Paper short abstract:

This paper speaks to the productive tension of temporary permanence through the presence of UN peacekeeping camps in Goma. Exposing the durations and itineraries that shape these settlements, this paper explores the ways that practices of camping can reconfigure urban spaces and futures of dwelling.

Paper long abstract:

This paper approaches the question of temporality and permanence relative to urbanization through the unexpected settlement of the UN peacekeeping camp. Between 2017 and 2019, the city of Goma temporarily accommodated military peacekeepers from southeast Asia, Africa, and Latin America in over 20 different camps across its extended urban landscape. These socio-spatial formations, I argue, instantiate the productive tension of temporality and permanence in ways that can help us better understand how urbanization emerges in the continuous (re-)making of settlements between now and later, as well as between the city and elsewhere. The paper first introduces its audience to the geography and lived realities of these UN bases to illustrate how these camps come into being through a dual consideration of their ephemerality and endurance. The ways in which peacekeepers socially, spatially, and architecturally make their camps - drawing upon the places they (temporarily) inhabit and the places they call home - are analyzed to offer new ways to think about how urban spaces across Goma materialize correspondences between disparate place-times. Designed as a more theoretical contribution, this paper departs from the peacekeeping camp to propose an analytic of “camping” with which we might unsettle predominant notions of the urban to recover its inherent uncertainty, particular in peacekept places. In doing so, I seek to respond to southern urban theory’s call for new vocabularies of practice with a verb that may beget new understandings of temporary dwelling arrangements in Goma and in an increasingly mobile, transitory, and precarious world.