The Camp

The city and the camp. The city against the camp. The city as the camp. These tend to be the relationalities—conjunctional, oppositional, analogical—with which we try to make sense of the stubborn shadow the camp casts on modern urban life. For all the differences between these formulations, symptomatically they all point to the same thing: city and camp in contemporary urban and political thought seem hopelessly entangled. The outside of the city (or the end of an outside/inside distinction) no longer seems to be the rural or the country, but its own internal zone of exclusion. Although we think of this as an acutely modern, even postmodern, problematic, something like the camp has been loitering around the edges of the city at least since ancient Rome. The English word camp comes via French and Italian, from the Latin word campus, meaning “level ground” or “field.” The Campus Martius (The Field of Mars) on the bank of the Tiber was the open field that accommodated military drills, war training, religious festivals, and athletic exercises, and as a temporary site of assembly was kept free of any permanent structures for some four centuries. If the Roman notion of civitas gives us at least one understanding of the city, then camp and city have been on familiar terms from the start. If we widen our scope beyond a strictly etymological lens, then a more recent, more colonial, and more material genealogy emerges: the invention of barbed wire, the expansion of transit systems, the development of colonial counterinsurgency methods, and the intertwinement of war and humanitarianism as they gave form to nineteenth-century camps in revolutionary Cuba, famine-stricken colonial India, and during the Boer War.

Part of the difficulty, of course, in pinning down any one genealogy is the fact that camps are defined by a spatial and temporal indeterminacy. Charlie Hailey, in perhaps the world’s first inventory of camp forms, points out that camps can just as easily be thought of as spatial practices, combining field and event, as they can be defined through time. “Just as they are lodged spatially between the open and the closed, camps exist between the temporary and the permanent,”¹ and as such can work conditionally—from temporary to permanent and from permanent to temporary. Not only have many cities, from Vienna to Barcelona, started life as military encampments (the Campus Martius itself became the most populous part of Rome); in the twentieth century, architects, from the Situationist Constant to the postmodernist Aldo Rossi, have either thought through avant-garde urbanisms “as crystallizations of the temporary form of vernacular architecture,”² that is, the camp, or relied on camps as metaphorical figurations for new urban practice. As Rossi remarked, “Cities are in reality great camps of the living and the dead.”³

Today, the proliferation of the camp form produces not just a diverse but an almost absurd, Borgesian inventory: homeless camps, recreational camps, university campuses, military camps, refugee camps, internment camps, summer camps, labor camps, fat camps, tech camps, protest camps, naturist camps, boot camps, and terrorist camps. One might be tempted to bemoan the diffusion of a word that has been so well traveled as to lose any definitional rigor or, in more spatial terms, to recognize the topological breaking point of a form. And yet something connects all of these senses and forms. Something about the topological elasticity of the camp form—with boundaries that seem to grow more elastic as colonial borders grow more hardened—keeps the camp installed as a ubiquitous political technology of our age of permanent crisis. In turn, something about our present, anterior to the proliferation of the camp form, produces “the political prevalence of the camp and the theoretical allure of its figure,”⁴ and if not the indispensability then at least the unavoidability of the camp in our contemporary political grammar and theory. If, after the brief and inauspicious foray into the smooth utopias of globalization, the figure of the refugee is, again, the political figure of our time, then it is perhaps inevitable that we find ourselves, in the city and out...