Slab City : dispatches from the last free place / Charlie Hailey ; photographs by Donovan Wylie.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Hailey, Charlie, 1970- author.

Contributor:

Wylie, Donovan, 1971- photographer.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Squatter settlements--California--Imperial County.

Squatter settlements.

Marginality, Social--California--Imperial County.

Marginality, Social.

Slab City (Calif.).

California--Imperial County.

California--Slab City.

Physical Description:

xiii, 175 pages ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Massachusetts : The MIT Press, [2018]

Summary:

Under the unforgiving sun of southern California's 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 site's residual military perimeters and gridded street layout; off-grid is really in-grid. Architect Charlie Hailey and photographer Donovan Wylie explore the contradictions of Slab City.0In 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', 'T'ai Chi on the Slabs Every morning', and 'Don't 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 society's dispossessed? Officially, it is a town that doesn't exist.

Notes:

Map inserted in pocket on inside of back cover.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN:

9780262038355

0262038358

OCLC:

1019834123