Camps by design: architectural spectacles of migrant hostipitality

Abstract

Detention camps, ‘hospitality’ centres, and other carceral facilities created to contain people ‘on the move’ are usually formed in familiar spatial arrangements such as military-like blueprints of prefabricated shelters organised in a grid layout. Over the recent years, however, a number of these facilities were architecturally designed in distinct formations while being presented as attractive spaces of care and support. By analysing two such facilities created in different contexts and scales – the Holot detention camp in Israel’s Negev desert and the French urban Centre Humanitaire Paris- Nord – this paper examines their spatial and political meaning in relation to the ways they were designed, managed, and presented to the public. Unlike minimal spaces of provision or spaces of participatory design in contexts of displacement, which might encourage the spatial agency of displaced people and the reworking of their political subjectivities, the paper shows how these architecturally designed facilities, with their spectacular form and infrastructural function, doubly objectify their residents. While the spectacular designs of these facilities frame irregular migrants as separated and temporary ‘guests’ who become the objects for the distant gaze of their ‘hosts’, their infrastructural spaces produce the migrants as racialised and constantly moving bodies which are the objects of ongoing processes of concentration, categorisation, and circulation. These designed facilities, the paper argues, create visually identified and clearly defined spectacles of both hospitality and hostility, or in Derrida’s term, of hostipitality, through which irregular migrants are included by their receiving societies as only objectified, distant, and temporary guests.