How Do Institutional Camps Persist?
Goran is originally from Bosnia and arrived in Italy when he was a child, almost 25 years ago. He settled in one of the oldest informal settlements in Rome and, since his eviction in 2010, has lived in a small Portakabin in a crowded camp on the eastern periphery of the Italian capital city. Camps like this started appearing in Rome at the beginning of the 1990s following the arrival of Roma asylum seekers during the Yugoslav Wars. Because they were viewed as nomads, most of them were not granted protection as refugees and therefore ended up living in informal settlements. The unhygienic conditions in these settlements and the threat that, according to the municipality, they posed to public order and security led to a series of slum removal programmes and to the relocation of evicted Roma to emergency camps. Although presented as a temporary measure, the Roma camp constitutes a policy tool that has been increasingly employed to manage the Roma population living in informal settlements. These camps have persisted until today and several thousand people have been stuck in these spaces for years, including Goran, who says:
Portakabins here are too small, there is not enough space [ā¦]. The municipality promised us a flat in a council house and told us that we had to stay here only for four months. But, weāve been here for a long time now. I even went and met the mayor [ā¦] but they donāt listen to us. 1
The Roma camp where Goran lives is still in place, and others have been opened after it. Although some Roma acknowledge the relative improvement of the living conditions in official camps compared to those of informal settlements, these camps also have several limitations. For example, they are usually located on the periphery of the city, in non-residential areas, far from public transport and other facilities, and suffer from very poor health and safety standards. Many others were relocated there with the same expectations that Goran had and, like him, are still waiting to be moved elsewhere.
Approximately 40 years before, in France, Samir was relocated to a transit estate not far from Paris. Like Goran, he also arrived in France as a young boy in the early 1950s from Algeria. His father had left a few years before and was later joined by the whole family, who for about 15 years lived in a bidonville (i.e. French term for informal settlement) in Nanterre, a municipality in the west of Paris region. After the Second World War, France needed a cheap workforce in the factories and decided to open its doors to economic migrants from the colonies. However, these migrants were not as welcome as the European ones and, although they could quickly find a job, they did not easily find places to live. The lack of housing stock after the war, the increasing number of migrants arriving into the cities and the widespread racism towards people from the North African colonies resulted in an increasing number of Algerian migrants living in informal settlements. Clearance of these informal settlements started during the 1960s and the people living there were relocated to so-called transit estates. A decade later, these estates still constituted the main housing solution for slum dwellers, who lived there for more than the few months initially planned. Samir and his family, after almost a year from their relocation, decided to write a letter to the person responsible for the slum removal programmes. The letter read:
You had reassured us that it was just temporary, a matter of two months, and that we would have been moved elsewhere [ā¦]. Today itās almost nine months since we are here and we havenāt heard from you ever since. 2
Samirās family was finally relocated to a council house 12 years after this letter was written. During this time, the conditions of the estate progressively worsened: the poor quality of the housing containers, the feeling of abandonment and the stigma that was attached to these places heavily affected the life of the residents. Hundreds of them, like Samir, had to spend years there instead of months but finally, unlike the Italian Roma camps, the transit estates were closed in the 1980s.
While Goran and Samir spent years in emergency accommodation, Cristian in contrast was evicted earlier than he hoped for from the village where he lived in 2015. With his family, he had arrived from southern Romania in 2005, when he was 8 years old. Like many other Roma migrants from Romania, his father decided to leave to find a better job and secure a better future for his children. Thanks to a neighbourās contacts they arrived in France and started living in an informal settlement in the northern part of Paris, together with other Roma and non-Roma Romanian migrants. Even though the living conditions in the bidonville were difficult, Cristianās father quickly found an informal job in the scrap metal collection sector, together with other residents. For a couple of years, they managed to get by, but in 2007 they were suddenly evicted from the settlement and, in 2008, they were relocated to a so-called integration village on the northern periphery of Paris. Unlike other Roma who had to find a new place to live, Cristianās family was selected to join this integration village in order to undergo language training and receive job and house-hunting support. However, when the municipality decided to close the integration village in 2013, Cristian and his family had still not found an alternative housing solution. He said to a journalist: āWe would like to leave, but we need a house, otherwise where can we go?ā. 3 In contrast to the residents of the Roma camps and transit estates, the Roma living in integration villages campaigned to stay put. In 2013, Cristianās family and other residents started squatting in the village and managed to remain there until 2015, when the site was finally cleared and the families left on the streets. With the help of associations and activists, they later set up a protest camp in front of the town hall, hoping to convince the mayor to offer them a new housing solution, but their demands remained unheard.
Goran, Samir and Cristian 4 experienced similar types of segregation in temporary camps. Yet these camps are characterised by different forms of persistent temporariness. While Goran still awaits relocation to council housing, Samir has finally moved out from the transit estate where he spent over ten years of his life. In contrast, Cristian would have preferred to spend more time in the integration village, and for this reason campaigned to extend its duration. How could these similar spaces persist in such different, even opposite, ways? Why and how do temporary institutional camps last? This is the puzzle underlying the research presented in this book. The answer that I will offer is that the protracted temporariness of camps depends on the contentious politics between state and non-state actors and, more specifically, on two factors shaping it: the incorporation of civil society associations through public partnership and the ambiguity of the policy context.
Several scholars in so-called camp studies (Minca 2015b, p. 75) have acknowledged permanent temporariness as an essential characteristic of camps. Camps have been defined as ādurable socio-spatial formations that displace and confine undesirable populations, suspending them in a distinct spatial, legal and temporal conditionā (Picker and Pasquetti 2015, p. 681). However, Ramadan (2013, p. 72) reminds us that the ācamp is never intended to be a permanent homeā but, as observed by Diken and Laustsen (2005, p. 17), it is planned as āa temporary site, a spatially defined location that exists only for a limited periodā. The camp is indeed a spatio-temporal device created in emergency situations, when there is āa temporary suspension of the rule of law on the basis of a factual state of dangerā (Agamben 1998, p. 169). But, despite its temporariness, the camp often endures, becoming a āpermanent spatial arrangementā (Agamben 1998, p. 169). In contrast to these views, Bernardot (2005) suggests that, rather than constituting a temporary response that unexpectedly becomes permanent, the camp is from its very origin planned as permanently temporary and, therefore, persistence is an aspect already inscribed in its creation. Yet, the presence of a permanent condition does not imply the end of its exceptionality but a protracted existence āoutside the normal orderā (Agamben 1998, p. 169). Moreover, this persistence does not always and necessarily imply further marginalisation. Indeed, although in many cases it leads to the perpetuation of regimes of exclusion and disenfranchisement, the blurring of legality and exception, fixity and temporariness can also produce āgray spacesā as ābases for self-organization, negotiation and empowermentā (Yiftachel 2009, p. 243).
In spite of all these different views, it remains widely accepted among scholars in camp studies that permanent temporariness constitutes a crucial aspect of camps (see Hailey 2009). This protracted temporal state has indeed been referred to in different ways, for instance: āenduring temporarinessā (Ramadan 2013, p. 72), ātransient permanencyā (Diken 2004, p. 94), āpermanent temporarinessā (Picker and Pasquetti 2015, p. 681) or āindeterminate temporarinessā (Turner 2015, p. 4). Nevertheless, albeit permanent temporariness has been widely acknowledged as a common aspect of camps and usefully sheds light on a condition strongly marking the lives of people inhabiting them, it has rarely been problematised and its drivers have been relatively under-explored, remaining mostly treated as a mere definitional feature of these spaces. While attention has been paid towards how prolonged temporariness is produced in the case of informal camps (see Bermann and Clough Marinaro 2014; Katz 2015; Rygiel 2011; Yiftachel 2009) as well as long-standing research into the persistence of ghettos and urban racial segregation (see Massey and Denton 1993; W...