Camps, Encampments, and Occupations: From the Heterotopia to the Urban Subject

This article aims to understand the main principles that design a worldwide landscape of precarious spaces. I argue that the increasing and more constraining policies of exclusion provoke the repeated creation of limits and 'outsides' and that this represents a major aspect of contemporary urban and world governance. Contemporary 'out-places' ['hors-lieux'] or concrete 'heterotopias' (Foucault) are linked to one another by policies of exclusion, organisation and control, subjective experiences, and routes. The formation and proliferation of heterotopias as an ensemble of margins and precarious spaces, turn visible as a global political fact the question of (in)equality.