Memory of the project by Stéphane Malka
The rapid shelter opens like an umbrella for urban campers, together in warmth. Illegitimate son of the minimal “unité d’habitation” of Le Corbusier and Claude Parent’s “oblique housing environment”, A-Kamp47 vertical camp has taken a stand at La Friche de La Belle de Mai in Marseille, on a wall between a cultural center and a railroad network.
These spaces, however, are actually in legal ambiguity, cantilevered between private and public property. By appropriating blind walls, we are in reality neither inside nor outside. It’s this interstitial space that has been taken and thickened in its verticality, like a corridor carved in between.
According to the Quiliot law of June 22, 1982, "To guarantee the right to housing constitutes a duty of solidarity for the entire nation." However, no law provides a national obligation for housing. Despite political promises, cardboard shelters and camp sites under bridges are multiplying. In the nicer neighbourhoods of Marseille, the homeless are setting up more visibly, from front lawns to building entrances.
In the winter of 2006, the Children of Don Quichotte (a French association) set up more than a hundred tents along the banks of the Canal Saint-Martin. A social revolution, outcasts and the rank-less squat Paris and many other cities in France. A logical evolution of light-weight shelters, the tent has the ability to be very mobile. But the problem is that isolated tents are more exposed; exposed to the cold, and also to theft and police raids.
In this project, Stealth Shelters respond to the immediate constraints of precarious social and intellectual systems. The proximity of the situation allows for a collective response that can be heard. The marginalized, the clandestine, squatters, and the homeless are sheltered. The blind wall snow has eyes, and they are watching us.
