Urbanism of exception: camps and inhabitation

Abstract

Writing on camps is dangerous as they are never constrained to the architectural scale and form, we might firstly perceive them. If examined as singular objects, even in their multiple diverse morphological aspects and their contested historiography, they seem incapable of mobilizing architectural and spatial reflection beside an aesthetic of precarity, the makeshift of resistance or the violent power of control, surveillance, exclusion, and death. But when imbricated with infrastructures, territories, materials, border regimes, migration policies, activism, and network of solidarity they become active part in a larger reality-making apparatus enhancing different temporal and spatial articulations without recomposition. in this short contribution I want to reflect on what I consider a central tension and ambivalence of the camp in political theory and architectural and urban thinking: the tension between the camp and the possibility (or impossibility) of inhabitation.