Occupying Paris: An Analytical Exploration of (Re)Making, Evacuating, and Inhabiting Camps

In France, the saturation of "emergency shelter (hébergement)" and long-term "housing (logement)" systems and the absence of flux pathways to each system make the migrants’ settlement trajectories uneven and fragmented. The increasing number of asylum applications (131,000 in 2022) keeps challenging the simultaneously operating reception system and housing system since the 2015 refugee crisis. From November 2020 onwards, police have evacuated makeshift camps in Île-de-France without offering emergency shelters to all, which has triggered frontline civic associations’ monthly protestations in the form of occupying significant places by camps in centre Paris. Evacuated migrants stayed in gyms and kept being thrown back onto the streets. Those stuck in the emergency shelter system are not eligible or waiting to enter the long-term housing system. The phenomenon questions what housing means to asylum seekers within the “housing-first” and “post-housing” debates.

Drawing upon my fieldwork starting from the COVID-19 period (2020-2023) in Paris, this paper analyses the sheer diversity of materiality and lived practices of asylum seekers’ journeys revolving around a variety of "camps." Through the reading of camps and home-making situated between “refuge” and “emergency shelter”, I will illustrate (1) how the (re)making and (re)evacuating the makeshift, official, and performative camps are commonly experienced solutions for asylum seekers; (2) how these practices reflect France’s evolving reception and housing policies; (3) how the “permanent temporality” (Picker & Pasquetti 2015) of camps reveals a complex tension between dignity and the circulating settlement journey of migrants.