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 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.

In early March 2012, the Israeli media published the architectural illustrations of a new facility for African asylum seekers, which was later known as Holot Residence Centre (Holot means ‘sands’ in Hebrew). The colourful renderings, showing women in traditional dresses and headscarves dancing cheerfully in a basketball court and black men relaxing barefooted in the shade of green shrubs climbing on trellises (Zeitun, 2012), presented Holot as if it was an attractive vacation resort. The description of the ‘residence facility [as being] planned and operated as a “campus” model’, which will include ‘dining halls, kiosks, classrooms, a club, a library, a prayer room, a playground and sports facilities’, implied openness and even empowerment of those expected to ‘reside’ there. So much so that many of the online comments complained about the investment of taxpayer money in a place that ‘looks like a 5 stars hotel’ instead of investing it ‘in Israelis’ (Ibid.; Katz, 2022: 246).

Around four years later, in September 2016, French and global media presented the architectural drawings of a new facility, one of the first two ‘urban camps for refugees’ created in Paris (Dewan, 2016). The visualisation included the drawings of colourful shelters and cafeteria porches while revealing a unique amorphic structure standing at the front of what would later be called Centre Humanitaire Paris-Nord. The facility, it was explained, would ‘offer services to homeless newly arrived migrants, such as social care, legal aid, health and psychological care, and information on where else to find shelter’ (Dewan, 2016), presenting it as a gesture of care for the consistent influx of migrants ¹ arriving to the city. These images were published only a few months after the announcement of the Socialist Party mayor of Paris, Ann Hidalgo, that the conditions of migrants in Paris, with the increasingly prevalent makeshift camps on the city's sidewalks, are ‘no longer tenable’ (Henley, 2016).

The architecture of these two facilities, while being designed in different geographical contexts and scales, present some interesting similarities. The Israeli Holot, defined as an ‘open residence facility’ and originally created for no less than 11,000 people, was built in the shape of a large octagon in one of the most isolated parts of the Negev desert (Figure 1). The French Paris-Nord, created to accommodate 400 migrants, was located in a derelict railway depot surrounded by transport infrastructures at the city's northern outskirts, with a huge rounded-shape inflatable structure, which became known as ‘the bubble’ (la Bulle), placed at the site's entrance (Figure 2). Both camps were designed by local French and Israeli architects to be rapidly created and operated temporarily. With their peculiar orbicular shapes and animated architectural drawings, however, they formed distinct features in their environments and in the media. Their swift design presented ambitious architectural intentions rather than the familiar formulaic layout of other institutional migrant and refugee camps, creating with their visual aesthetics an unmistakable spectacle. These architectural spectacles, it was clear, were not oriented for their migrant residents but mainly to satisfy the gaze of their ‘hosts’, that is, the state and urban citizens and authorities. What can we learn from the architecture of two facilities designed to accommodate migrants? How could the functional and aesthetic considerations of their design inform us about the practices and politics of their creation?

Figure 1.

The octagon-shaped Holot facility. Google maps, February 2021.

Figure 2.

The bubble of Centre Humanitaire Paris-Nord, Photograph by the author, Paris 2017.

In this paper, I comparatively examine the architectural design and related governmental narratives of Holot and Paris-Nord camps to decipher the relationship between their forms and meanings. These migrant facilities were presented to the public as hyper-visible spaces featuring provision, care, and hospitality, and their design, shared the architects, was indeed inspired by leisure spaces of hotels and festivals. Both, however, made part of wider state-created hostile environments of bordering which irregular migrants, asylum seekers, refugees, and other ‘people on the move’ face in Israel and France (Katz, 2019, 2020, 2022), and have functioned as ‘semi-carceral’ migrant facilities (Martin et al., 2020: 759), or, in the words of Moran et al. (2018: 666), as ‘semi-sanctioned forms of confinement for asylum seekers and refugees’.

These camps could be described as spaces of what Derrida (2000) called ‘hostipitality’, a word manifesting the etymological link between hospitality and hostility and capturing the threat of unknown guests who might always become enemies. Based on Kant's idea on the ‘condition of universal hospitality’ in which the unwanted guest ‘must not be treated with hostility so long as he behaves in a peaceable manner in the place he happens to be’ (Kant, quoted in Derrida, 2000: 5), Derrida highlights the self-contradictions and limits in the performative act of hospitality in which the guest is welcomed while being expected to respect ‘the being-at-home of [the host's] home’ (Derrida, 2000: 14). Such spaces of hostipitality are invested in ‘protecting’ the ‘hosts’ at least as much as in welcoming those who are considered only as ‘guests’. They involve holding people who are not convicted criminals in limiting conditions, often away from the public's eye, while producing them as temporary, removable, and therefore more vulnerable (Mechinya, 2021). Such camps often create infrastructural spaces (Easterling, 2014) which make part of today's turbulent and splintering bordering apparatuses (Zhang, 2019) through which racialised migrant bodies are concentrated, sorted, and circulated (Mountz et al., 2013). They also remove the migrants away from their receiving urban environments, which might offer alternative forms of inhabitation that go beyond the host/guest hierarchies, suspicion, and hostility.

The research for this paper was primarily conducted between 2017 and 2019 based on mixed methods, including site observations and a spatial analysis informed by architectural and legal documents. This was supplemented by a semi-structured interview with Holot's architect and online media data analysis which included interviews with the designers of Paris-Nord, information on the governmental aspects of both facilities, and descriptions of the lived experience related to them. Illuminating the links and gaps between the architectural imaginaries that generated the design of these facilities and between their function and political meaning reveals the problematic implications of their architecture which could otherwise be seen as merely playful and harmless.

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. In the examination of the specific design intentions behind the Israeli and French facilities, discussed in the second and third sections, I analyse how their architecture was not only based on other carceral facilities but have also migrated from the extravagant worlds of tourism and festivals, while, as opposed to its declared hospitable and highly visible intentions, it produced the migrants as invisible within their environment's ‘hidden geographies’ (Mountz, 2020).

Incorporating attractive architectural forms in the design of semi-carceral infrastructural migrant facilities, this paper argues, creates a Janus-faced political spectacle of hostipitality. This architecture of ‘detention-as-spectacle’ (Mainwaring and Silverman, 2017), with its short-lived temporalities and eye-catching visualities, generates part of a propaganda of care and migration management of the 'temporary guests' around what are inherently violent practices and uninhabitable spaces formed and performed for the benefit of the distant spectators of the ‘hosts’ while violently rendering the racialised black and brown mobile bodies of those seeking asylum as contained, invisible, and displaceable. The makeshift spaces created by the migrants around these camps to answer their particular human needs reveal how these uninhabitable infrastructural spaces are resisted. Architects, I show, based on other contexts, have recognised the importance of such spatial agency of displaced people with which they redefine their complex situations and subjectivities (Albadra et al., 2020; Conti et al., 2020; Cuny, 1977, 1983). Yet architecture, as we can see in these two camps, could also be used to design-wash hostile environments only to benefit those who initiated them rather than those residing in them. Indeed, these designed facilities include migrants merely as objects of mass control and circulation who are contained in an aesthetic object produced as a populistic spatial–political show.

Camps by design

The spatial layout of institutional camps for civilians is the incarnation of a distinct disciplinary facility – the military camp, designed to provide for and manage a specific population, i.e. soldiers, in a minimal and controlled manner. The basic blueprint of the military camp and its technologies of containment were appropriated for the mass control and care of people in concentration camps, refugee camps, and other forms of encampments across the globe. This typology facilitates order and basic rationalised logistical provision in emergency situations otherwise perceived as chaotic and often uncontrollable.

The form of repetitive prefabricated shelters organised in a grid layout, while often experienced as ‘alienating and intimidating’ by their residents (Martin et al., 2020: 755), is still the most common in the practices and imaginaries of such manual-based camp design. On the one hand, they create isolated and isolating spaces which enable to violently contain and manage those who are rendered ‘undesirables’ in what Giorgio Agamben famously defined as the paradigmatic ‘spaces of exception’ (1998). At the same time, they form physical spaces which are highly connected to human and material infrastructures of mobility that enable them to be swiftly created, populated, maintained, and altered (Meiches, 2015). These camps are generated by the global ‘matrix of details and repeatable formulas’ of what Easterling calls ‘infrastructure space’ (2014: 11). But these spaces could also be seen as themselves generating a ‘global infrastructure’ of camps (Katz, 2019, 2022) through which unregulated flows of people are gathered, suspended, categorised, and circulated as racialised and objectified bodies.

The infrastructural space of the camp, while being separated from everyday environments, is simultaneously produced in news and media reports as an identifiable and highly visible bordering spectacle. This spectacle is shaped as a continuous, flexible, and responsive event, reforming and performing today's splintering, mobile, and turbulent borders (Zhang, 2019). As opposed to the embedded temporariness which forms part of the exclusionary mechanisms of these bordering spatial spectacles, which deems those circulated in them to a constant ‘temporal irregularity and uncertainty’ (Mechinya, 2021: 96), the ever-presence of these spaces reasserts the power of the state and other related entities (‘the nation’ and ‘the city’) as ‘the patron’ who define ‘the conditions of hospitality or welcome’ (Derrida, 2000: 4).

A spectacle, as Rancière argues, means involving only an exterior and a passive gaze of an image which replaces real knowledge and action and its ‘appearance [is] separated from its truth’ (2009: 12). The very spectacle of the camp, therefore, by producing irregular migrants and their spaces as the objects for the gaze of the distant spectator, also reproduces them as detached and thus further displaceable. Infrastructural and spectacular camp spaces, then, perform a double objectification of the migrants as bodies that should be sorted and circulated and as part of a highly visible, defined, identifiable, yet distant environment to be gazed at from afar. The migrants, importantly, often resist it through their own spatial actions, forming related informal sites ‘where new forms of politics and political subjectivities are being created’ (Martin et al., 2020: 754).

Reflecting on the human and political value of these camps, architectural theorists indeed argue that as long as humanitarian environments of minimal provision sustain the life that survive violence and destruction, ‘the potential for political transformation still exists’ (Weizman, 2011: 61), and refugees could organise there against their displacement and exclusion. Indeed, it is the refugees themselves who, in such minimal and restricted environments, often become ‘world builders’ (Singh, 2020) who recreate and transform their spaces of refuge, together with their political meaning (Katz, 2019). Perhaps such understandings, that camps should provide only the bare minimum, is why architect David Turnbull suggests that ‘the laying out of a camp is not understood [by architects] to be an architectural project’ but ‘the work of others’ (2015). Over the past decade or so, however, there has been a rise in the discussions on camps, emergency shelters, and other humanitarian spaces in the architectural discipline. Architectural magazines such as ICON (2015) and Dezeen have offered entire issues and ongoing stories on camps; architecture books such as Humanitarian Architecture (Charlesworth, 2014); and exhibitions such as ‘Making Heimat’ in the German pavilion of the 2016 Venice Architecture Biennale and the 2017 MoMA's ‘Insecurities: Tracing Displacement and Shelter’ – are all part of the multiple outputs through which architectural design and discourse responded to the issue.

Yet the subject of ‘humanitarian architecture’ is not new. Forced displacement is inherently linked to the built environment, and while architects have primarily focused on post-disaster shelters (Davis, 1978), they have also worked on designing camps. One of the most interesting forms of these earlier approaches engages with participatory practices for designing refugee camps, considering how ‘a sense of community could be provided [… by the] layout of the camp’ (Cuny, 1977: 128–129; also see Cuny, 1983). This architectural approach recognises those often being perceived as ‘helpless refugees’ as having active agency in the production of their spaces, building on the ability of the refugees to engage with the process of appropriating their minimal humanitarian shelters; ‘In disaster response, the term victim should be coterminous with participant’, wrote Cuny (1983: 7; quoted in Siddiqi 2017: 371), seeing camps as an initial layout for refugees’ spatial actions. The participatory architecture here has arguably transformed the status of refugees-inhabitants, at least in its intentions, from the ‘users’ of the camps’ alienating environments to their active designers, and from ‘helpless victims’ into agentic creators of their built world. Today architects again adopt participatory aspects in humanitarian sites, considering refugees as co-designers while importantly acknowledging the limits of participatory architecture in these contexts of containment, violence, and dependency (Albadra et al., 2020; Conti et al., 2020).

The two architecturally designed camps discussed in this paper did not involve participatory design. The intersection between participatory and humanitarian architecture is relevant for this paper, however, in order to present a possible (even if limited) alternative to the design approach for these two facilities. This is because participatory humanitarian design recognises the empowering meaning of the creation of space in displacement's ‘imposed provisionality’ (Conti et al., 2020: 214), while putting the ethical and political legitimacy of architecture at its centre to avoid situations that promote the interests of the architects or other powerful groups that create these spaces on the back of the vulnerable populations of refugees which they aim to support. In the next two sections, I will discuss the architectural design approach adopted for Holot and Paris-Nord in relation to their governmental attitude and reflect on the spatial agency of the migrants in relation to them. I will examine how the infrastructural and spectacular spatiality and dehumanising governmentality of these camps produce them as a propaganda of hostipitality while rendering the objectified bodies of the migrants residing in them as invisible and dispatchable, an approach to which the migrants resist through their own spatial production.

‘Revolving doors’: The Israeli Holot circulation and deportation portal

Initiated as a border reception facility, Holot was planned to be the first formal point of entry to the African asylum seekers arriving to Israel from the Sinai desert. Between 2006 and 2013, Israel was a primary destination country for around 60,000 asylum seekers, originating mainly from Eritrea, Sudan, and other sub-Saharan countries, who were smuggled and trafficked through Sinai (Ne’eman, 2020). With a budget of 250 million NIS and covering 750 dunams (185 acres), Holot was located near the Israeli-Egyptian border, which was the entry area of the asylum seekers to Israel. This was where new asylum applications were supposed to be processed in order to further control their movement to other parts of the country. A parallel border-fence project, however, has changed the meaning of Holot into an infrastructural space par excellence to circulate asylum seekers away from Israeli cities and further away from the country.

Designing for temporary guests

Holot was opened at the end of 2013, yet its design has already started in early 2011, when Thomas Leitersdorf, an Israeli architect educated at London's famous Architectural Association, was commissioned to plan the facility by Israel's Ministry of Defense. Leitersdorf designed different large-scale projects in Israel and beyond, including residential neighbourhoods, military bases, and hotel projects, an experience that came in handy during the design process. In an interview in his north Tel Aviv office, ² the camp's brief, reflected Leitersdorf, was for a ‘residence facility’ that was planned to be managed by the Israeli Prison Service, but was ‘certainly not a prison’ (Katz, 2022: 253). The state brief has asked for a facility in a ‘campus’ model, that is, a site divided into sections to enable a phased construction and management in different levels of control and openness.

The brief, being in itself a ‘work in progress’, has also detailed a tight timeframe for ‘a very rapid project’, said Litersdorf. This temporality reflected an embedded nature of urgency and expediency in what was perceived as an emergency or crisis situation. Composed from prefabricated components such as shipping containers and corrugated steel hangars, the facility's design promised a swift assembly, with the repetitive characterless structures instructed to be coloured differently for their easier identification. On the website of Leitersdorf practice, it is specified that ‘the timeline for the project's completion was cut short’ adding that ‘within 16 months and with 31 different planners and consultants’ all necessary plans were completed (Leitersdorf, 2021). It was an ‘insanely rushed project’, Leitersdorf highlighted; ‘like creating a city in one go’ (Katz, 2022: 254). The project's timeline was also inscribed to its lifespan, as it was planned to be used only until the ‘situation’ of the asylum seekers was resolved; it was designed to be transformed later into a military facility and was therefore built according to the Israeli Defense Force standards. The enthusiastic descriptions of the project's rapid temporality, which were also reflected in the media, show how the camp was created as a spectacle of adrenaline architecture to reflect the state's responsive turbulent bordering apparatus.

After the design process has already begun, it was decided to locate Holot at the heart of a closed military zone in one of the most remote and isolated parts of the Negev desert. The state assigned a ‘social adviser’ to assist in the design of the distant camp, who recommend including classrooms and sports facilities for the ‘residents’. Holot's ‘main difficulty’, acknowledged Leitersdorf was that it had to be designed for ‘young, capable people’ who would inevitably be bored in a place that was essentially isolated from civilisation. Like in other camps, the asylum seekers were expected to be ‘helpless and passive’ and could be ‘helped and activated through special programmes’, as Turner describes (2005: 322), in a way that will combat apathy yet will not have any possible contested political implications.

The design discussions, importantly, were not only about the facility's construction and services but also about the maintenance of the thousands of those who were planned to be totally dependent on its ‘hospitality’ and provisions. From the very beginning it was clear that ‘running costs would be enormous,’ as Leitersdorf reflected, mentioning that nobody was familiar with the high numbers the facility was aiming to, of 10,000 meals provided three times a day. Here, Leitersdorf's hotel-design skills became handy; being familiar with calculations of food provision in hotel design, he determined that having kitchens in the camp itself would be cheaper than delivering it.

Scholars indeed consider hotels to be directly linked to camps and other carceral facilities, in which care and custody go hand in hand as part of efforts of state powers to discipline through space (Foucault, 1977). With the management of ‘temporary guests’ and their space–time encapsulation, camps and hotels make spatial biopolitical techniques designed to address all aspects of the biological lives of those hosted in them, including shelter and food, hygiene and security, enabling the basic requirements of control and care, custody and protection, to be met simultaneously. This close similarity enabled hotels in the past to be transformed from spaces of tourism and hospitality into improvised camps, while carceral spaces have been transformed into sites of tourism and leisure (Ramadan and Fregonese, 2015). By comparing ‘summer camps’ and ‘holiday camps’ with ‘correction camps, military camps, refugee camps’, Löfgren argues that ‘although these two categories of camp belong to very different spheres, they have elements of a common structure – the idea of large scale, detailed planning and control, self-sufficient communities with clear boundaries’ (2003: 245). These ‘communities’, however, are far from being ‘self-sufficient’ but are dependent on the infrastructures and logistics of mobility to maintain them in their isolated locations (Meiches, 2015).

Architecturally, however, while engaging with the logistical logics of hotel functionality, Holot's design as a site of direct disciplinary control in the Foucauldian spirit is indisputable. The camp was designed as an enormous octagon, after Leitersdorf has searched for the ‘perfect form’ that would allow maximum control for the camp's personnel over the detainees. As such, Holot was designed as an internally facing ‘total institution’ (Goffman, 1961), a hostile facility in which asylum seekers could be controlled and suspended for unknown periods away from society. In terms of architectural function and logistics, it is clear why Leitersdorf found his experience with hotels relevant, with the tourism industry and carceral migrant facilities conversely disciplining welcomed and unwelcomed guests and im/mobilised bodies, whether in secluded holiday resorts or in isolated detention camps.

Holot was therefore an architectural hybrid – a detention camp, a prison, a military facility, and a hotel – which its swift functional design together with its inviting architectural visualisation published in the Israeli media have created it as a spectacle of ‘hospitality/hostility’ (Derrida, 2000: 4). This hostipitality spectacle enacted the state's ‘bordering practices’ (Zhang, 2019: 729) while performing, at least in the view of an uncritical gaze, an image of state hospitality which worked together with the 1951 UN Refugee Convention with Israel being one of its original signees. In addition, considering and manifesting hotel design reflects the approach to the arrival and presence of the asylum seekers in Israel as a temporary matter, one which could be contained until the ‘guests’ will disappear. Yet Holot's evolving governmental context is what reveals its full temporal and spatial meaning as an infrastructural statespace after it became a site in which African asylum seekers, who were already well-settled in Israeli cities, were constantly circulated with the intention to be dispatched elsewhere.

Holot circulation infrastructure and deportation portal

When Holot was opened in December 2013 it was given quite a different role than the border camp it was initially planned to be. Another grand national project accompanied its creation – the construction of a secure border-fence along the border between Israel and the Egyptian Sinai Peninsula, tasked with stopping illegalised human movement to the country. The fence and the camp were designed together to stop irregular migration to Israel by both physically blocking and deterring it through the intimidation of prolonged detention. The fence, however, eventually changed the meaning of the camp altogether. Indeed, the number of crossings increased when the camp was initially conceived and designed – from more than 14,000 in 2010 to more than 17,000 in 2011. However, in 2012, when Holot's design and construction were still in their early stages while the fence project was rapidly progressing, the number of crossings began to drop and significantly fell to 43 crossings in 2013. When the facility was opened as planned at the end of 2013, Holot was therefore no longer needed as a border camp. The intention behind it now was to constantly concentrate, contain, and circulate asylum seekers who already lived in Israeli cities, and to channel them to other cities or outside Israel.

In the camp's planning document, the logic of the state on the displacement of asylum seekers from Israeli cities is already mentioned, with the architect seeming to identify with it. Leitersdorf, who already planned controversial state projects such as the city of Ma’ale Adumim in the occupied West Bank, specified ‘the influence of the infiltrators ³ staying in Israel on the public’ and recounting how ‘the infiltrators grab the simple jobs that do not require training, pushing Israelis out of these jobs and increasing unemployment among Israelis’ (Katz, 2022: 253). The racialised black bodies of the asylum seekers clearly represented on the architectural drawings, created, according to the planning document, ‘a multiplicity of foreigners’ who inhabit certain areas of cities, causing a feeling of a ‘lack of security for citizens’ while overwhelming local social services. These statements have continued the rhetoric of state officials; joining around 1000 demonstrators in 2012 in south Tel Aviv who waved signs saying ‘Infiltrators, get out of our homes’, Israeli Member of Parliament Miri Regev told the crowd that the ‘infiltrators’ were ‘a cancer in our body’, while Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, after the event escalated to violent attacks on the asylum seekers, claimed that ‘illegal infiltrators [were] flooding the country’ and threaten ‘the social fabric of society, our national security and our national identity’ (Sherwood, 2012; Katz, 2022: 252).

In 2013, while newcomers were no longer arriving, asylum seekers were nevertheless sent to be concentrated and contained in the desert camp for an unlimited time, later limited to one year. Thus, instead of functioning as a border camp where new detainees arrived immediately after crossing, the facility became a place to which the very capable asylum seekers who already made part of Israeli urban life were displaced. The camp's official aim, explained the state to the court, was ‘the prevention of settlement [of asylum seekers] in cities’, with the court agreeing that Holot's ‘objective of the prevention of settlement [of asylum seekers in cities] as “alleviating the burden” of cities, especially south Tel Aviv … [is] a legitimate one’ (HCJ verdict 8665/14: 110; Katz 2022; 264). After detention, those who spent time in Holot were not allowed to resettle back in certain cities such as Tel Aviv and Eilat, and as some of the detainees were persuaded to leave Israel, the camp became the portal that sucked people from their urban environments, where they were not seen again, in order to circulate them to other spaces as racialised, undesired, displaceable bodies. This reality created an existential threat which became a defining feature of those asylum seekers living in Tel Aviv and in other cities; while Holot was geographically distant, it became a constant shadow that followed their urban existence (Katz, 2020, 2022). The court acknowledged this influence of Holot, stating that it ‘adopts the system of “centrifugal circulation” as its way of removing infiltrators from city centers, spinning them in a centrifugal motion to the outskirts of the desert … then back to the city centers, while at the same time, taking others out of city centers “to fill their places”’. The court reflected how this creates a ‘distorted path of a constant change [of] “revolving doors”’, raising its concerns on the real camp's objective of ‘hazing’ the asylum seekers and ‘breaking their spirit’ thus enforcing them to leave Israel (HCJ verdict 8665/14: 110; Katz 2022: 265). Indeed, the unofficial yet clear intention behind the opening of Holot was to make the asylum seekers’ lives so miserable that they left Israel ‘voluntarily’ (Drori-Avraham et al., 2015). Holot has thus functioned as a dark spatial infrastructural instrument that circulated asylum seekers by pulling them out of Israeli cities, containing them in the camp, and channelling them to other cities or outside the country.

Indeed, the conditions in the camp were poor and alienating, including its very location. While Holot was defined as a semi-carceral facility that detainees could leave in the morning and return to in the evening, its remote location has turned it into a de facto fully carceral prison camp where the freedom of movement of the detainees was severely limited. Holot's spatiality and form of management have also added to the distress of the detainees there. Two tall fences surrounded the camp, and the half of the octagon which was eventually constructed has been divided into four wings, one for management and three for accommodation. The wings were divided by biometric gates to cellblocks, where each of the 28 rooms was shared by 10 people sleeping on five bunk beds. The overcrowded rooms, significantly deviating from state and international standards, were supplemented by other compromised conditions in the camp, such as close to 0 °C of winter temperatures in the rooms; low-quality food in very small portions; lack of leisure and educational activities; and close surveillance of the detainees, all of which made Holot a very miserable environment which had a devastating impact on the lived experience of the asylum seekers there. ‘This place is doing everything it can to break us’ (Pevzner, 2016) reflected one of the detainees on Holot; ‘the conditions for animals in the zoo of a Third World country are better than what you see here’ reflected one of the Israeli volunteers in the camp; ‘it is terrible what we are putting these people through’ (Kaplan Sommer, 2018; Katz, 2022: 260, 265).

The camp, then, played two main roles: to circulate African asylum seekers away from Israeli cities and keep their racialised black bodies out of sight of Israelis and to channel them to other places while ‘convincing’ them as non-citizens to leave Israel by making their lives miserable, with a devastating effect on them and the urban life they managed to build. Holot's preliminary aspirations to ‘improve’ asylum seekers’ lives and education through state-initiated activities, together with the camp's initial attractive images, were only a distraction of hospitality to the facility's two main hostile roles. While making the camp and its residents a bordering spectacle of hostipitality and an object of the distant gaze in Israeli media, Holot was aimed to make asylum seekers invisible and temporary in Israeli cities. When the camp closed after around five years, more than 13,000 were detained there for different periods, with its sinister aims not being unsuccessful; in 2014, when detention was for unlimited time, more than 6000 asylum seekers left Israel, many of whom to unsafe locations, and while in 2015 the number halved as detention was limited to one year, it was still significant.

With the opening of Holot, asylum seekers have embarked on ongoing protests and marches against the camp. Later on the detainees, with the attempt to alleviate their own suffering in Holot, have created in 2015 a modest makeshift area of business and leisure outside the camp to support themselves socially and culturally and to ‘kill time’ in the place which never succeeded to provide adequate social activities for them. Improvised stalls and shops, together composing around 30 structures, sold everyday products such as soft drinks, soap bars, packs of cards and blankets, a makeshift gym with weights imported from Tel Aviv was opened, while Sudanese and Eritrean restaurants and coffee shops with traditional sweets became packed with diners, who maintained that ‘eating the same food every day [in the camp] makes you crazy; a person needs something to remember their home and culture’ (Glazer, 2015; Katz 2022: 260). By forming their own spaces, similarly to other re-appropriated camps, the asylum seekers reclaimed a world to replace that taken from them, actively resisting their objectifying dehumanisation. These actions of spatial agency carry political meanings on the refusal to align with the necropolitical state actions of enforced circulation and dependency. Unsurprisingly, these makeshift structures were rapidly demolished by the authorities, abruptly ending this resourceful initiative (Angel Mishali, 2016). Unlike the participatory camp designs discussed earlier (Albadra et al., 2020; Conti et al., 2020; Cuny, 1977, 1983), Holot did not encourage active inhabitation but an inherently temporary and detached existence, rendering its residents perpetually ruptured and displaceable.

Holot was initially designed as a border camp with an open ‘campus model’, yet it created a gruesome infrastructure for the ‘forced movement of asylum seekers’ (Gill, 2009), a necropolitical system of enforced circulation aimed at crushing the detainees’ spirit to persuade them to ‘voluntarily’ leave Israel. The camp's first cheerful hotel-like drawings and swift design were merely part of Israel's border spectacle of hostipitality, working in tandem with the state’s approach to African asylum seekers as temporary and precarious guests which should be circulated and channelled far away from its cities and then beyond its boundaries.

‘Postbox’: The French Centre Humanitaire Paris-Nord concentrating and despatching node

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. Yet, like Holot, not only the governmental reality but also the design itself, inspired by temporary and hyper-visible spaces of leisure, have created a spectacle that was circulating migrants to the city's outskirts and then further away from it.

The ‘bubble’ festival

The Parisian camp was designed according to the desire expressed by Hidalgo that the ‘support for migrants [would be] a strong marker of her mandate’ (Quiret, 2017), with the thought behind the Centre's design was, as described by the architectural advisor to the Mayor Michéle Zaoui, that it ‘must be aesthetically pleasing’ (Poll, 2017: 25). Julian Beller, a young architect with experience of working on cultural installations at festivals and with Roma people, was selected as the designer and as one of the Centre's key symbolic public figures. Describing his own work as ‘festive architecture’, a form of design activism constructed for ‘the marginalised, the forgotten’ in ‘the unused urban interstices’ (Talland, 2014: 3, 4) while detailed by the press for his black clothes and ‘glinting nose stud’ (Collins, 2016), Beller brought his image as an ‘authentic’ and ‘outsider’ persona to the project, working, as Zaoui reflected, not as a ‘normal architect [but] outside the norms of the profession’ (Poll, 2017: 28).

Located in a dilapidated railway depot in the area of Porte de la Chapelle in northern Paris, the facility was composed of two main parts: a large 1000 m² inflatable structure of white yellow-and-grey striped domes (‘la Bulle’ or ‘the Bubble’) functioning as migrants’ day shelter, and, within the two-storey 10,000 m² hanger (‘the Hall’) designed to host up to 400 migrant men, a series of 12 ‘villages’ of colourful cabins, cafeterias and hygienic facilities. Colour here, like Holot, was used as a simple way to identify a location in a repetitive environment of indistinctive prefabricated temporary structures. Within the extravagant ‘bubble’, the familiar shipping containers were used as offices, while in the disused train depot metal scaffoldings were used to place the colourful cabins in different heights as a stylistic effort for a makeshift or squatters’ ‘chic’, while intentionally keeping the graffiti on site. Beller stated that his two central architectural references for the Centre were the ‘informal village’ and the ‘festival’ (Poll, 2017), with the inflatable structure designed by the artist and engineer Hans-Walter Müller who was invited by Beller following his experience in designing festival structures. Asserting that the Centre's aim was to create ‘an example of how our cities can be more hospitable’ (Paris-Nord, 2016), Paris-Nord aesthetics was indeed designed by him to create a highly visible spectacle of hospitality and engaged with other forms of hosting temporary guests; it was imagined by Beller ‘a bit like camping, or a little vacation village’ (Collins, 2016) inspired by festivals, art installations, outsider urbanism, and, similar to Leitersdorf's design, also by holiday sites. Interestingly, not only the centre's designers were related to the world of temporary events; Utopia 56, an organisation that collaborated on managing the camp and managed France's first and only other humanitarian camp near Dunkirk, built its reputation for managing rock festivals.

Paris-Nord's temporality, its design limitations, its urban location, and the urban actions which accompanied its creation, however, frames it as part of a less hospitable and more hostile response. Temporariness, like in Holot, was designed into the Centre from its very first stages, and the architectural choices were based on the facility's specific temporality of fast construction and quick assembling and disassembling. The Centre was planned to be a temporary site that was created for only 18 months and then deemed to be moved to another part of the city (Katz et al., 2018; Paris-Nord, 2016). Beller stressed that in the design of the facility ‘everything we are doing is movable and flexible’, a pop-up shelter that goes well with his ‘philosophy [that] has always been about ephemerality’ (Talland, 2014). The design process itself was also fast, with Beller having ‘only a week to come up with a design’ (Collins, 2016). These enthusiastic declarations on the swift design of flexibility and change almost celebrate the adrenaline architecture of emergency with a Deleuzian flare of constantly transforming urban assemblages. While giving it the visuality of informally designed architecture created by its users, the Centre's makeshift-like architecture was not based on the migrant's spatial agency such as other participatory designs (Albadra et al., 2020; Conti et al., 2020) but was only adopted as a ‘stylish’ look orchestrated from above. The camp's swift construction and the embedded temporariness of its transportable structures, highlighted temporariness as a basic condition of migrants in the city, at least as far as the authorities and some of Paris residents were concerned, with Paris-Nord being a one-off architectural event which was planned to move on from the city together with the migrants themselves. The temporal form, function, and imaginaries related to festival architecture, which was part of the camp's design, then, was not only an inspiration but answered both the city and the state's objectives of hostipitality formed by a spectacle of imposed temporariness camouflaged by plastic in strong bright colours.

Like Holot, the Centre's function was compromised by its poorly designed sections; the inflatable structure created a bubble of failures, with maintenance issues such as uncleanable floors, problematic thermal-comfort which made it unbearable in the summer heat and winter cold, and with acoustics that ‘drives you crazy’ (Poll, 2017: 33). The Centre was also not big enough to provide for all of those needing it, and informal shelters were formed around it by migrants queuing or hesitating to enter, resisting its limited capacity to properly accommodate them unconditionally (Katz, 2019). In addition, while being within Paris, the Centre was located in an area bounded with two layers of perimeter fencing, metal barricades, and busy transport infrastructures, all working to disconnect the camp from its urban context.

The City of Paris, while working on the creation of the Centre, simultaneously increased its hostile spatial actions to prevent migrant's occupation of the city's public spaces with makeshift tents, with the municipality installing at least 4 km of fences and fields of boulders to prevent the creation of new migrant tent camps in these areas. ‘It's an architecture of hos­tility and inhospitality’ (Couvelaire, 2016) reflected a Parisian architect on these actions, which made the Centre part of an imposed urban reality of displacing migrants within and from the city. Significantly, however, the Centre's compromised and conditioned hospitality was designed as a clear hostility by its mode of governance, which added an even grimmer meaning to its temporary and disconnected architecture.

Paris-Nord's sorting node and dispatching centre

Several months after the Mayor's announcement of creating a space of unconditional hospitality, the state joined as a partner in the project and imposed its own interests. From a City of Paris emergency shelter where migrants will be provided unconditional care and ‘be calmly informed of [their] rights’ (Paris-Nord, 2016), the Centre became part of the broader national Ministry of the Interior asylum system, with its permanent camps across the country (Katz, 2019). Consequently, the camp became a transit site for newly arrived migrants who may benefit from a bed for a few nights only on a condition that they register their personal information and biometric identification. The construction of the camp was accompanied by the creation of the Center for Administrative Status Review (Cesa – Center d’Examen de Situation Administrative) at the local police station for registration of biometric data, namely fingerprints (Baumard, 2016). The information extracted from the migrant's bodies was then sent into the EURODAC database containing all fingerprints registered across Europe, permitting the French authorities, following the Dublin Regulations which assign responsibility for migrants to the first state registering them, to identify, sort, and channel those already within the system often away from France (Boitiaux, 2017).

The camp, therefore, has acted as a de facto infrastructural space of categorisation, circulation, and re-distribution of migrants away from the city: within 5 to 10 days of their arrival to Paris-Nord, they were transported by buses to other state camps where they could apply for asylum or potentially be deported (Katz, 2019), with others eventually returning to the capital to live there as irregular migrants. The clear signs in the camp showing ‘fingerprint = shelter’ and ‘fingerprint → bus’, meant that following the camp's temporary shelter the identified migrants were dispatched outside the city. Rather than being a centre of unconditioned hospitality, this urban camp has become an infrastructural bordering facility for the concentration, identification, and circulation of migrants to other camps in France, and possibly outside the country, serving the state's hostile migration policies which filter out unwanted racialised black and brown mobile bodies.

Paris-Nord, therefore, has turned into a transit zone, orienting migrants to spaces outside the city, ‘a post box’ to send them away from Paris, in the words of the manager of Utopia 56 (Poll, 2017: 18). While the road infrastructure has separated the camp from its immediate environment, it allowed access for the buses that carried migrants away from the Centre and out of Paris almost daily. Systems of motorised transport, as Meiches argues, ‘constitute important components of several camp assemblages’ as they ‘enable the construction and functioning of the camp’ as a quasi-independent site (2015: 485). In Paris-Nord, these infrastructures have also formed the camp as an infrastructural site in itself, a human and material junction that does not only support the general camp's functioning but also support its particular infrastructural function of moving migrants away from the city.

As Utopia 56, which left Paris-Nord in protest in September 2017, explained, the camp has ‘become an administrative trap’ for many migrants, stating that the facility ‘deprives them of their right to seek asylum’ (Utopia 56, 2017; Katz et al., 2018). Like Holot, Paris-Nord's design then, migrating from the worlds of festivals and holiday villages, created a flashy architecture as ‘a place of attraction’ in the words of Zaoui (Poll, 2017: 32), one which was designed as a spectacle of hospitality entangled with the hostile infrastructural space of mobile border control (Zhang, 2019) for the gaze of distant spectators. The camp attracted migrants not to create communities provided with prolonged care, but to make them even more displaceable as a collection of mobile bodies destined to be removed off the streets and hidden behind roads and fences at the city's outskirts, only to become objects of biometric extraction and then categorised and circulated away from Paris.

Designing spectacles of hostipitality – a concluding discussion

Holot and Paris-Nord were two camps designed by architects and considered as new architectural forms for governing migration. Rather than creating these facilities in their familiar form, that is, basic shelters organised in a grid layout to provide for only the essential needs of those residing in them, their Israeli and French architects, Leitersdorf and Beller, have developed new designs. As they came from different ideological perspectives, the positionalities and intentions of these architects were not the same. Leitersdorf identified with the state's intention to create a facility to hold asylum seekers away from Israeli cities and society. Differently, Beller, coming from the world of design activism, imagined the camp, based on its initial conception by Mayor Hidalgo, as a space of welcoming unconditioned hospitality, with design attributes that imitate processes of squatting or other makeshift environments of spatial agency. Yet, while the basic brief for these facilities was different in context and scale, the design which was similarly coded into the aesthetic and function of the Holot octagon and the Parisian bubble had an important role in creating them as spectacles of hostipitality.

The architecture of both Holot and Paris-Nord created them as spaces that doubly objectify the migrants through their spectacular form and infrastructural function. They were designed as spectacles of highly visual and rapidly created temporary camps, framing the migrants as perpetually mobile bodies with architectural approaches which migrated from other planes of human mobility and hospitality, and they were also designed and governed as spatial infrastructures sorting and circulating people. As spaces of migrants hospitality, the genealogy of these camp designs is traced back to hotels and festivals, the first being all-inclusive places of tourism and retreat, and the latter easily assembled and disassembled around particular entertaining events. This nuances the understanding of camps as spaces that are not only related to isolation and banishment but also to physical and conceptual connectivity, forming junctions of material and human movement and of hybrid designs intersecting functions and aesthetics of leisure hospitality with carceral control. Holot, interestingly, while being originally designed to be readjusted as a military facility, was later considered for touristic use as a cultural and business centre for hosting festivals in the Negev (Breiner, 2021). These camps, however, were also created as hostile infrastructural spaces from the very beginning, detached from everyday environments in spatial and temporal aspects. They were not only physically separated from other human environments by desert land or busy transportation infrastructures, but they were also temporally distinct from them as rapidly created spaces that were planned to disappear together with the migrants who resided in them as only temporary ‘guests’. As such, migrants were not considered for these designs as subjects with particular preferences, skills, and plannable future, who could inhabit them in a significant way, or as people who can continue to be part of the cities they already inhabited, but as objectified and mobile bodies which should be gathered, suspended, categorised, and processed according to their biometric information and non-citizens status, only to be further circulated and channelled out of the cities and countries where they have resided. Their related metaphorical descriptions as ‘revolving doors’ and as a human ‘post box’ communicate just that.

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. This also includes their creation as exceptional temporary spaces; while detention centres in their various forms are a permanent feature of control over human mobility in Israel, France, and beyond, and migration is similarly a permanent feature of these societies, the rushed and temporary architecture of Holot and Paris-Nord produced the bordering regime as splintering and responsive, and the migrants as only a temporary reality which will be channelled elsewhere. The architecture here, as opposed to its expected role to permanently settle and inhabit, is used as a temporary and destabilising feature (Mechinya, 2021) of hostipitality.

The participatory humanitarian architectural approaches discussed earlier (Albadra et al., 2020; Conti et al., 2020; Cuny, 1977, 1983) did not lack problems, but, to a degree, they have critically acknowledged their inherent limits, deficiencies, power imbalances, and ethical complexities in designing for refugees in confining environments of displacement, while recognising the agency of the displaced and their capacity to generate their own narratives through the creation of space and place as important. Differently, the Israeli and French designs were primarily concerned with rapidly producing highly visible spatial spectacles directed mainly to the media in which the architectural image is given priority to lived experiences. Here, architecture was recruited for a political imperative in which the aesthetics of festivals, leisure, and makeshift-like spatiality is adopted to make the irregular migrants perceived and processed as a temporary phenomenon rather than accepted as an ongoing reality of people seeking asylum; the designed camps appear as if they are primarily concerned with the migrants’ wellbeing yet hiding their logic of imposed mobility, precariousness, and incarceration in alienating infrastructural space. These propagandic enlighten images produced a political profit for those powers creating them while limiting the spatial agency and related political power for the migrants, cynically imposing on them a joyful and ‘hype’ design of leisure directed to the gaze of the outside world while wrapping and distancing their grim realities of imposed movement and powerlessness.

‘The very life of refugees, their life as refugees, poses a potent political claim with transformative potential’ (2011: 61), writes Weizman. This potential is sometimes translated to spatial–political actions of inhabitation and resistance conducted by the refugees in their camps (Katz 2019, 2022; Singh, 2020), which happened around the Holot and Paris-Nord in different forms and scales, actions which might present a challenge to state systems that, in turn, keep the displaced as powerless and further displaceable (Gill, 2009). Overly designed temporary camps, therefore, do not only objectify irregular migrants as mobile bodies while hiding them as undesired behind flashy architecture, but they also create spaces that prevent agency, alternative forms of inhabitation, and political claims and resistance generated and expressed by spatial or urban actions.

Both Holot and the Paris-Nord were closed in March 2018, after holding and processing tens of thousands of migrants. Holot was closed as part of the attempt of the state to deport all African asylum seekers in the country, an effort which was eventually stopped by the protesting Israeli society and the Israeli court (Katz, 2020). As planned, the temporary structures of Paris-Nord were deflated, disassembled, and packed away, while the railway structures were demolished to prepare the site for its more permanent future and urban use. Years after their closure, the asylum seekers and irregular migrants in Tel Aviv and Paris are still threatened by the decisions and actions of state powers. The architecture of these ‘camps by design’, however, could already be marked as a spectacle of hostipitality which, through its beguiling infrastructural space, did not provide the migrant with inviting forms of inhabitation but produced them as objects of administrative circulation and of a distant gaze designed to conceal the extent of the violence and hostility through which they were managed and ‘hosted’.