Slab City: Dispatches from the Last Free Place (Mit Press)

About this book

An architect and a photographer explore a community of squatters artists snowbirds migrants and survivalists inhabiting a former military base in the California desert. Under the unforgiving sun of southern Californias Colorado Desert lies Slab City a community of squatters artists snowbirds migrants survivalists and homeless people. Called by some the last free place and by others an enclave of anarchy Slab City is also the end of the road for many. Without official electricity running water sewers or trash pickup Slab City dwellers also live without law enforcement taxation or administration. Built on the concrete slabs of Camp Dunlap an abandoned Marine training base the settlement maintains its off-grid aspirations within the sites residual military perimeters and gridded street layout; off-grid is really in-grid. In this book architect Charlie Hailey and photographer Donovan Wylie explore the contradictions of Slab City. In a series of insightful texts and striking color photographs Hailey and Wylie capture the texture of life in Slab City. They show us Slab Mart a conflation of rubbish heap and recycling center; signs that declare Welcome to Slab City Tai Chi on the Slabs Every morning and Dont fuck around; RVs in conditions ranging from luxuriously roadworthy to immobile; shelters cloaked in pallets and palm fronds; and the alarmingly opaque water of the hot springs. At Camp Dunlap in the 1940s Marines learned how to fight a war. In Slab City civilians resort to their own wartime survival tactics. Is the current encampment an outpost of freedom a new city on a hill built by the self-chosen an inversion of Manifest Destiny or is it a last vestige of freedom tended by societys dispossessed? Officially it is a town that doesnt exist. Research for this project was supported by the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts.