Campsite Architectures of Duration and Place (review)

This book is about "camping" as a process of siting, clearing, making, and breaking a settlement. It is a philosophical inquiry into the meanings of place and time, specifically the process of moving, settling, creating, and changing as metaphors of human attachments to place and attempts to control change. This leads to the conclusion that camping is a method for thinking about place and home. The author draws extensively on cultural theory. Bachelard, Debord, de Certeau, Deleuze, Foucault, Lefebvre, Serres, and many others pop up like weeds (or rhizomes) in a campground and with much the same effect—they appear where they are not wanted. Does the reader really need a reference to Foucault to explain the "double displacement" of Hurricane Katrina victims from their homes and from the Superdome to FEMA trailers?

Hailey, a practicing architect and assistant professor of architecture at the University of Florida, has some creative thoughts on the ways certain kinds of ephemeral settlements are shaped by people seeking to express themselves or merely hoping to survive. His book will appeal most to scholars with an interest in American popular culture, vernacular architecture, and city planning. His chapters on municipal auto camps in Florida and some of the permanent communities they spawned, such as Braden Castle Park and Gibsonton, a winter camp for carnival performers, offer fresh insights into this phase of the state's history. His paring of Slab City, California, and the Burning Man festival in the desert north of Reno, Nevada, based on "similar climate and degree of remoteness" leads to a cursory but intriguing observation on virtual camping by Internet. A chapter on Manila Village, which existed in the Mississippi Delta south of New Orleans, from the 1870s to 1965, and the "urban camping" that followed the destruction of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina, raises more questions than it answers.

How, for example, does the refugee camp, surely the most complex and ubiquitous example of campsite planning and administration in the world today, relate to the author's concepts of duration and place? Hailey makes some good points about the relationship of military camps to other forms of semi-permanent settlements, and one of his principal insights, about the camp as a model for response to continuous change, is well argued. In the end, however, these points are lost in a fog of unfortunate rhetorical choices. Two examples of his prose will have to suffice: "The inclusion of 'site' in this work's title is meant parenthetically and reflects not the complete suppression of site but the possibility of simultaneously maintaining and transforming sitedness through practices of siting, within the overall process of camping." (5) "Remembering that Nietzche wondered if there could be a grounding without ground, we might ask the following: does the confluence of a contemporary itinerancy of American dwelling (from permanent to temporary) and the incidence of camps that linger as dwelling sites (from temporary to permanent) suggest an alternative method for the construction of place—one that embraces the paradoxes inherent in architectures of mobility and time?" (223)

Although the title may suggest it, this book is not a history of camping, nor is it an examination of the material culture of camping apart from some references to trailer design and campground layouts. It is only obliquely about tourism or recreation. It has little to say about the physical environment of campsites except to note that they require space for campfires, tents, trailers, and other semi-permanent structures.