "Jungle," and La Linière camp in Grande-Synthe – it offers observations and analytical strategies relevant to camp spaces in other spaces and contexts and to camp studies more broadly.

From their emergence in the 19th century to their current global proliferation, camps have been created extensively by and for different populations under the modern state order. Whether employed by national and colonial powers as instruments of control, or constructed ad hoc by displaced populations as makeshift spaces of refuge, camps are used as a versatile instrument for the rearrangement of people in space. In Israel-Palestine, camps are part of the significant geopolitical changes related to the state-building project and to the mass displacement it caused, providing a core example of similar enterprises of territorial alternation and social engineering. While the Palestinian refugee camps are well recognised and studied, many other types of camps which have appeared in the region over the last century together form a distinctive spatial paradigm. Through its particular manifestations in Israel-Palestine, this article examines the camp as a central instrument by which modern societies and territories are administered, negotiated and reorganised. The identification, understanding and re-definition of the camp’s multifaceted spatial vocabulary allows to better understand this encompassing phenomenon which becomes increasingly relevant and urgent in today’s migration age.

For the paper visit:
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13602365.2016.1276095

This paper examines the central role of the camp in the early Israeli state period and its spatial and geopolitical evolution. Unlike official Israeli history, which presents the immigrant camps as an inevitable improvised response to the unexpected problem of mass immigration, I examine the camp as a strategic modern biopolitical instrument that allowed for the state's profound geopolitical changes and was itself altered according to them. The paper analyses the ways in which the camp facilitated the creation of Israel as a state formed by two seemingly contradictory, but in fact complementary, conditions: on one hand, a product of a chaotic ‘state of emergency’ and a form of ‘ordered disorder’ created by mass immigration, and on the other hand, a product of a comprehensive, tightly controlled modernist project combining physical planning and social engineering. This duality reveals the role of these immigrant camps, which were created both in Israel and abroad, as spatial ‘black holes’ which swallowed the contradiction between the radical geopolitical transformation and the rational self-image of the Israeli state-building project. The evolving and hybrid typologies of the camp in Israel's pre-state and early-state periods expose it as a versatile instrument, highlighting the need for informed spatial and geographical genealogies of the camp in order to illuminate its various transformations.

www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0962629816300877

Through the analysis of camps in Israel/Palestine and their use in the past and present for two complementary purposes—to rapidly spread and settle the Jewish population and to concentrate and suspend Arab populations—this paper explores the versatile role of the camp in the struggles over the frontiers of this contested territory. Within this geopolitical context, I empirically examine two frontier camps in the Negev/Naqab desert: the historical ma'abara immigrant transit camp of Yeruham and the neighbouring Rachme Bedouin ‘unrecognised village’. The former was created as part of a state project to deal with mass immigration and became a minor ‘development town’, while the latter is similar to other makeshift settlements constructed by the displaced indigenous Arab populations. I argue that, as a zone in which hegemony has not yet been established, the frontier is a territory where the camp in its varied typologies is prevalently used to spread, re-settle, concentrate and suspend different populations, both indigenous and new to the area. I contend that, while camps facilitated the instant creation and growth of Jewish frontier urban settlements in order to establish a social engineered civic control over the land, the same instrument enables the suspension of local ethnic minorities in time and space, abandoning them in an ongoing situation of enduring temporariness, in order to make them settle in a concentrated form according to the interests of the state.

(2015) City, ‘Durable  Camps’ special issue, 19(5) 727-740. 

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13604813.2015.1071115?journalCode=ccit20

‘Architecture’ would probably be the wrong term to describe the abnormal uses of the spatial language developed in the conflict spaces of the Palestinian Refugee camps. The everyday syntax of building, digging, creating openings and paving roads has been intensified in this environment, which is subject to constant restrictions, and has taken on functions requiring new interpretive tools that are difficult to locate in standard architectural discourse. This paper examines the spatial reality that has developed beyond the fences and roadblocks through Deleuze and Guattari’s characterization of the uses of a minor language, as exemplified in Kafka’s writing, and will show how the physical lines of escape are not that different from the linguistic ones. Through the use of concrete spatial phenomena like the smuggling tunnels, the mud-brick houses and the chaotic spatial fabric this paper presents the ways minor characteristics reveals themselves in the camp and the way the limiting and strict spaces have become a tool used in a political struggle.

Public Culture (2010), 22/3 (62), 425-432.

http://publicculture.dukejournals.org/content/22/3/425.abstract

In the winter of 2018, Tel Aviv’s streets and squares were occupied by two large protests organized by one of the most destitute population groups in the city. At the end of February and again at the end of March, thousands of African asylum seekers, supported by Israeli residents, have demonstrated against Israel’s plan to deport many of them in a government operation scheduled to begin in early April. In the first demonstration, over 20,000 people have marched through the streets of south Tel Aviv, one of the city’s most neglected areas where many asylum seekers live, and the second rally of more than 25,000 took place at the central Rabin square. ‘There is no difference between our blood and their blood because we are all human beings’ was one of the slogans chanted together by the African and Israeli protesters, who also carried signs quoting Jewish texts about loving the stranger (Lidman, 2018; Yaron, 2018). Shortly after these protests the planned mass deportations were suspended by the High Court of Justice and eventually were cancelled by the government.

More than a decade earlier, in the winter of 2005, a smaller yet much longer protest has occupied the Mustapha Mahmud square in Cairo, when Sudanese refugees have gathered to demand the improvement of their protection and living conditions in Egypt (Whitaker, 2005). The peaceful sit-in of about 2,000 refugees was held in front of the offices of the UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, located in the Cairo’s affluent Mohandeseen neighbourhood, where the refugees have created and operated a makeshift camp considered to be one of the largest urban protest camps in the history of Egypt (Pascucci, 2017). After three months of the refugees’ protest which was socially and materially supported by local residents, Egyptian security forces coming to evacuate the demonstrators have opened fire on the crowd, killing dozens and detaining hundreds, a violent event denoted as the Mustapha Mahmoud Park Massacre.

These events in these two cities seem to be unrelated. Not only they have happened in two Middle Eastern urban contexts that are hardly discussed in relation to one another, they are also separated in more than thirteen years and had a very different outcome. Yet these events could also be seen as closely connected in both their geopolitical context and in their urban meaning. As Tel Aviv and Cairo are two central cities of neighbouring countries, their regional connection is related to the sequence of these events; following the Mustapha Mahmoud massacre many refugees felt they are no longer safe in Egypt and decided to cross the Sinai desert and seek asylum in Israel, initiating a growing stream of African asylum seekers to the country and eventually leading to the events that sparked the Tel Aviv protests (Sabar and Tsurkov, 2015). But importantly, these events of public assembly of forced migrants in their cities are also tightly connected in their shared political and urban meaning. While happening in different national, urban, and socio-political contexts, they reveal not only the important function of the city as place of refuge, which could indeed often be precarious and contested, but they also reveal the key role of urban public spaces in the ways urban refuge is being negotiated. In the public spaces of both Cairo and Tel Aviv, vulnerable forced migrants came together, with the solidarity of local residents, to protest against their precarious realities and to articulate a political claim for their basic human rights and to be protected. From a population group which is often ‘hidden and exposed’ (Pavanello et al., 2010), these urban public events of protest have enabled them to become visible and more protected, at least for a while, with the urban environment itself allowing their claims to be articulated, seen and heard. 

By reflecting on the protests of refugees and asylum seekers in Cairo and Tel Aviv, this chapter examines the central role of the city as both a place of refuge and as a place where political claims on the conditions of refuge could be articulated and negotiated, at least to a certain extent. I will begin by examining the precarious situation of forced migrants in Cairo and Tel Aviv, examine the urban protests in both cities, conclude by examining the key role of the city in creating a public space where residents could come together, protest against their predicaments, and articulate a political demand to change their realities.

On the very same day that La Linière camp was opened by Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) in Grande-Synthe near Dunkirk, its prefabricated emergency shelters had begun to change shape. Many of the standardized identical timber structures that had originally been built according to an accurate set of instructions were given, by their new residents, additional layers and extensions created ad hoc, some almost doubling their size.
By drawing on the pre-fabricated timber shelters in the migrant camps of Dunkirk and Calais in northern France, this chapter investigates the emergency shelter as an ongoing spatial process designed for and by imagined and real users. While it is first designed as a mass-produced standardized structure for anonymous users, it is then re-designed ad hoc by its real users who appropriate it according to their specific needs, abilities and preferences. The chapter discusses the significance of agency of those adapting their shelters while arguing that displaced people need more than only a minimal structure to cope with their precarious realities.

This chapter examines the networked and rapidly evolving spaces of the border migrant camps created in Northern France between 2014 and 2017. While refugee camps are often analysed as isolated spaces of containment, which in many cases endure for decades, border migrant camps, as this chapter demonstrates - whether formal or informal - are often dynamic, hyper- temporary and highly connected spaces, part of the ever- changing entanglements of intense border practices, politics and migration flows. The chapter includes mapping of the camps in the North of France, with a particular focus on Calais, Grande-Synthe, and Paris, as well as the mapping of the changes of the Calais 'Jungle' camp over time.

Chapter 6 in Architecture on the Borderline: https://www.routledge.com/Architecture-on-the-Borderline-Boundary-Politics-and-Built-Space-1st/Pieris/p/book/9781138102828

This chapter adds to existing scholarship on the city and the refugee camp by examining the urban significance of makeshift and institutional camps that were created by, and function within, particular cities. The city, here, is not examined as merely the geographical background of the camp or its coincidental setting. Rather, it is considered as a key factor in shaping the camp. The camp, in fact, has become part of the city while being simultaneously divorced from it as a temporary space of separation and containment. In contrast to Agier’s (2002, 318) concept of the “city-camp” (camps-villes), which describes the urbanization processes of the refugee camp, we examine institutional and makeshift urban camps as spatial and governmental instruments and urban realities created and administered primarily by urban actors as a way to manage and contain migrants in the city.

Our analysis is based on three different camps established in European cities. The City of Paris’s first institutional “refugee camp” (Dewan 2016), the “Centre Humanitaire Paris-Nord,” was opened by the French authorities in November 2016 as a response to the presence of migrants without shelter in the capital. Located in the northeast section of the city, the center aimed to provide short-term housing for up to four hundred male migrants within an adapted formerly abandoned hangar, while also providing a day shelter for up to eighty individuals within an inflatable landmark structure nicknamed the “bubble” (Emmaüs Solidarité 2016). The second camp we consider is the Berlin Tempelhof camp, which was established by the city of Berlin in October 2015 in the adapted hangars of the Nazi-built former Tempelhof Airport located in the city’s center. The camp’s inhabitants, around three thousand at its peak (Tamaja 2016), were supposed to be housed there for up to two weeks while submitting their asylum claims, though many stayed for much longer. The third camp we examine is the demolished makeshift camp in Calais known as “The Jungle,” which appeared in January 2015 after migrants in Calais seeking to cross the English Channel to the UK were forced to relocate their inner-city, makeshift camps to a landfill site at the outskirts of the city. The site, which by October 2016 reached a population of ten thousand (Davies et al. 2017), had quickly developed into a complex, quasi-urban environment as a result of both the neglect of the French authorities and the efforts of the camp’s inhabitants and the multiple NGOs that supported them.

In this chapter we examine these camps and cities in three sections: the first discusses the camps’ conflicting, changing, and entangled modes of governance; the second analyzes the camps’ spatial forms as temporary spaces that are separated from their urban contexts in different ways; and the third examines their broader urban symbolic meanings as spectacles of both hospitality and hostility. These three sections enable us to reflect on the gaps between the ways in which these camps are represented and how they function in their specific urban environments. In doing so, we aim to elucidate some of the common characteristics of these complex spatial formations.

Chapter 4 in Camps Revisited: https://www.rowmaninternational.com/book/camps_revisited/3-156-e104fe5a-c986-4af3-bbf8-b5f8ad82594c

For a copy of the full chapter, please send me an email to i.katz@sheffield.ac.uk

Whether in its institutional form—set up by the authorities to manage the unprecedented (or so it is often described by the media) number of people informally crossing international borders—or in its improvised and makeshift shape, the “camp” remains the most immediate and impactful intervention of the receiving countries to the current flows of irregular migrants and their “management.” As a result, displaced people and irregular migrants are either contained in enclavic, militarized structures or inhabit informal and abandoned spaces. The establishment of camps, whether formal or informal, represents a specific political reaction and resilience strategy as those on the move face the fortification of borders and the rise of nationalism.

This book thus analyzes the camp as a multifaceted, spatial formation taking different forms and functions in the management and control, but sometimes also in the development of new identities and new forms of political agency, of the populations that they host. It also intends to theorize the camp in light of the abovementioned unruly mobilities while reflecting on its different manifestations and their impacts. On the one hand, the book takes into consideration institutional camps established by the authorities and looks at them as modern institutions and spatial biopolitical technologies, while also analyzing makeshift camps realized “on the spot” by the refugees themselves and how these different forms of camp are related to each other. On the other hand, it reflects on specific cases of camp identities and on the different camp forms and functions, in the contemporary political landscape, with their multifaceted spatialities: from Romani camps to protest camps, from former refugee camps converted into tourist attractions to post-disaster camps, to the relationship between the camp and the bunker.

Chapter 1 in Camps Revisited: https://www.rowmaninternational.com/book/camps_revisited/3-156-e104fe5a-c986-4af3-bbf8-b5f8ad82594c

For a copy of the full chapter, please send me an email to i.katz@sheffield.ac.uk

Infrastructures of Care brings together academics, activists, NGOs and spatial practitioners for a discussion on the spaces and infrastructures of care and support relating to forced migration and refuge. The project begun as a symposium and exhibition at The Bartlett School of Architecture in February 2019. This exhibition catalogue continues to explore the various spatial, material, human, and humanitarian entanglements of provision created for and by displaced people.

Experiences of forced displacement and migration are profoundly shaped by the places where people find refuge and support. While the refugee camp dominates spatial studies, today around 60% of the world’s forcibly displaced live in urban areas and the city has been recognised as a particularly important host to refugees. In addition, as more than 80% of refugees live in developing countries, humanitarian concerns of protection and support are closely entangled with the social, political, and economic contexts of local populations. The broad array of formalised and informal spaces of displacement and refuge along with the ever-changing infrastructures of care and provision often destabilise the dichotomy between the city and camp and the meaning of concepts such as shelter and relief. This in turn suggests a re-thinking of how figures such as the forced migrant and the aid worker are understood. While foregrounding the role of space, this initiative takes as a starting point the infrastructures of care which are varyingly understood as spatial, human, material and institutional mechanisms of support and agency, as well as of control and restriction.

While infrastructures are usually conceived as physical and technical systems according to normative and modernist understandings, this has been challenged in recent years with particular reference to the global south. Infrastructures are increasingly understood as part of broader political, economic, social, material and spatial processes, both formal and informal, affected by factors within and beyond national borders (Simone 2004, Gandy 2005, de Boeck 2012, Chattopadhyay 2012, Larkin 2013, Amin 2014, Easterling 2014). Following these interpretations, we argue for recognising the entanglement of physical, human, legal, humanitarian, and other infrastructures of care and relief created both for and by forced migrants. For example, we understand spaces such as camps created by humanitarian agencies as well as urban and para-urban informal and formalised spatial appropriations set up by refugees themselves, as parts of infrastructures of care for displaced populations. Furthermore, while “care” is often understood as overwhelmingly positive, we argue for a more nuanced interpretation which acknowledges the associated layers of support, vulnerability, control, and in some cases coercion, related to this term (see Casualties of Care, Ticktin 2011). We simultaneously suggest that certain forms of care and associated sustenance are not necessarily reducible to, or exhausted by mechanisms of control (hooks 1990, Hartman 2016) and further recognise that the labour of care is often highly gendered, and significantly devalued, while being explicitly imbricated in politics. Infrastructures of care can therefore be understood across scales and spatial forms, in relation to the intimacies of daily life and at the level of broader legal, economic, humanitarian and state planning systems. In referring to infrastructures of care, we are hoping to draw out the systemic nature of institutions, mechanisms and agents that facilitate, enable and hinder relief for forcedly displaced people (Xiang and Lindquist 2014).
These projects are brought together to offer theoretical, methodological and empirical provocations on the theme of infrastructures of care.

Camps currently proliferate globally, whether these are makeshift or institutional camps, have a long history as a spatial instrument used by different powers to control and administer populations and territories.
From the colonial settler camps and concentration camps of the nineteenth and twentieth century to today’s official and informal refugee camps, the camp was and still is being employed as a versatile mechanism for the management of people in space. Camps are also part of the significant
geopolitical changes in Israel-Palestine related to the Israeli state-building project and to the mass displacement it caused. While the Palestinian refugee camps are well recognised and studied, the many other types of camps which have appeared in the region over the last century form a distinctive yet still unrecognised spatial paradigm, which provides
core example of similar enterprises of territorial alternations and social engineering. By identifying, understanding and re-defining the camp’s multifaceted spatial vocabulary in Israel-Palestine, we gain a means of conceptualising this surrounding phenomenon, a conceptualisation that is increasingly relevant and urgent, given the contemporary situations of forced migration and population management worldwide.
This short essay illustrates my PhD research, which focuses on Israel-Palestine as an extensive laboratory of camps—settler camps, immigrant camps, transit camps, refugee camps, IDP camps, detention camps, and others—which compose an integral part of the drastic territorial and demographic changes the area has undergone and is still undergoing. The theoretical and comparative empirical analysis in this work draws on and goes beyond this locality, examining the appearance and function of similar camp types around the world. The work analyses the architectural and geopolitical meaning of this complex instrument, investigating how the camp was and still is being used by different actors from all sides of the political spectrum, whether to facilitate national and territorial objectives or as a platform for its residents in their ongoing political struggles.

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, 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.

For the full essay visit:
https://medium.com/insecurities/the-global-infrastructure-of-camps-8153fb61ea30#.16j8j44ez

Based on current debates on the nature of camps in contemporary society and geopolitics, this commentary on Claudio Minca's paper titled ‘Geographies of the Camp’ (2015),
argues that while some camps could indeed be analyzed according to Agamben's theory as dehumanising spaces of de-subjectivation and thanatopolitics, other camps appear as sites where new political subjectivities emerge. Consequently, the paper suggests to analyse them according to Hannah Arendt’s political notion of ‘natality’ as spaces of political action.

Political Geography, (2015).

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0962629815000359

This short piece explains the relevance of my research 'The Common Camp', which won the 2016 RIBA President's Research Award in the 'Cities ans Community' category, to architects and planners.
The Award's judges commented that; 
"this project makes a significant, original and timely contribution to the existing, but limited, field of study concerning temporary settlement camps. It is a work which has international significance beyond Israel and Palestine, particularly within a world of increasing migration and conflict.
Very well researched and engaging in its specific focus on two camps, it makes a fascinating commentary on the ordering of society in 'camps of expansion' vs the more makeshift disorder of 'camps of exclusion'."

The full research paper will be published in The Journal of Architecture in 2017. For more information about the award see:
http://www.arct.cam.ac.uk/news/the-department-had-two-winners-of-the-2016-riba-president2019s-awards-for-research

The urban nature of the Syrian conflict has caused heavy physical damage to cities and the internal displacement in Syria is also inherently urban. Many of the 6.5 million Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) in Syria have been displaced, sometimes several times, within their own cities. This paper examines some of the current social, political and material issues related to forced displacement in Homes, Syria.

Manufactured Insecurity by Esther Sullivan is a gripping account of a predatory formation at the heart of the most popular form of private-market low-income housing in the United States: the mobile home park. The book reveals, through the combination of ethnographic exploration and theoretical analysis, the systematic evictions and dis-possessions that became the lived reality for millions of American mobile home residents and their correspondingly tenuous rights to a protected place and secured housing. By shifting between the daily spaces and difficult realities of residents in these parks during their expected and actual liquidation, and the variety of actors, powers, and structures that prosper from these realities, Sullivan powerfully exposes how precariousness and profit are two sides of the same coin of this housing formation while revealing its dreadful meaning to its inhabitants and communities. About 18 million low-income residents live in mobile home parks in the United States. With affordable housing diminishing, the mobile home parks have become the main way in which America accommodates its poor, and the expanding class of American working poor is the actual business model on which these residential parks are built upon. In these parks, residents are often both tenants and homeowners, with divided property rights that produce their precarious form of housing tenure. While notably 80% of residents own their mobile homes, only 14% also own the land on which their homes are placed. As such, residents in these parks are often only "halfway home-owners"; their households are placed on rented lots of land which are privately owned by others in a form defined as "divided asset ownership." This exposes residents to the vulnerability of renting a plot in a park that could be offered for sale and redevelopment at any stage, and from which they may be evicted, destabilizing their lives and abruptly destroying their slowly developed complex ecosystems of homes and communities. With a clear and thoughtfully composed analysis, Sullivan shows how the hardship of frequent expulsions inflicted on America's poor is not coincidental but the consequence of a sophisticated industry, which thrives and capitalizes on the needs of a deprived and captive population. Rather than being accidental, the reality of closing mobile home parks and the related expulsions of residents is the result of a complex and obscure system of technical, financial, market, and legal methods facilitated by a changing mix of national, state, municipal, and local actors and regulations, and by socio-spatial processes of segregation and stigmatization. More broadly, this reality of built-in precariousness is based on a neoliberal approach to urban planning and policy, which enables people to legally settle on a rented plot of land with their own home, while at the same time producing them as easily displaceable for the benefit of landowners and the urban planning agenda. This way, while land at the outskirts of cities is settled temporarily by rent-paying low-income residents who must also take care of their own homes, thus extracting maximum benefit for the land owners, this land could be easily cleared and redeveloped when the city grows and its value increases. This method is not only keenly adopted by local and national land markets but also by municipalities and urban planners for which, as noted by Sullivan, ‘almost any other land use is more spatially desirable than a mobile home park’ (p.65).

The margins, it seems, always come in plural. Rather than being a unified, coherent and fixed mode of existence, the spatial, material, and human entanglements of what is perceived as ‘the margins’ are constantly being assembled by a variety of agencies, constellations and networks which reject stable definitions and metanarratives.
Review on: Rethinking life at the margins: the assemblage of contexts, subjects and politics, edited by Michele Lancione.

See: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13604813.2018.1536025

For a copy of the full review, please send me an email to i.katz@sheffield.ac.uk

The significance of housing in disciplining the modern subject has been widely discussed within architectural history with regard to a variety of contexts, periods and theories. The importance of housing in forming “adequate” subjects of the nation-state and shaping the state-citizen contract has ranged from investigation of late-nineteenth-century British social housing projects and postwar architectural experiments to Foucauldian analysis of the disciplinary function of the working-class housing estate. Yael Allweil’s book, which provides an account of the central role of housing in nationalism and nation-building, could have been comfortably assessed within this framework. Yet the complex and contested situation of Zionism and Israel-Palestine — a homeland for two competing nationalities (as its hyphened name indicates) — and the author’s ambitious timeframe and broad empirical perspective (encompassing more than 150 years of both Jewish and Arab housing) situate her work beyond this frame of reference.

ספק אם אפשר לכנות בשם  'ארכיטקטורה' את השימושים החריגים בשפה המרחבית שהתפתחו באזורי הקונפליקט של מחנות הפליטים הפלסטיניים. התחביר היומיומי של בניה, חפירה, קביעת פתחים וסלילת דרכים התעצם במרחב הנתון להגבלות מתמידות, וקיבל תפקידים הדורשים כלי פרשנות חדשים שקשה לאתרם בשיח האדריכלי הרווח. במאמר זה אנתח את המציאות המרחבית שנוצרה מעבר לגדרות ולמחסומים באמצעות אפיוניהם של דלז וגואטרי את השימושים המינוריים בשפה כפי שהם מתבטאים בכתיבתו של קפקא, ואראה כיצד קווי המילוט הפיזיים אינם רחוקים במהותם מאלו הלשוניים. באמצעות תופעות מרחביות קונקרטיות כמו מנהרות ההברחה, הבניה בבוץ, והמבניות הסבוכה של המרחב אדגים את האופן בו מתבטאים המאפיינים המינוריים במחנה, וכיצד הופך המרחב המגביל והנוקשה לכלי במאבק.

היחידה להיסטוריה ותיאוריה, בצלאל //  גיליון מספר 26 - קונפליקט: אנטגוניזם ויצירה, אוקטובר 2012