ABSTRACT
Tent cities like the Occupy movement are part of a long history of protest encampments as sites of political protest. In May of 1968, civil rights activists erected a monumental Tent City on the National Mall in Washington DC as part of the Poor Peoples campaign catalyzed by the Civil Rights Movement. The essay explores how this provisional demos, a temporary commons forms within tent cities, assigned agency and leveraged collective action for economic and political change. It also considers if it is precisely the tent’s impermanence, it’s negligible footprint, that in part contributes to the refusal on the part of the state and cities to commit to long-term settlement of the denizens of these tent cities, precisely because of the correlation of race, citizenship, personhood, and land? This essay examines what tent cities in the past can tell us about how these temporary formations might function as sites of political action and change.
