by Mark Cahill
A few years ago while in grad school I was working on a design project for an "alternative hotel." The problem: It's super cheap to travel, but too expensive to stay the night. At the same time I was planning a trip out to the west coast for a few days of site seeing and backpacking. Looking for that perfect hostel, I began to think about what exactly to bring. I definitely wasn't going to miss the opportunity to spend some time in San Francisco, but was also not going to miss Yosemite. I pictured myself walking through the streets of the city with my pack on and my tin cup clanking as I hopped the street car tracks; climbing those infamous hills; roaming about the wilderness of Haight Ashbury.And it dawned on me: I was carrying shelter in the form of my tent anyway so why shouldn't I be able to just pitch it somewhere in the city? Why couldn't this be part of how we travel and how we stay in urban areas. So I used this idea on my hotel design. I had already decided to design the roof as a green roof, so it was easy to designate the area as a "campsite." And so there it was: Urban Camping.As it turns out, this has been done before, and is being done now to some extent. In San Diego in 1914, a Hotel placed a "Tent City" on top of their roof to make use of that wasted space. That was nearly a century ago, and it seems that again the idea is gaining some more steam. An Architecture firm called import export have created a mobile multi-level tower (pictured above) that allows for tents to be pitched in urban settings. Another young designer named J. Enrique Enriquez entered this idea into a design competition and it fetched him an honorable mention.Would you camp in a city?