Slab City

Charlie Hailey, Donovan Wylie, Low Density, Survey, Territory and mobility, Urban Paradigms

Adaptive landscape, Adaptive reuse, Built Environment & Low Density, California, City, Community, Desert, Environment, Extreme environments, Informal settlements, Landscape, Local materials, Photographic Atlas of the Cities, Photography, Residential, slabs, Urban Dialogue, USA, Waste management

"Slab City: Dispatches from the Last Free Place" (MIT Press), 2018 -- https://lccn.loc.gov/2017056197

Often described as the “last free place”, Slab City is an informal settlement built on the remains of a World War 2 military training camp in the southern California desert. In their book Slab City: Dispatches from the Last Free Place (MIT Press), architect Charlie Hailey and photographer Donovan Wylie seek to understand how this place and its architecture accommodate the needs and desires of its residents within the constraints of a remote, off-grid site and its harsh desert environment.