‘The Common Camp’: temporary settlements as a spatio-political instrument in Israel-Palestine

Abstract

Irit KatzCamps, whether created by or for refugees, undocumented migrants or 'war on terror'suspects, form a central mechanism by which modern societies and territories are managed. While most of us live in permanent built environments which create the stable and predictable settings for our mundane activities, other people are ruptured from such a prosaic reality, living in a situation which is transient and ephemeral.Camps are an inseparable part of this reality of displacement and movement, detention, asylum and refuge. These spaces are often created ad hoc due to an urgent need and later are frequently suspended in time with no clear future, separated from their social, cultural and spatial surroundings.While detention, transit and refugee camps differ substantially in terms of their functions, conditions and modes of creation and organisation, they are all recognised as various forms of the same ever-present mechanism of modernity that is still an important aspect of how we live today. Over the last decade, much has been written about the 'return of the camp', 1 mainly in relation to the camps of the US 'war on terror' 2 and the global proliferation of the camps which form part of the current 'migration age'. 3 Yet the camp has never disappeared since its first emergence in the colonies as early as the 19th century 4 and its extensive use during the 20th century, which will be remembered, as stated famously by Zygmunt Bauman, as the 'Century of Camps'. 5 In Israel-Palestine, the camp was and still is prevalently used to facilitate the significant geopolitical changes of the last century related to the Israeli nationbuilding process and the mass displacement it caused. 6 Camps are extensively employed by both authoritarian regimes and contemporary democracies as instruments of control, custody, care and abandonment. As such, they are mainly analysed as 'devices of power', created by, and mostly for, stripped populations which are managed outside society and the normal state apparatuses in order to maintain the 'national order of things'. 7 However, the camp is not only a space for powerless people: while many camps are indeed inhabited by weak populations excluded by strong powers, others are used by the strong to gain and

Urbanism of exception: camps and inhabitation

“…In their criticism, Agier's camp city like model had a major shortcoming in considering camps as only transformed by processes relating the surrounding urban landscape. Katz (2015Katz ( , 2017 looked into the aftermath of Agamben's theory in the context of Israel/Palestine conflict and argued that although camps were in a stat of exception in the 19th and 20th century, they became so 'common' as a prevalent space in the 21st century; common in the sense that they are widespread and have become central to the way modern state organizes management of people and space in the region and where human agency of struggle and contestation where new subjectivities and various power relations emerge.…”

From Emergency to Integration? The Spatial Controversy of Reception Centres in Italy

“…According to the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, considering human life in its double dimension of zoe (biological life) and bios (political life), the condition of the refugee, characterized by the lack of legal protection by any State (human rights are protected by law, and law is applied to citizens), creates a "space of exception", between inclusion and exclusion, where life is reduced to the biological one, a "bare life" (Darling 2009;John-Richards 2014). The deepness of such thought is entering in the broad architectural discourse (Boano 2017), but has already emerged in the space of exception par excellence: the refugee camp (Katz 2017;Tan 2016), immediate and protracted emergency settlement and housing solution, assuming today the dimension of cities.…”