THE DESERT ON THE MARGINS IS MY HEIMAT: FOR A NON-EUROCENTRIC VISION OF MIGRATIONS AND ARCHITECTURE
Parasite 2.0
We explore the idea of migration with a non-Eurocentric perspective in the context of the current migration crisis as a starting point for the creation of a supranational state free from third-party governments, viewing peculiar radical islands such as the refugee camps as places where the concept of Heimat may be fully realised. REPORTING […]
We explore the idea of migration with a non-Eurocentric perspective in the context of the current migration crisis as a starting point for the creation of a supranational state free from third-party governments, viewing peculiar radical islands such as the refugee camps as places where the concept of Heimat may be fully realised.
REPORTING FROM THE WESTERN FRONT
Nowadays, as Europeans, we are used to looking at migration movements with a centripetal perspective: from outside, overstepping a border, towards our prosperous continent. Over the centuries, the recognition of a limit – of an inside and an outside – thus led to the individuation of a different subject, “the other”, which lies at the basis of the very concept of Europe as described by Braudel. This, in turn, triggered off specific narratives about nature, man and civilisation, resulting in the outright scission between East and West.
In Orientalism (1978), Edward Said tackles the issue of redefining and explaining the construction of the East by the Old Continent. According to Said, the East is not a practically identifiable geographical and cultural entity. On the contrary, he regards it as a tool employed by European cultures with the purpose of building their own identity as Europe, pigeonholing “other” cultures into simplistic stereotypes and generalisations.
Said neatly outlines the Eurocentric nature of the ideological imposition of the difference between East and West – a specious device that also played a crucial role in the achievements of Colonialism. Is it fair to say that our explanation of the real is almost completely based on a Western cultural experience? “Reporting from the front” – which front? With what eyes are we looking at this front? Who’s responsible for its creation? Is the Western world really willing to aid those who, in our view, are no longer capable of mastering their existence? Is this aid ultimately directed towards another aim beyond?
SALVIFIC ARCHITECTURE
In recent years we have observed the return of a theoretical and practical trend that views architecture as having the possibility of solving political and/or social issues. We have seen a growth in the number of publications, biennials and projects on the topic, though uncritical ones sometimes, thus yielding to a general mystification of these concepts and of their meanings. Symptomatic of such a return is the renewed attention to the Maison Dom-ino, which turned a hundred in 2014 and has become an icon for those who believe in Open Source Architecture. Le Corbusier’s project was born in response to a housing crisis in Belgium in order to provide dwellings in a situation of social unease; today, it still serves the same purpose for entire populations migrating towards Third World megalopolises. It is, indeed, the most prominent and widespread tool for architectural anarchy, being employed in a variety of scenarios ranging from the Favelas informal reality to North Africa, from “abusivism” in Southern Italy to Greek Polykatoikia. It is the symbol of that kind of architecture that developed between the two World Wars, at a time when the scarcity of houses in fast-growing or war-devastated cities prompted a great deal of architects to found the Modern Movement, whose pivotal tenet was the creation of the perfect city for the modern man: the demiurge-architect resembles god in its creative act, building an ethically charged theoretical structure with a supposedly central social role. Le Corbusier, with his insane idea for the Paris of the future, was the main advocate of this ideology and its contradictions. The modern project gave rise to a polarised city fragmented into social classes. Today, indeed, if we journey through the suburbs of the cities that were reached and modified by such theories, we can detect its by-products: the theories, transformed into political weapons aimed at resolving social tensions within the urban landscape, were applied according to principles of ostracism and exclusion.
The demolition of the urban housing project Pruitt-Igoe, with which Charles Jenks set the seal on the end of modernist utopia, provides a case study of the misleading use and failure of architecture whenever this does not operate with valid policies.
Indeed, the “modern experiment” attempted to export the European model of the city to other continents in which entirely different cultures and traditions were rooted. Examples include Le Corbusier’s idealised and preposterous Algiers plan, and the Candilis, Josic and Woods’ “Nid D’abeille” project in Casablanca. Here the European failure to export and westernise “the other” is apparent.
SIDE EFFECTS AND RADICAL ISLANDS
The Modern Movement urbanism stirred up a process of urban estrangement of those lower classes that were born out of urban cleansings such as Haussmann’s “Grand Travaux” in Paris and the “Plan Cerdà” in Barcelona. Such projects have promoted the formation of cities fragmented into different social classes, while simultaneously encouraging the creation of urban radical islands, which harbour the potential to rebel, where it is possible to imagine new codes of ethics. They testify to the disingenuous, if not deceptive, nature of urbanisation processes that masquerade as major works for the redevelopment and improvement of social conditions. Haussmann’s healthy, bright and spacious Ville Lumière is a city made for the Boulevards’ burgeoning bourgeoisie – not for all. It can be classed as one of the first examples of Urban Regeneration – a word that today’s architects prefer to the out-of-favour gentrification, though it does not really move away from it. In these two cases, the side effects are particularly noteworthy: on one hand, the Paris Commune; on the other, Catalan anarchism (also to be found in other Spanish regions) during the Spanish Civil War. In 1901, in the working-class district of Atochas Monte Alto (La Coruña, Spain) a priest married two women, which was the first same-sex marriage in history. In the bowels of anarchic Barcelona, the first naturist schools began to appear, where a free and open vision of knowledge could be transmitted, escaping the oppression of the Catholic establishment, the only source of education at the time. This goes to show how “it’s a paradox that the places thought to be the most uninhabitable turn out to be the only ones still in some way inhabited. An old squatted shack still feels more lived in than the so-called luxury apartments where it is only possible to set down the furniture and get the décor just right while waiting for the next move. Within many of today’s megalopolises, the shantytowns are the last living and livable areas, and also, of course, the most deadly.”1
The idea of the island and the desert – intended as springboards for the formulation of new worldviews – has been explored, historically, by numerous writers and philosophers. In “Causes and Reasons of Desert Islands”, for instance, Deleuze talks about continental islands, harking back to the definition given by geographers to accidental or drifting islands, which originate from a fracture in the mainland – an erosion that chase them away, a detachment that labels them as different and foreign bodies. By the same token, in 1516, Thomas Moore attempted to elude the censorship of his time by devising an imaginary island by the name of Utopia, also coining this word. The island, by representing an antithesis to England under Henry VIII, embodies new codes and ethics in a potential different world. Can we look at these places of exclusion, at these artificial desert islands as the only places left where an alternative to the status quo can be envisaged, where architecture can retrieve its social, political and ethical role?
RADICAL ISLANDS, REFUGEE CAMPS AND THE STATE OF “OTHER” TERRITORIES
“Our task will be to protect cultural and existential spaces that allow us to prepare the conditions for the time after this one, of violence and misery, that we have now entered, I believe, irreversibly. Our task will be to create survival spaces and to sabotage colonial predation and war. The problem will concern the forms of prosperous survival: which dimension can they find and how persistent can they be? To what extent will they succeed in connecting with experiences of institutional representation? To what extent will they succeed in envisioning projects to come?”2
Refugee camps are radical islands scattered throughout that contemporary metropolis that spreads out on the whole Mediterranean area and that is now expanding on a global scale. As it was for Catalan and Parisian districts of exclusion that were subsequently turned into places for collective experimentation, it is perhaps through the lens of today’s refugee camps and their frontier condition that we can rethink the concept of the migrant, beginning with these margins where new communities strive to form day after day, each one settling in with its own cultural codes.
In his recent book “Mondi Possibili” (Possible Worlds), Marco Petroni, starting from Said – who saw the migrant as a key twentieth-century figure, “with no homeland, […] situating itself amid several territories, forms, houses” – describes how contemporary economical and social dynamics have erased the exceptionality of the nomadic condition, while leaving it as “the only possible way to lay claim to one’s own subjectivity in a context of ever-lasting global crisis.”3
“It is within this in-between dimension that the paradigm of the possible – understood as transformation project, remoulding of the world – comes into play. The design of the possible operates in multiple directions, in an area of continual transit of cultures, social and individual stories. ‘Living on borders and in margins – Chicana poet Gloria Anzaldúa claims – keeping intact one’s shifting and multiple identity and integrity, is like trying to swim in a new element.’”4
Petroni maintains that “the design of the possible”, which moves through borders and margins, is the only way to shape a “renewed social role” and to redefine designers as “translators of meaning”. In some refugee camps, we have seen the birth and growth of alternative ways of dealing with collective life and economy, with the result of recovering concepts of solidarity, exchange and gift, in stark contrast to capitalist accumulation. In a sense, these places already offer examples of “the design of the possible”.
Calais is perhaps the most representative case. Today the so-called jungle hosts around 3’000 migrants, who are trapped in limbo for entire weeks or months. The camp, which almost violates human rights, has risen autonomously following the dismantlement and closure of another refugee camp in Sangatte. Now there rise small self-managed schools and service systems that are supported by activists and volunteers. Some fringes of architecture and political activism have become interested in these places in a similar way to how, in recent years, informal urbanism such as the favelas had attracted their attention. We need to be careful, however, not to charge these case studies with excessive radicalism, lest we mystify them through rhetorical theorisations.
In 2016, in the small city of Gioiosa Ionica in Calabria (deemed to be one of the most problematic regions in Southern-Italy) the municipality welcomed a group of asylum seekers. In a town of only 7’000 people, such a proposal was accompanied by a project that may at first sound like a joke, but ultimately displayed a great potential. A group of activists invented a sort of alternative currency, whose notes feature famous communist leaders’ faces. This currency, in agreement with local shopkeepers, was then given out to the migrants who could then use it within the town. The idea, reminiscent of current experiments romanticised by libertarian thinking such as Bitcoin, has had a remarkably positive impact both on the asylum seekers’ living conditions and on local economy.
If the refugee crisis can generate forms of horizontal and caring economies, why shouldn’t we also imagine new social policies or even new forms of government? If we were to compose a map of the Heimats – of the refugees’ Heimats –, could we then form a state and write its constitution? A system of codes with which to envision a new world. Can the world itself start afresh from there? We imagine a supranational state of which refugees can be citizens and in which the concept of Heimat can be realised most meaningfully.