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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
For nearly two decades, the area surrounding the French port of Calais has been a temporary staging post for thousands of migrants and refugees hoping to cross the Channel to Britain. It achieved global attention when, at the height of the migrant crisis in 2015, all those living there were transferred to a single camp that became known as ‘the Jungle’. Until its dismantling in October 2016, this precarious site, intended to make its inhabitants as invisible as possible, was instead the focal point of international concern about the plight of migrants and refugees.
This new book is the first full account of life inside the Jungle and its relation to the global migration crisis. Anthropologist Michel Agier and his colleagues use the particular circumstances of the Jungle, localized in space and time, to analyse broader changes under way in our societies, both locally and globally. They examine the architecture of the camp, reconstruct how everyday life and routine operated and analyse the mixed reactions to the Jungle, from hostile government policies to movements of solidarity.
This comprehensive account of the life and death of Europe’s most infamous camp for migrants and refugees demonstrates that, far from being an isolated case, the Jungle of Calais brings into sharp relief the issues that confront us all today, in a world where the large-scale movement of people has become, and is likely to remain, a central feature of social and political life.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018
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Table of Contents
Cover
Title page
Copyright page
Illustrations
Photos
Figures
Maps
Introduction: for a better understanding
A longer history of the Jungle
Europe and the migration question
Calais as metonym for European crisis … and solidarity
Notes
1
:
Movement to and fro: the Calais region from 1986 to 2016
1986–1997: the indifference of the French authorities
1997–1999: a growing attention
1999–2000: the Sangatte moment
2002: British control at the port of Calais
The long years of eviction
2009: ‘The closing of the Calais Jungle’: a new media sequence
The network of voluntary organizations
A brief ray of light
The rise of the far right
September 2014 onward: concentrate, disperse, control
Notes
2
:
From Sangatte to Calais: inhabiting the ‘Jungles’
Sangatte, 1999–2002
March 2015: Jungles, camps, squats
April 2015 to October 2016: the Jungle or ‘the art of building towns’
Notes
3
:
A sociology of the Jungle: everyday life in a precarious space
Society under precarious conditions
Settling in the shantytown
Economic and social life
Making a community
Notes
4
:
A Jungle of solidarities
Calais as a cosmopolitan crossroads of solidarities
The situation in other encampments
Mobilization networks: from local to national
Notes
5
:
Destruction, dispersal, returns
‘The biggest shantytown in Europe’
The sheltering operation as spectacle
Dispersal
After the demolition: returns and rejections
Notes
Conclusion: the Calais event
The camp as hypertrophy of the border
Cosmopolitics of the Jungle
Notes
Postscript: how this book was written
The authors
Index
End User License Agreement
List of figures
Map 1. The Schengen area.
Map 2. Jungles, encampments and localities mentioned.
Photo 1. The ‘Calais Jungle’, also known as the ‘Pashtun Jungle’, destroyed in September 2009 (photo: Sara Prestianni, July 2009).
Photo 2. The Norrent-Fontes encampment, 2016 (photo: Julien Saison).
Figure 1. Plan of the Sangatte camp in 2002 (from Olivier Clochard, Le Jeu des frontières dans l’accès au statut de réfugié, Université de Poitiers, 2007, p. 252).
Figure 2. Location of encampments, squats and jungles in the Calais region as of March 2015 (Actes & Cités; ENSAPB; Studio C. Hanappe).
Figure 3. The Leader Price camp in March 2015 (source: ENSAPB; Studio C. Hanappe. Students: Bensaci, Credey, Migliore).
Photo 3. Loup Blaster's sycamore in the Galoo squat (photo: Cyrille Hanappe).
Figure 4. The ‘town centre’ of the Bois Dubrulle encampment (source: ENSAPB; Studio C. Hanappe. Students: Alves, Carrasco, Lefrançois, Olavarria).
Photo 4. The Tioxide hangar (photo: Cyrille Hanappe).
Figure 5. Plans of the bar (upper left), the mosque (upper right) and the church (lower) of the Tioxide camp, March 2015 (source: ENSAPB; Studio C. Hanappe. Students: Marino, Sauqué, Stoumpou, Skipsey).
Figure 6. Calais Jungle, October 2015 (source: ENSAPB. Teachers: Aquilino, Chombart de Lauwe, Hanappe).
Figure 7. Afghan restaurant, Calais Jungle, October 2015 (source: ENSAPB. Teachers: Aquilino, Chombart de Lauwe, Hanappe. Students: Frikha, Guarin, Pujole, Tumbarello).
Figure 8. House of a group of Eritrean women, Calais Jungle, October 2015 (source: ENSAPB. Teachers: Aquilino, Chombart de Lauwe, Hanappe. Students: Frikha, Guarin, Pujole, Tumbarello).
Figure 9. The ‘Darfour is Bleeding’ courtyard of Sudanese migrants (source: ENSAPB. Teachers: Aquilino, Chombart de Lauwe, Hanappe. Students: Baïram, Gkiola, Hanart, Vilquin).
Photo 5. The container camp (Centre d’Accueil Provisoire), Calais Jungle, October 2016 (photo: Sara Prestianni).
Photo 6. Children in the Calais Jungle, February 2016 (photo: Sara Prestianni).
Photo 7. A hairdressing salon, Calais Jungle, December 2015 (photo: Sara Prestianni).
Photo 8. The Calais Jungle, October 2016 (photo: Sara Prestianni).
Photo 9. The Norrent-Fontes encampment, 2016 (photo: Julien Saison).
Photo 10. Calais Jungle, 25 October 2016, the second day of the evacuation: awaiting departure for the Centres d’Accueil et d’Orientation (photo: Sara Prestianni).
Photo 11. Calais, 26 October 2016, the Jungle after evacuation and during its destruction (photo: Sara Prestianni).
Map 3. Deaths at the Franco-British border, August 1999–May 2017.
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The Jungle
Calais's Camps and Migrants
Michel Agier
With Yasmine Bouagga, Maël Galisson, Cyrille Hanappe, Mathilde Pette and Philippe Wannesson
With the collaboration of Madeleine Trépanier, Céline Barré, Nicolas Lambert, Sara Prestianni and Julien Saison
Translated by David Fernbach
polity
Copyright © Michel Agier, Yasmine Bouagga, Maël Galisson, Cyrille Hanappe, Mathilde Pette and Philippe Wannesson, 2019
This English edition © Polity Press, 2019
Polity Press
65 Bridge Street
Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press
101 Station Landing
Suite 300
Medford, MA 02155, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-3060-1
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-3061-8 (pb)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Agier, Michel, 1953- author.
Title: The jungle : Calais's camps and migrants / Michel Agier et al.
Description: 1 | Medford, MA : Polity, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018013003 (print) | LCCN 2018029163 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509530632 (Epub) | ISBN 9781509530601 (hardback) | ISBN 9781509530618 (paperback)
Subjects: LCSH: Political refugees–France–Calais. | Refuge (Humanitarian assistance)–France–Calais. | BISAC: SOCIAL SCIENCE / Anthropology / General.
Classification: LCC HV677.C342 (ebook) | LCC HV677.C342 A45 2018 (print) | DDC 362.89/912830944272–dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018013003
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Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, Elcograf S.p.A.
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
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Illustrations
Photos
1
The ‘Calais Jungle’, also known as the ‘Pashtun Jungle’, destroyed in September 2009
2
The Norrent-Fontes encampment, 2016
3
Loup Blaster's sycamore in the Galoo squat
4
The Tioxide hangar
5
The container camp (Centre d’Accueil Provisoire), Calais Jungle, October 2016
6
Children in the Calais Jungle, February 2016
7
A hairdressing salon, Calais Jungle, December 2015
8
The Calais Jungle, October 2016
9
The Norrent-Fontes encampment, 2016
10
Calais Jungle, 25 October 2016, the second day of the evacuation: awaiting departure for the Centres d’Accueil et d’Orientation
11
Calais, 26 October 2016, the Jungle after evacuation and during its destruction
Figures
1
Plan of the Sangatte camp in 2002
2
Location of encampments, squats and jungles in the Calais region as of March 2015
3
The Leader Price camp in March 2015
4
The ‘town centre’ of the Bois Dubrulle encampment
5
Plans of the bar (upper left), the mosque (upper right) and the church (lower) of the Tioxide camp, March 2015
6
Calais Jungle, October 2015
7
Afghan restaurant, Calais Jungle, October 2015
8
House of a group of Eritrean women, Calais Jungle, October 2015
9
The ‘Darfour is Bleeding’ courtyard of Sudanese migrants
Maps
1
The Schengen area
2
Jungles, encampments and localities mentioned
3
Deaths at the Franco-British border, August 1999–May 2017
Introduction: for a better understanding
On 24 October 2016, the evacuation of the Calais Jungle began. The relevant department of the French interior ministry and the police, along with members of various voluntary organizations, led the occupants of the shantytown camp to coaches that would take them to reception centres whose names and locations they did not know. In the first three days, a little more than 3,000 people were moved in this way. On the third day, the destruction of dwellings began, and also of the communal facilities built during the previous eighteen months of occupation and installation. At the end of the same week, the government authorities announced that the ‘dismantling’ was finished. In fact, the complete destruction would still take a few more days. Left until last were the containers that the government had decided to place in the middle of the Jungle nearly a year earlier. These were taken apart and removed a few weeks later.
The demolition of the Jungle was seen as a success. It took place at the start of a major election campaign in France (the presidential elections of April and May 2017), in which the existing government sought (without success) to win back an electorate that it had very largely lost. To this end it wanted to show signs of its ‘firmness’ and ‘humanity’, in the official ‘elements of language’. Above all, the state sought to demonstrate its ability to suppress the public problem posed by the migrants, through the disappearance of the migrants themselves along with any trace of their local presence, their settlement on the ground. This would be the signal of a strong state, protecting the national territory against undesirable foreigners.
A longer history of the Jungle
And yet, only a few months later, at the end of January 2017, the national press as well as voluntary organizations acknowledged that migrants were still at Calais. Those who had been unwilling to take the coaches the previous October had dispersed in the region around the town and were now coming back, while others returned from further away, after realizing that the reception centres (Centres d’Accueil et d’Orientation [Reception and Orientation Centres], or CAOs) to which they had been taken when the Jungle was demolished were a dead end, since they neither resolved the administrative obstacles to their asylum requests nor succeeded in making them abandon the attempt to cross to Britain. Thus the history of the Calais migrants did not finish with the ‘eviction’ of October 2016 (studied in detail in chapter 5). The story that needs to be told is a much longer one – in its historical and geographical context, European and regional – just as we have to understand what happened in this shantytown – or rather a town and a community in the process of coming together – that the whole world called ‘the Jungle’, and where, at least at one point, 10,000 people lived. What crazy mechanisms enabled Europe, and in particular France and the United Kingdom, to ‘invent’ and ‘manufacture’, then destroy, this unnameable place? So unnameable that fear was further intensified by calling it a ‘Jungle’, taking up, distorting and above all re-signifying the Pashtun word djangal (which, in its original language, simply means a bit of forest) so as to Westernize it a bit, and thus designate it from this point of view, French and European, as a negatively exotic and disturbing place, more distant than it is in reality, and less human.
What the present book describes is the very opposite of this. Based on a chronological and monographic study conducted by a team that included researchers, students and members of voluntary organizations,1 it offers points of reference to help understand what has been happening at Calais for the last fifteen years and more – and has continued since the demolition of the camp and the dispersal of its occupants. Also the book describes and analyses what happened in the Jungle itself between April 2015 and October 2016, the respective dates of the opening of the encampment and of its destruction. The overall context of the Jungle is what has been called in Europe the ‘migrant crisis’. But the causal connection between the formation and development of this site and the so-called migrant crisis is only very indirect. What is taking place on the Franco–British border has its origin in the 1990s. It is important to place this situation in an older local and regional context: that of Europe's external borders since 1995 and the establishment of the Schengen space (connected also with the borders at Ceuta, Melilla and Patras – see map 1). At the same time, to take Calais as a case study means describing an example of the European crisis in general.
Map 1. The Schengen area.
The closing of the Sangatte camp in 2002 (the emergency shelter and reception centre of the Red Cross, 1999–2002) was already supposed to mean, according to the French government of the time, that ‘there will be no more crossing at Calais’. However, thousands of migrants of different generations and nationalities (Kosovars, Kurds, Afghans, Eritreans, Sudanese, Iraqis, Syrians, etc.) continued to wander in the region between Calais and Dunkirk. They tried to cross to the UK despite the Franco–British agreement on keeping migrants on French territory, made at Le Touquet in 2003. The formation of the Calais encampment – also called a ‘state shantytown’ or the ‘New Jungle’ when it was created in April 2015 – was just one episode in this long border history, and certainly a singular one, in the context of the exceptional arrival of a million migrants in Europe that year. From Lesbos to Calais, Idomeni to Ventimiglia, hundreds of encampments, reception and holding centres, ‘hot spots’ and other sites of confinement developed as never before around Europe's borders, in its margins and even at the heart of its cities.2
Europe and the migration question
The policy of removing undesirable immigrants began twenty-five years earlier, with the ‘Schengen process’, whose regulations centred on taking measures to prevent their entry into this territory. The European Council meeting held at Tampere in October 1999, which started the process of harmonizing policies in this field, saw the appearance of the concept of ‘external action’ or ‘externalization’, as well as ‘partnership with the countries of origin’, which would lead in the following years to a policy of subcontracting the management of migration and asylum to countries in Africa and the Middle East. The concept of externalization reappeared in the agenda of a meeting at The Hague in October 2004 (which set the programme and objectives for European asylum and immigration policy for the following five years), as well as in the proposal of Tony Blair's government that centres for sorting asylum requests should be set up in the countries around the European Union. The following years brought the question of control and criminalization of migrants to the heart of European policy, to the detriment of integration and reception. The March 2016 agreement between the EU and Turkey represents one of the latest examples of the drift in European policy, externalization of border control to third countries being a central pillar of this. Moreover, at the level of member states, emergency management not only substitutes for any real long-term planning, but also for genuine measures that would reduce deaths at sea, which are tragically rising every year.3
The year 2015 was marked by an increase in the number of refugees entering European territory. The figure reached over a million individuals. There then followed a brief period in which the determination of these refugees, combined with the interests of certain member states, made it possible to reverse the trend and create what would be known as the ‘Balkan corridor’, which offered a safe and rapid passage for refugees from Greece towards Austria and Germany. But this corridor began to close in November 2015, when at Idomeni, on the border between Macedonia and Greece, an arbitrary sorting of entries began, allowing only individuals of Syrian and Iraqi nationality to cross.
Early in 2016 this border closed completely, at the same time as did the entire Balkan corridor (the Greece—Macedonia—Serbia—Hungary (or Croatia/Slovenia)—Austria route). The refugees who continued to arrive in Greece, chiefly across the Aegean Sea, remained boxed in on Greek territory, in reception camps opened by the government under pressure from the EU (‘hot spots’), where conditions were inhumane, or in makeshift camps around the borders, such as those that formed at Idomeni and Piraeus. The signing of the agreement between the EU and Turkey on 18 March 2016 went in the same direction of closure. In exchange for a faster process of visa issue for Turkish citizens, as well as €6 billion, Turkey committed itself to controlling its borders and readmitting to its territory those asylum seekers on the Greek islands who were considered non-admissible. If arrivals on mainland Greece significantly diminished in the wake of this agreement, the Greek islands, and particularly Lesbos, were transformed into a real limbo, where thousands of people waited months without knowing their fate.
Calais is simply one step in a migration journey that lasts months, even years, and obliges the refugees to seek shelter – in the absence of genuine reception policies – in makeshift encampments scattered right across Europe, whether at Calais, Rome, Ventimiglia, Paris, Idomeni, Subotica, Patras or elsewhere.
At Calais there are both people who crossed to Sicily, and those who entered overland or by sea to Greece.
Those landing in Sicily – chiefly refugees from sub-Saharan Africa or the Horn of Africa – have very often suffered extremely severe violence and conditions of life before reaching Europe. In Mali, Niger or Sudan, the attempt to reach Libya begins in the ghettos of Gao, Agadez and Khartoum, with people often imprisoned before they start on the desert crossing in a truck weighed down with its human cargo, those weakened by the journey and without the strength to continue being simply left on the sand. Libya, which has made migrants into a real money-spinner, is where all who cross it suffer the greatest violence: often kidnapped on their arrival, at Koufra or Sebha, imprisoned in dozens of holding centres scattered across the country before being exploited as cheap labour. The Libyan transit is still harder for women, victims of violence on the part of the authorities and military who control the territory. After having survived the test of the Mediterranean Sea, and despite being obliged to identify themselves – particularly after the ‘hot spot’ controls established in September 2015 – many refugees decide to leave Italy for another European country.
The Tiburtina station in Rome is the meeting-point for refugees from the Horn of Africa, travelling from Sicily to the borders of Ventimiglia and Como. Those seeking to reach France or specifically Calais continue to Ventimiglia, those set on Switzerland or Germany head for Como or Bolzano. The policy of closing borders even within the Schengen space has led to the creation of informal or temporary camps managed by the Red Cross, where migrants await the aid of a smuggler4 to continue their journey.
Whether referred to as ‘migrants’ or ‘refugees’, the inhabitants of the Calais shantytown share a common experience of displacement from their country of origin, with the aim of settling in a place where they might find protection and a perspective for the future. The migrants at Calais were those among the individuals crossing Europe who hoped to reach the UK (where they often have relatives or an already established community, or think they have a greater chance of integration), but found themselves blocked at the border. Between 2014 and 2016, the number of migrants in the makeshift encampments around the crossing points to England grew to unprecedented levels, due both to the growing number of refugees entering the European Union and to the reinforcement of the UK border.
The main nationalities present were Afghans and Sudanese, who in 2016 made up more than two-thirds of the total number of migrants on the site. The population of migrants at Calais reflects a certain state of conflicts in the world, yet it is not an exact representation of the migrant populations reaching Europe during this period, nor even of those arriving illegally across the Mediterranean. Whereas on Lesbos the majority are Syrians, there are only a few of these at Calais, since they tend more to favour Germany or the Scandinavian countries. Likewise, the migrants from Francophone Africa, who are numerous among those arriving on the Italian shores, are almost absent at Calais, not wishing to seek asylum in the UK. Only a minority of individuals seeking refuge in Europe are blocked at Calais. Besides, depending on the routes taken from their country of origin, the demographic weight of nationalities shifts. The EU–Turkey agreement and the blocking of the Balkan route in spring 2016 reduced the number of Afghans, Syrians and Kurds arriving. Conversely, the seasonal reopening of the Italian Mediterranean route led to a sharp increase in the proportion of Sudanese, Eritreans and Ethiopians during the course of summer 2016.
Calais as metonym for European crisis … and solidarity
Calais represents one staging-post on a trajectory of migration that is often long – anything from several weeks to several years – in the course of which displaced individuals are blocked at several political and geographical border crossings. The double obstacle of a stretch of sea 30 kilometres wide, and a border where security was reinforced in 2015, made Calais a cul-de-sac where the temporary became permanent, where the encampment ended up persisting and even urbanizing. This transformation, paradoxically, also made it a staging-post for many refugees seeking asylum in France. From a place of transit to England, the Calais shantytown thus became, throughout the 2015–16 period, a relatively hospitable site for migrants of various status, given the lack of public arrangements for reception and transit adapted to their situation in France.
Calais – a border town of the Schengen space, a place of transit to an England whose borders are increasingly externalized and securitized. The refugees find it a temporary refuge, while waiting either to cross or to make an asylum application in France. Calais is a town with multiple borders, where not only European policies are tried out, but also national and municipal ones, policies of reception and rejection of migrant and refugee populations.
Viewed as a transit space not only by migrants but also by institutions and the local population, Calais is one of the most constricting national spaces in terms of security and the eviction of foreigners from the urban space. But this temporary transit zone has turned out to be increasingly durable, on account of the reinforcement of border controls and the establishment of a physical border (barbed-wire fences) at the crossing points (port and tunnel).
The creation of the camp, officially known as ‘campement de la Lande’ [i.e., Heath camp], corresponded to a public strategy of management of the migrant populations outside of the town. It was initiated by voluntary organizations and individuals who saw it as a way of improving the living conditions of refugees on this new site. Situated 7 kilometres from the town of Calais, and 34 kilometres from England, at the heart of a border zone that is closed and controlled by a Franco–British security system, the Calais camp was first and foremost a site of extraterritoriality.
The transfer and regrouping of migrants and refugees into a single ‘tolerated’ camp, some distance from the town, took place in April 2015, as a response of the French state to the request of the Calais mayor (a member of the main right-wing party, Les Républicains). This led to a new sequence of tensions and outbreaks of violence, but also gestures of solidarity, social, media and political mobilizations, which made Calais a metonym for Europe's crisis in the face of the influx of migrants from Africa, Asia and the Middle East, but also for a Europe of solidarity, more open to others and the world.
This solidarity also gave rise to major intellectual mobilizations. Many books have been published in both French and English on the subject of migrants and the Calais Jungle, which shows the particular place that this situation rapidly acquired, not only in the domain of research, but also in political and artistic action. By its dynamism and its art of transformation, as much as by its marginality and precariousness, the Calais Jungle rapidly stimulated thought. By way of personal visits, ‘philosophical reportage’ or longer-lasting investigations, philosophers found here material for renewing their reflections on (in)hospitality, citizenship, cosmopolitanism, globalization, the status of foreigners and national public policies in the face of precarious mobility.5 Other works have taken the form of manifestos, artistic, poetic and political actions, some of these issuing from the ‘Appel des 800’.6 These are original expressions based on various kinds of writing or testimony: photographic, film, literary, philosophical, cartoons, and publications of the words and writings of migrants.7
We have followed closely these voices and mobilizations, and integrated them into our diagnosis of ‘what happened at Calais’ – the Calais event. They help us to understand how a place created to make its occupants as invisible as possible, as close to disappearing altogether, became, without losing hardly anything of its precariousness (in other words, with the possibility of disappearance a constant throughout), a site of life and very great visibility, the theatre of new political, urban and aesthetic questions for Europeans.
The present work, however, differs from those just mentioned in the sense that it is first and foremost a research document and an archive of the present. Without needing the form of an indictment, it offers a collective anthropological expertise, a procedure which could be called ‘forensic anthropology’ if this expression did not refer too closely to an outdated biological and physical conception of anthropology. It is forensic in the sense of forensic medicine – investigating the causes and processes that lead to the death of an individual. But this is social, cultural and political anthropology, applied to a place, communities, a situation. This book thus presents a diagnosis of the causes, process and effects of the life and death of the Calais Jungle (April 2015 to October 2016). The detailed descriptions and analyses conducted as closely as possible on the ground seek both to establish what happened at Calais and to draw more general lessons. Our desire is to produce knowledge on the basis of this case, from the perspective of an anthropology of contemporary dynamics and using the method of ‘extended case study’ developed by field anthropologists of the Manchester School.8 This method makes it possible to grasp and retain moments of a world in constant transformation. Starting from a particular situation, localized in space and time, the aim is to draw out all the threads for understanding the logics that ‘produced’ this situation and thereby understand a more global change under way, a new state of societies – both local and global – coming about and being steadily transformed, with the stakes and perspectives that arise from this.
Anthropology has to be reactive, collective, and multidisciplinary, in order to meet the ‘contemporaneity’ between research and the perpetual motion of the present. A whole team has been mobilized to achieve this work, and we draw on historical, architectural and urban, sociological and political research, as well as on ethnography and participation in the field. The study has thus gained from being collaborative, bringing together those engaged in fieldwork and members of voluntary organizations who met on the ground, with several years’ familiarity with the site (and those that preceded it), who were determined to draw from their experience an archive and a body of knowledge. More broadly, it forms part of an attempt to renew anthropological research and writing in the project of understanding in depth the transformations under way in the contemporary world.
As a first-hand research document, this book is addressed to everyone wishing to understand the situation and its context in detail. It is also the history of a present that is still being made, since it is concerned with both the pre- and post-Jungle experience. Throughout the text, we are equally careful not to isolate Calais from its regional environment – and particularly to mention the town of Grand-Synthe, some 40 kilometres away, where a very different municipal experience developed. Calais is one place of encampment/camp/shantytown among others in the north of France, in Europe, and in the world. These various sites are linked, they form networks, and enable us to reach a wider conception of the name of Calais, of what Calais signifies, as ‘concentrate’ of a change on the global scale, on a planet where extra-territoriality and policies of exception are spreading.
Keeping as precisely as possible to the chronology of some twenty years of migration policies and population movements that led to the opening, and eighteen months later the destruction, of the Calais Jungle, we describe in parallel movements of solidarity and hostility. The seemingly major local role of the far right (much has been said about how ‘the Calais people’ were ‘xenophobic’) is put in its proper place, almost derisory in relation to the hostility of the public authorities (municipal and national) to the migrants. Conversely, local movements of solidarity towards migrants developed substantially from the early 2000s, and played an important role in making it possible for migrants to live here despite the hostile context. We also dwell on the spatial and social forms that were invented during these years of wandering through the Calais squats and encampments up to this final site – which was first called the ‘New Jungle’ – showing that all these installations enjoyed a relative autonomy – an unforeseen and inverted consequence of their removal by the public authorities.
The first chapter offers a detailed and contextualized chronology of the events that led to the formation of the camp (in April 2015) and then its destruction (October 2016). This falls into four main phases: from the 1980s to the ‘Sangatte moment’ (1999–2002); then the post-Sangatte period until 2015, for which we describe the rise of both the far right and movements of solidarity; the formation and development of the Calais camp in 2015; and finally the period from its partial destruction of March 2016 to its total destruction and the dispersal of the migrants in October 2016. This history has been reconstructed with the help of interviews and existing documentation, but above all thanks to the archive constituted by the memories of members of voluntary organizations, who, as co-authors of this book with their personal reflections, sought both to bear witness to the period 1999–2016 and to understand it.
The book then pursues a descriptive, reflective and critical approach, taking the case of the Calais Jungle to draw three main ‘lessons’ (chapters 2, 3 and 4). These bear on the basic questions for understanding the new models of mobility and locality on the European and global scale. The first lesson (chapter 2) concerns the infrastructure of sites of mobility. This chapter develops an architectural and town-planning perspective, describing the transformation and improvement of the spaces created by the migrants in the urban encampments and the Calais camp itself, where an encampment architecture and a precarious town-planning were invented: a ‘draft’ for a town, provoking wider reflection on receptive urbanism in contexts of mobility. The second lesson (chapter 3
