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[ 171 ] On a warm Saturday night in June 2005, three young men arrived at their carefully chosen campsite. They pitched their North Face tents, unrolled their sleeping bags, and sat down to enjoy an evening in the out of doors. Friends and successful entrepreneurs from New York City, this group of campers appeared to be following a well-beaten path—temporarily escaping their urban lives for adventure and solace in nature.Where they departed from the millions of Americans who annually head out on a camping vacation, however, was in their selection of setting: not woods, lake, or mountains, but Times Square, mid-town Manhattan. Camping in the capitol of pavement-and-neon civilization—what were they doing there? Their explicit reasons were simple, without any stated political, environmental, or artistic motivations. They thought it would be cool. As they wrote in their blogs the next day, the experiment met expectations. “The night was spectacular,” one entered. He went on to describe their plans and experience: “We chose the traffic median at 44th Street because it is a wide island right in the middle of Times Square with plenty of room for our tents to sprawl. It was noisy and bright, but the leds replaced the stars nicely and the skyscrapers couldn’t have imitated sequoias any better.” The campers seemed happy to converse with the crowds that gathered, pose for photos, and to accept the pizza a stranger brought them.While they noted that no less than ten different police officers came to investigate their camp, the men prided themselves on successfully negotiating their way out of an order to disperse. Posing either as photographers for the North Face company or as fans waiting on line for concert tickets, they managed to keep their site until morning.1 The appeal of this scene, to campers, crowds, and cops alike, centered on its apparent novelty. The image of tents on a traffic island looked so incongruous as Sleeping Outside The Political Natures of Urban Camping p h o e B e s . K r o p p Y o u n G [ 172 ] c i T i e s a n d n aT u r e to be entirely whimsical. The reflexive connection of camping with wilderness left viewers unable to assimilate the Times Square bivouac as anything but anomaly.As one individual responded, “This was a very thought-provoking experiment. . . . If people can camp in public places such as state and national parks, then why should they not be able to camp in Times Square?”2 Urban streetscapes and rural parklands may both be public spaces, but they are public in different ways. People do not, in fact, camp freely in either, and must adhere to different sets of regulations. Nonetheless, camping on the street is not the same as camping in national parks. Yet, despite the extraordinary urban location, the norms of wilderness-style camping still seemed to govern. The tight cultural bond between camping and nature allowed the campers to imagine skyscrapers as Sequoias, an improbable metamorphosis that the tents seemed to invite. Online reactions echoed this refrain, using wilderness camping as the operable referent. One joked, “Excellent spot. How far did you have to hike to find it?” while another added only “i have the same northface tent.”Whether judging them exquisitely hip or unfathomably crazy, what most found provocative was the urban simulation of a nature experience, if quoted only in the form of branded camping equipment.3 Comparatively few, and none of the campers, remarked upon the other potentially volatile comparison to those who camped in the city on a regular basis—the homeless. Had several disheveled and itinerant men set up camp in Times Square not with Gore-Tex and digital cameras but shopping carts and old blankets, the conversations with authorities and passersby were likely to have had a different tenor. The campsites of the homeless are not urban anomalies, no matter how scarce city officials have tried to make them. The novelty of the stunt, then, rested not in the idea of urban camping, but the identities of the campers who practiced it. Middle-class urbanites sleeping outside with the help of purchased gadgetry represented a recognizably safe image, even if practiced in an unusual location. One of the few to query this discrepancy, a user posted, “Don’t get me wrong. I’m all for Starwars fans and Apple freaks (I’m one) and you guys camping out on...

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