Design
The Town That Doesn’t Exist
Slab City, buried deep in the California desert, is a land of squatters, artists, and migrants—and few rules. In a new book, an architect and a photographer document “the last free place.”
Deep in the heart of California’s Colorado Desert, a few hundred nomads have carved out a quiet life amid the sand. They’re uncountable by any real census, because their population changes every season. They’re unattached—living there because they’re escaping from something, or in search of something else. What they’ve all found is a place called Slab City.
The informal camp settlement sits 200 miles from Los Angeles, 150 from San Diego, and 50 north of the U.S.-Mexico border; on a swath of land first designated as public under the Section 36 land ordinance, which preserved “free public space for common schools.” By the mid-1900s, most other states had sold off their Section 36 land, but by chance, California’s 640-acre plot remained.