Building a Bed for the Night: The Parisian “Yellow Bubble” and the Politics of Humanitarian Architecture

Scott‐Smith, Tom

doi:10.1353/hum.2020.0025

Cited by 4 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 9 publications

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“…The ephemerality of the Bubble’s very existence underscored the fragility of refugees’ ‘welcome’ in Paris. While the politics and function of the Bubble’s temporary humanitarian architecture is well documented by Scott-Smith (2020), we highlight the role the ephemeral played in structuring how ‘arrival’ infrastructure was accessed and navigated, and how ephemerality generated alternative spaces of care and dwelling within and beyond the perimeter of the Bubble.…”

Section: Ephemerality In the Bubblementioning

confidence: 86%

Peripheral humanitarianism: Ephemerality, experimentation, and effects of refugee provisioning in Paris

Ramakrishnan

Thieme

2022

Environ Plan D

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This article examines the place-based assemblages of humanitarian care, which emerge at neighbourhood scales in response to a wider politics of exclusion. We ground our discussion in the variegated humanitarian efforts and solidarities that took place in a working-class neighbourhood on the periphery of Paris, which brought into sharp relief the combination of precarity and provisioning in the wake of the 2015 ‘refugee crisis’. Drawing on ethnographic encounters, we recount the combination of reactive, emergency humanitarian logics (between 2016 and 2017) and experimental humanitarian strategies contesting wider exclusionary and deterrence-based asylum practices (2018 to the present). We show how modes of ephemeral and experimental humanitarianism operated across local spatiotemporal nodes – inside a welcome centre (the ‘Bubble’), and on the surrounding streets. We argue that attention to the effects of the ephemeral and experimental solidarities and encounters that formed outside the formal infrastructure of humanitarian care in Paris were in part palliative, but profound in their re-imagining of a progressive politics of solidarity amidst protracted and overlapping precarities. We propose peripheral humanitarianism to describe these effects, a spatially and temporally contingent humanitarian assemblage engaging with both traditional and DIY humanitarian responses that challenges structural exclusions of racialized ‘others’.

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Section: Ephemerality In the Bubblementioning

confidence: 86%

Peripheral humanitarianism: Ephemerality, experimentation, and effects of refugee provisioning in Paris

Ramakrishnan

Thieme

2022

Environ Plan D

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“…The problematic aspects of the design of these facilities are often indicated by the lack of basic architectural consideration, with the attractive ‘bubble’ being a noisy, hot, and claustrophobic (Scott-Smith, 2020) and Holot being depicted as a grim and poorly-equipped camp with its definition as an ‘open facility’ negated by its isolated location. Yet these problems could also be seen as symptoms to the political intentions underlying these designs, in which the narratives and interests of the institutional powers that created them to manifest bordering and enlightened welcoming concurrently were always proffered over the ones on whom they were imposed.…”

Section: Designing Spectacles Of Hostipitality – a Concluding Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Centre Humanitaire Paris-Nord was not located in a distant desert but within the French capital. The facility, which was opened by the French authorities in November 2016 as a response to the presence of migrants without shelter in the city, was envisioned by its initiator Mayor Hidalgo as a Centre with ‘strong sense of humanity’ that would be reflected in its ‘powerful aesthetic sensibility’ (Scott-Smith, 2020: 320). Indeed, it was communicated in the media as a spectacle of welcoming humanitarian hospitality, presented by Hidalgo as a project intended to provide ‘a site that allows the accommodation of those arriving destitute’ (Dearden, 2016); located in the northeast section of the city, the City of Paris's first institutional ‘refugee camp’ (Dewan, 2016) was aimed to create a welcoming space of urban hospitality.…”

Section: ‘Postbox’: the French Centre Humanitaire Paris-nord Concent...mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The notion of 'camps by design', explored in the first part of this paper, reveals the underexamined links between architectural and political intentions in the design of migrant facilities (but Katz et al, 2018;Katz 2022;Scott-Smith, 2020;Weizman, 2011). In this part, I also examine the relationship between infrastructural spaces and spatial spectacles as part of the state's operative system of border control.…”

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confidence: 96%

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Camps by design: Architectural spectacles of migrant hostipitality

Katz

2022

Incarceration

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Detention camps, ‘hospitality’ centres and other carceral facilities created to contain people ‘on the move’ are usually formed in familiar spatial arrangements such as 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 examining 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 analyses 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 constantly moving racialised 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.

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“…This has included studies of self-constructed shelters (Mould, 2018), prefabricated shelters (Katz, 2017a) and flat-packed shelters (Scott-Smith, 2019). It includes studies of repurposed shelters (Doraï and Piraud-Fournet, 2018), grand architectural shelter designs (2020a) as well as more mundane considerations of engineering (Scott-Smith, 2020b). The Jungle itself has generated a range of interesting literature focusing on physical forms, which includes studies of material precarity (Mould, 2018) its relationship with nearby cities (Mould, 2017), and the spatial dynamics of migrant journeys (Davies and Isakjee, 2015).…”

Section: Infrastructural Immobilitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Infrastructural immobility: Movement and material culture in the Calais Jungle

Scott‐Smith

2022

Incarceration

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This paper develops the idea of infrastructural immobility, a dynamic within infrastructural systems whereby the movement of one thing relies upon the immobility of another. Drawing on fieldwork carried out in the Calais Jungle over the summer of 2016, it explores the relationship between what moves and what stays in processes of migration, arguing that if we are to make sense of camps as both spaces of confinement and spaces of mobility it is important to look at the role of infrastructures and the objects they contain. Infrastructures have been defined as ‘matter that enables the movement of other matter’ but it is rarely acknowledged that the matter that facilitates movement will often have to stay immobile. To carry cars, our roads need to stay fixed: they must not shift, rupture, buckle or break. To channel water, pipes need to be sealed and secured, remaining stationary and solid. This also applies to camps and other carceral junctions, which have their own balance of confinement and mobility shaped by material forms. This paper focuses on two objects in Calais – fencing and shipping containers – to illustrate the point.

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Building a Bed for the Night: The Parisian “Yellow Bubble” and the Politics of Humanitarian Architecture

Cited by 4 publications

References 9 publications

Peripheral humanitarianism: Ephemerality, experimentation, and effects of refugee provisioning in Paris

Peripheral humanitarianism: Ephemerality, experimentation, and effects of refugee provisioning in Paris

Camps by design: Architectural spectacles of migrant hostipitality

Infrastructural immobility: Movement and material culture in the Calais Jungle

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