Displacement, Labor and Incarceration

Although typically associated with provisional spaces for settlement, education and entertainment, camp environments are increasingly linked with humanitarian relief provision in the face of environmental or man-made catastrophes. They form part of the broader genealogy of power-knowledge relations conceptualized by Michel Foucault with regard to modern institutions, and emulate associated pedagogical and disciplinary programs (Foucault 1980, 83). ¹ This chapter examines two contrasting responses to the accommodation of mass human displacements that occurred before and during the Second World War (WWII) in the United States. It situates them in a comparative and visually discursive spatial genealogy that highlights the instrumental role of spatial planning. This chapter’s argument is that the meanings and associations of the ‘camp’ as a phenomenon underwent a transformation from a model environment for rehabilitation to a punitive alternative across a range of functions for different groups of subjects, including American citizens, Japanese citizens, ‘enemy aliens’ and enemy prisoners of war. During the Depression era, camp types varied from Hoovervilles and migrant camps, or company-run labor camps, to Farm Security Administration (FSA) emergency relief camps, subsistence homesteads, greenbelt towns, and permanent and mobile camps for seasonal labor (Conkin 1959), regarded among the best examples of community-centered planning at that time. ² During WWII, camp typologies expanded to include Civilian Assembly Centers and Relocation Centers under Executive Order 9066 and Justice Department detention camps, Citizen Isolation Centers, Federal Bureau Prison camps, U.S. Army Facilities and Immigration and Naturalization Service Facilities. Their military-barrack-style designs and limited civic amenities highlighted embedded forms of racial discrimination within mid-twentieth-century social democracy.