Michel Agier. Exils - Des mégapoles aux camps by labandepassante Agier is, as far as I know, the only scholar to write about slums and refugee camps, and I frankly think he’s brilliant. A very rough, jotted-down translation of one of my favorite parts, about 22 minutes in:
What I saw in the favelas and in the camps was that up to a certain point, and often in the absence of a social state (in the case of the favelas, etc) or with a minimal intervention of the international community in the case of the camps, people reorganize their spaces, reorganize their lives very quickly in the camps – I noticed that families were reformed very quickly in the camps, and after about a month or a year or two, the space itself of the camp transformed – at first they live in tents, but over time buildings of mud, boards, etc – they make their space livable. We see the same thing, though this is a different case, in the clandestine communities of migrants in Calais or in Patras, Greece, where I recently went to do some investigations – there too in the worst material conditions, people install themselves to create a livable place. This process seemed to me to be the process of the creation of a city – or a process of racinement; The root doesn’t exist there at first, but then we arrive and plant the root and all the stories of the city or the village or the house are always stories of someone who arrives: no one emerges from the ground. It’s this process of planting that seems to me to be very visible in the favelas and the refugee camps. The comparison is not at all evident, empirically-speaking – there are enormous differences, and yet, we see this with its minimal material infrastructure, and distance from normal life. We must detach ourselves from this European model of the city – and it is this European model that exists around the world to determine what is a city – we must detach ourselves from these ideas to reconstitute the process of the creation of the city that is a space of interaction, a space of multiple exchanges, a hybrid space, and thus find this process occurring in the refugee camps.There are communities of people that slip through the cracks of society’s structure: refugees, slum-dwellers, the mentally ill, Roma, etc. And it is important to bear in mind that these populations recreate a certain amount of that structure on their own. Human survival requires cooperation, which is a very reassuring thought. But the other thing that’s interesting is that these populations aren’t totally free from control: they are contained in specific spaces (and often these neighborhoods live a precarious existence, at risk of demolition or forced displacement). Refugee camps are, in many ways, over-organized, managed in bureaucratic systems of control by UNHCR and other international NGOs. Similarly, the people of Skid Row cycle in and out of prisons—the containers for undesirable, “invisible” people, and also a space where personal freedom is explicitly constrained. Enter Agier, again, around the 46-minute mark, where he talks about the anthropological "frontier," arguing that identity dries up without territory because we are always the Others of others: the frontier is crucial as the meeting place where we can construct our own identities. The walls that are being erected to keep migrants out of Europe, for instance, are the opposite of the frontier. Humanity is about meeting, and the edification of walls is dangerous and desperate, he says. It is in this vein that the Safer Cities initiative operates. The second iteration of New York’s broken glass policies, the Safer Cities project is shown to be an assault on the poor and minority populations, as Skid Row residents are targeted for crimes that are ignored among wealthy white people. The criminal justice system across the country is already horrifically skewed to disproportionately impact minorities (who are often victims of racial profiling) and poor people (who often can’t afford appropriate protections). The Safer Cities initiative makes their very lives illegal, as it targets them for the actions necessary for their survival. I thought of Chatterjee’s The Politics of the Governed, which I read for my class on Indian politics this spring. Chatterjee’s key argument is that people whose voices are excluded from civil society make claims on the government’s responsibilities to look after and control them, rather than through the government’s constitutional duty to lawful citizens. When the urban squatters or rural poor mobilize to claim benefits from government programs, they are not acting as members of civil society, because the procedures in place have previously excluded or marginalized them. Instead, they must work against the distribution of power in society. They often act in extra-legal and paralegal ways to claim civic services and welfare benefits, maintaining that the illegality of their actions does not negate the state’s duty to provide for their welfare. Illegal activities are a fundamental part of their existences and political engagement. When these illegal activities are not tolerated but rather forcibly repressed, it amounts to warfare against the livelihoods of the poor and marginalized—who could be anyone: mental illness (a key factor driving people to Skid Row) affects 1/4 Americans, for instance. More importantly, they are not just anyone – they are someone to the people who love them, humans as much as the people who fear them are.
