On his book Slab City: Dispatches from the Last Free Place
Cover Interview of July 10, 2019
The wide angle
A starting premise for our work was that camps, like Slab
City, accommodate conditions that might otherwise remain without space. Camps
are also bellwethers—early indicators of change and registers of the challenges
faced by those who camp, whether by choice or out of necessity. It is true that
Slab City, as the “last free place,” is a camp of autonomy where slabbers can
experiment with ways of living and building. There are very few places where
you have the independence to build and tear down at will. But its residents
also contend with the weight of that freedom, the transience that goes along
with it, and the depth of a history that extends well beyond the slabs. Studying
Slab City, we found evidence of broader narratives that have defined a country
and its identities—legacies that continue to be debated. The depth of Slab
City’s multivalent histories and contemporary practices reexamine frontier and land
tenure, resources and resourcefulness, Manifest Destiny and “city on a hill,”
and migrancy and a country’s internally displaced people.
Slab City is built on layers of past settlements. The
residue of the military camp is there, and some residents curate its memory as
a form of patriotism. Immediately adjacent to Slab City, an active bombing
range is also a constant reminder of that recent past. Much earlier, this site
hosted the camps of Cahuilla Indians who harvested clams and fish along the
shore of the natural lake (sometimes connected to the Gulf of California) that
later became the accidentally created Salton Sea, when human efforts to control
the Colorado River catastrophically failed. On your way to Slab City, you uncannily
emerge from below “sea level” (there’s a small sign along the road) to reach
East Mesa, where slabbers now occupy the ancient coastline amid sand, concrete
slabs, and shell middens. Soon after the military camp was decommissioned, its
slabs hosted migrant farm workers harvesting creosote.
Donovan and I are both interested in the architectures of
resistance and adaptation. Slab City is an effort to synthesize
Donovan’s ground-breaking studies of the architecture of control with my
interest in emergent built environments that must contend with transience.
Questions we have asked here and in our continued collaboration are: What are
the architectural consequences when freedom and control overlap? What happens
when freedom from intersects with freedom of? How might public
land host private aspirations? How to make home in an unhomely place? What are
the material consequences when desire and need come together in a self-governed
place? How do makeshift dreams ride the desert sea like concrete slabs on sand?
The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.Jerome Kagan, Interview of September 17, 2009
[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.Carolyn J. Dean, Interview of February 01, 2011
The wide angle
A starting premise for our work was that camps, like Slab City, accommodate conditions that might otherwise remain without space. Camps are also bellwethers—early indicators of change and registers of the challenges faced by those who camp, whether by choice or out of necessity. It is true that Slab City, as the “last free place,” is a camp of autonomy where slabbers can experiment with ways of living and building. There are very few places where you have the independence to build and tear down at will. But its residents also contend with the weight of that freedom, the transience that goes along with it, and the depth of a history that extends well beyond the slabs. Studying Slab City, we found evidence of broader narratives that have defined a country and its identities—legacies that continue to be debated. The depth of Slab City’s multivalent histories and contemporary practices reexamine frontier and land tenure, resources and resourcefulness, Manifest Destiny and “city on a hill,” and migrancy and a country’s internally displaced people.
Slab City is built on layers of past settlements. The residue of the military camp is there, and some residents curate its memory as a form of patriotism. Immediately adjacent to Slab City, an active bombing range is also a constant reminder of that recent past. Much earlier, this site hosted the camps of Cahuilla Indians who harvested clams and fish along the shore of the natural lake (sometimes connected to the Gulf of California) that later became the accidentally created Salton Sea, when human efforts to control the Colorado River catastrophically failed. On your way to Slab City, you uncannily emerge from below “sea level” (there’s a small sign along the road) to reach East Mesa, where slabbers now occupy the ancient coastline amid sand, concrete slabs, and shell middens. Soon after the military camp was decommissioned, its slabs hosted migrant farm workers harvesting creosote.
Donovan and I are both interested in the architectures of resistance and adaptation. Slab City is an effort to synthesize Donovan’s ground-breaking studies of the architecture of control with my interest in emergent built environments that must contend with transience. Questions we have asked here and in our continued collaboration are: What are the architectural consequences when freedom and control overlap? What happens when freedom from intersects with freedom of? How might public land host private aspirations? How to make home in an unhomely place? What are the material consequences when desire and need come together in a self-governed place? How do makeshift dreams ride the desert sea like concrete slabs on sand?