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 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. 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, 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. Research for this project was supported by the Graham
Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts.
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