Learn about the history of protest camps and how people have not only imagined but also practically built alternative worlds together.
Introduction
The article explores the rich history of protest camps, charting their development and influence on social movements worldwide. It examines their diverse purposes and manifestations, from historic labor disputes to contemporary environmental and political activism.
This excerpt is adapted from the chapter, Protest Camps, by Anna Feigenbaum, Fabian Frenzel, and Patrick McCurdy in ‘Making Things International 2’, edited by Mark Salter and published by the University of Minnesota in 2016. Photos have been added by the Commons library.
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The Occupy Movement and urban occupations in Egypt, Greece, Spain and Israel made headlines across the world in 2011, turning ‘protest camp’ into a household phrase. While it may have seemed that these camps erupted spontaneously, there is a long, transnational history of tents being pitched for political change. While contemporary movements certainly show new styles of protest camping, the tactic of building a public place for protest and dialogue is borne from a long tradition of people working to imagine other possible worlds together.
Distinct from other forms of social movement practices like demonstrations or marches, the protest camp is made through acts of collaboration as both a place to live and to engage in political action. Protest camps may be defined as a place-based social movement strategy that involves both acts of ongoing protest and acts of social reproduction needed to sustain daily life.
Tracing out some of the international history of protest camping, draws attention to the ways that protest camps have been made across time, movements and continents. In the long lineage of protest camping that we sketch out here it becomes clear that transnational connections exist between camps across time and space.
Working out of a collaboration with Artivistic in the Summer of 2011, we adopted and developed the term “promiscuous infrastructures” to try to capture the crooked and messy nature of how the ideas, bodies, objects and structures that come to make up protest camps travel. While the term promiscuous carries much negative weight in social and cultural realms, in the biological sciences it is used to mean, as its etymology suggests: to mix, forward.
The acts of transfer that make protest camps move are local, but also translated and adapted across countries.
Likewise, protest camps makes visible all of the architectures and objects required to sustain or socially reproduce daily life–from kitchens to showers to media centers. While these objects and environments are always a critical part of what makes social movements work the way they do, like things more broadly, they fade into the backdrop, appearing occasionally as props, but rarely as central actors in social movements.
For hundreds of years camping, as a form of protest, has brought politics home. The Diggers and Levellers of 17th Century England directly inspired protest camps set up in recent decades. Under the leadership of Gerrard Winstanley, they rejected the idea of private land and reclaimed common land to grow crops, protesting what they saw as unjustly high rates set by landlords. This rejection arose from the Diggers broader protest of what they saw as a society full of social and wealth inequalities. In their manifesto, The True Levellers Standard Advanced, they argued that land was no longer free to all men, but “bought and sold, and kept in the hands of a few” who delight in their comforts as if “rejoycing in the miserable povertie and straits of others.”
These Diggers were a direct inspiration for the San Francisco Diggers formed in the 1960s who played a large role in setting up people’s park and spawned into the transnational group Food Not Bombs, often found serving food at Protest Camps. They also inspired the work of women at the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp in the 1980s. In 1996 in London the Pure Genius Campaign squatted unused land in central London to turn it into an agricultural commune, claiming allegiance to the Diggers’ ideals.
Whereas 17th century history can show us instances of reclaiming and re-purposing public space, history from the late 18th and early 19th centuries captures the rise of camping as a tactic to create collective and communal environments. Known as “camp meetings”, these took place in both the United Kingdom and the American frontier and were most commonly associated with Christian movements and Methodists in particular. Camp meetings were essentially large gatherings of worshipers who converged upon an agreed location, often a forest or a field, and created an intense, yet festive atmosphere where campers could engage in a form of religious recreation; it was camping with a (higher) purpose.
Organised camping, Scout movements and summer camps began to take on popularity in the early 1900s, particularly with the middle classes. In the United States, some camp founders aimed to bring nature and practical outdoors skills to city boys. Others wanted to strengthen religious bonds and generate community virtues (. The architectural design of the camp as a miniature village or tribe was often manifested on the tents themselves, emblemized with images of Native American men in headdress. Seton’s Woodcraft Indians “emphasized the Indian virtues of honesty and forthrightness, outdoor living, council fires, and Indian dances.” Here everyday material practices of making a communal home were explicitly linked to communal understandings of what makes a virtuous society.
The founders of organised camping saw a significant connection between the act of living outdoors together and the formation of a community of understanding. While the content of this understanding varied greatly, the recurrent form points to the organised camp as a unique structural, spatial and temporal place able to shape the lives of those that work, play and create within it. Eells writes of the origins of organised camping: “Because the camp was recognized as a powerful influence on behavior and ideological thinking, many religious and political groups turned to it as a means of propagating their special points of view.”
Combining common interests with communal uses of land, these camps served as precursors to protest camps.
The Bonus Army Camp and Hoovervilles both sprang up as a result of and a response to the great depression in the United States. Hoovervilles, named after then president Herbert Hoover, were shantytowns that provided basic infrastructures for those who lost their homes and livelihoods to the depression. Hoovervilles served primarily as basic shelter, offering a place to eat and sleep. Yet as they grew, some took on street names and even elected a mayor, becoming a type of alternative village. Hoovervilles were often set up in city spaces, like New York’s Central Park. This practice used the material conditions of life in the Great Depression to expose poverty and make it visible to the public. This tactic has been echoed for decades that followed. For example, in 2006 protests led by a group called Les Enfants de Don Quichottein in Paris saw bright red tents erected along wealthy, tourist areas of Canal St. Martin and along the Seine to raise awareness of homeless and housing rights.

Hooverville on the Seattle tidal flats, Seattle, Washington, U.S., 1933. Point of view is at the foot of Atlantic St. near the Skinner and Eddy Shipyards. Credit: Seattle Municipal Archives, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Back in 1932 the Bonus Army set up camps that combined infrastructural elements of Hoovervilles and military base camps during protests in Washington D.C. Like early scout camps, Bonus Army camps were organised into units with hierarchical leadership. These military components became intertwined with the makeshift musical stages and Salvation Army run libraries that sustained the protesting veterans throughout their months long protests demanding payment of promised benefits for their time served in the military.
The Bonus Army’s camps directly influenced Resurrection City, the Poor People’s Campaign 1968 shantytown camp on Washington Mall. It also served as inspiration for a little known precursor to Occupy: the Bloomberg-Ville protests of New York City. Purposefully invoking the Hooverville spirit and named after New York Mayor Bloomberg, the June 2011 City Park sleep-in protests were a reaction to the mayor’s proposed budget cuts and layoffs and combined social media use with physical occupation and performative protest.
While these instances form an important part of the lineage of protest camping, it was not until the 1960s that we began to see camps explicitly and intentionally used as a form of protest.
Greg Cowan writes that the act of camping accompanied many of the protests of the 1960s as the spatiality and temporality of the camp’s architectures were well suited to activists’ needs and limited resources. “The unsettled social conditions of the global student protests of 1968 were reflected in the architectures of protest; temporary, mobile and collaboratively deployed.” At the same time that student protests were flaring around the world, Martin Luther King Jr. was planning what would come to be his last major protest action. From May to June of 1968 Civil Rights and anti-poverty activists from the recently formed Poor People’s Campaign set up a highly-organised tent city that ran along the grassland between the Lincoln Memorial and Washington Monument in the American capital.
King himself drew attention to the links between Resurrection City and the Bonus Army protests. Shortly before his death he explained to a radio reporter that the marching caravans of city dwellers would be “patterned after Bonus March back in the 1930s.” King assured listeners “We will live in some nice houses until we can get our own town built because we gonna take you to Washington.” The plans for the city drew on the model of a base camp. Its strategic placement near the Capitol served as a visible act of mass resistance and provided easy access to government buildings for city dwellers’ daily protests.
However, unlike the Bonus Marchers camp, Resurrection City was devised primarily as an act of protest. The act of camping served many tactical functions that made American poverty visible to the public by bringing the poor to the government’s front door.
Resurrection City also stood as an experiment in alternative living. The campsite had its own urban planners from a nearby university. Two architecture professors and their students designed the walkways, sanitation routes and communal spaces for the camp. Dozens of volunteers including social workers, health professionals and educators helped set up and run on-site health care centres and kitchens serving three healthy meals a day, more than many of the city’s residents had in their home lives. While the camp faced a number of challenges in the form of floods, federal officials and in-fighting, the protest camp captured public imagination.

Resurrection City, Washington D.C., 1968 Credit: Henry Zbyszynski, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
In the late 1970s and early 1980s protest camps again spread across the world. Peace camps were pitched up on four continents, in an era before the term “globalization” had entered common use. One of the earliest and largest peace camps was the 1975 occupation of a nuclear power plant in Whyl, Germany. The camp lasted for 9 months and ended in a suspension of the building of the nuclear power plant, bringing on negotiations between the government and protest movement. In 1977 American protesters followed suit, occupying Seabrook nuclear plant in New Hampshire, which they called Freebrook.
As the anti-nuclear movement grew in the years following, many of the organizational methods and tactics developed at these early encampments were shared by anti-nuclear groups around the world. One of the largest of these camps began with a peace walk in September of 1981. What started with 35 walkers to the first nuclear cruise missile storage base at RAF Greenham Common in England, swelled within two years to become a global movement of transnationally networked anti-nuclear peace camps.
The physical location of these protest camps outside of military bases and weapons manufacturing plants directed media attention towards these issues, putting them onto the public agenda.
This enabled, or at the very least sustained, public dialogue and political pressure around the issue of nuclear warfare and increasing domestic militarisation. Within two years camps sprung up around military bases, weapons manufacturing plants and similar military targets across the UK at sites like Faslane and Molesworth, as well as in numerous locations in the US, Canada, the Netherlands, Germany, Italy, Australia, South Africa, Japan and Honduras.
In the 1990s, the rise of environmentalism met with the growth of consumerism and suburban landscaping in the form of motorways, mega-stores and strip malls. This led to a number of campaigns to save green land and natural habitats from further development. Protest campers took to forests, parks and trees engaging in direct action to stop land destruction and preserve natural habitats. In the United Kingdom, the first anti-road development camp appeared in Twyford Down in 1992, and soon after protest campers were occupying treetops in Newbury, England and rows of terrace housing set for demolition in East London.
The rapid growth of these protest camps led to widespread media coverage. In 1994 The Economist reported, “Protesting about new roads has become that rarest of British phenomena, a truly populist movement drawing supporters from all walks of life.” Meanwhile, in Canada a protest camp was set up to protect Clayoquot Sound, an area of rich natural resources inhabited by First Nations, from legislation that allowed for extensive logging and destruction of the natural habitat. More than 12,000 people took part in blockades, with hundreds staying at the protest camp on site.
Perhaps what might be considered a new type of transnational protest camp emerged in the form of convergence spaces in the late 1990s and early 2000s around international summits of elite government officials, military and corporate leaders, such as WTO and G8 meetings. Some of the largest camping spaces of the anti-globalization movement were set up at World Social Forums. 2001 gave rise to the Intercontinental Youth Camp in Porto Alegre, Brazil.
Started somewhat by accident, Left and student groups worked together to solve an ensuing housing crisis as youth protesters were about to descend on the city for the World Social Forum with nowhere to sleep. Drawing inspiration from the Zapatista encuentros and Argentianian piqueteros, the organisational form of the Youth Camp the following year set out to create a “city within a city” complete with its own currency. By 2003 the third camp had grown into a ten-day affair bringing 23,500 people together from all across the world in a makeshift city made up of self-managed neighbourhoods and including an eco-built media center, cultural and workshop spaces.
These events provided occasions and opportunities for global justice activists to mobilize, as thousands of people would come together to creating material infrastructures to form temporary communities.
From cooking for thousands to cleaning up after them, protesters camping at the counter-summits and World Social Forums of the anti-globalization movement of movements created large-scale cooperative infrastructures for daily living, decision-making and political organising.
The amount of media attention directed towards both summit delegates and counter-summit dissenters often transformed these international meetings into high profile media events covered by journalists from around the world.
Following the model of convergence camps being set up in the anti-globalization movement and drawing on its own national history of protest camping, the Hori-Zone camp in Stirling against the G8 in Gleneagles was set up in 2005. The camp was open for two weeks, from the end of June 2005 until July 11th, 2005. Hori-Zone provided space for 5,000 campers and served as a space to both plan and conduct resistance. Around 1,000 activists departed from the camp to take part in blockade-type actions of the organising network Dissent!’s July 6th Day of Action.
Over time the Global Justice camps became a ritualistic form of protest and often plans for the camp would begin before the location of a summit was even announced. For example, planning for the 2005 Gleneagles G8 Summit began in fall 2003. Dissent! Network activists steadily developed the HoriZone EcoVillage for the Summit even before the location of the G8 was announced.
Alongside these summits two new networks grew that used camps to grow and spread their messages. The No Borders Network working around migrant rights, and the Climate Camp.
Climate camps went beyond previous modes of protest camping to establish week long physically and virtually connected communities comprised of different neighbourhoods, each with their own meeting space centred around a communal kitchen.
Run with solar, wind and bike power, using grey water systems and eco-loos, Climate Camps served as both a space for protest action and as a living experiment in ecological cooperation. Building on the Gleneagles experience, Climate Camp pitched up for the first time in 2006 to highlight the urgency of political action to prevent dangerous climate change. The chosen target was the Drax coal-fired power station in Yorkshire. The camp drew 800 activists, enough to make a marked impression on national media and capture peoples’ imagination.

Climate Camp 2006 at Drax, Yorkshire. Credit: Fotdmike, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
A year later at Heathrow, camp numbers increased to 2,000 for a week-long protest against further airport expansion. The Heathrow camp utilised many of the same organisational practices and architectural methods as both the inaugural 2006 camp and the alter-globalisation summits that came before. The modular design and pre-planned infrastructures of these eco-camps made their form easy to adapt and reproduce in different locations. Following years saw more UK climate camps around the country in Kingsnorth (2008), London (2009) and Edinburgh (2010), and further afield in Canada, the US, Germany, Denmark, France, Ireland, the Netherlands, Belgium, Ghana, Australia and New Zealand. Tracing the development and transnational reach of climate camps shows how protest moves in both its politically symbolic and material forms.
Meanwhile protest camps could be found in democracy movements around the world. In 2004 Ukraine, hundreds of thousands took to the streets in tents protesting the fraudulent outcome of national elections. 2006 saw thousands camp in the streets of Oaxaca in a protest led by teachers for indigenous rights, education and economic justice. Thailand’s Red Shirts set up camps in 2008 and again in 2010 in a successful attempt to force new elections. Thai protesters in 2010 were camping out in the city centre for three months and were evicted by police and army units leaving over 60 people dead. Protesting the occupation of their country by Morocco, refugees in Western Sahara and Algeria transformed their refugee camps into stages for political organization.
By the time Tahrir Square captured international attention in 2011, protest camps already had a long history.

Protesters rest in the tents set up in Tahrir Square during the Egyptian Revolution of 2011. Credit: Sherif9282, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons
Yet the uprisings in Egypt, with its mass encampment in Tahrir Square, captured global attention in a way no protest camp had done before. This “Tahrir Moment” turned protest camps into a common phrase for a new generation.
Inspired by Tahrir and the May 15 movement in Spain, Occupy Wall Street began with an Adbusters‘ online and magazine subvertisement that rhetorically asked: “Are you ready for a Tahrir Moment?” and followed with the call: “On September 17, we want to see 20,000 people flood into lower Manhattan, set up tents, kitchens, peaceful barricades and occupy Wall Street for a few months.” The advertisement capitalized on the affective resonance produced in many who watched the revolutions in Egypt and harnessed this affect, daring its readers in the West to re-imagine what was possible.
In days Occupy Wall Street evolved from a modest group of campers in Zuccotti Park to a hub of activity were thousands came together.
Protest camps mirroring Occupy’s message, practices and material form spread to over 950 cities in 80 countries in less than one month. Since Occupy captured the global imagination in 2011, large protest camps have popped up as part of social movement activity in Istanbul, Turkey and political unrest in Kiev, Ukraine in 2013.

Occupy London – Tents in front of St Pauls, London Sunday 16th October 2011. Credit: Neil Cummings, CC BY-SA 2.0
While the geographical location, political claims and demographic composition of these two protest camps are very different, they share infrastructures of living and governance—the architectures and practices of meeting spaces, kitchens and shelter that animate life in a protest camp.
Tracing an international genealogy of how protest camps are made across time and place shows us that the ways social movements move is not always straightforward or predictable. The impact one camp will have on the world cannot be quantified or measured through resource counting or participant polls alone. Those looking for linearity in processes of protest, like those concerned with only large-scale structures, often misunderstand or misrecognize the everyday practices that make ‘protest camps’ as they appear and disappear across cities, countrysides and continents. Just as forms of decision-making travel and change, so too do styles of tents, media practices, and direct action strategies.
The things that make up protest camps are promiscuous. From cunning to accidental, there is often a chaotic performance that gives life to these camps.
As structures and ideas travel across time and place, they become adopted and adapted. They mix and move forward, opening up new questions and leading us in new directions. This history of protest camps is a history of how people not only imagine, but practically build alternative worlds together.

Harvard University Free Palestine Camp 2024. Credit: Dariusz Jemielniak (“Pundit”), CC BY 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons