DescriptionSpatial dynamics orient our day to day lives and reflect our identities. For most, our rights to personal space are organized legally by land ownership and leasing of properties, while our rights to public space are protected by our local, state and national governments. This is not the case in Slab City, an off-grid community living on the edge of the desert in Imperial Valley, California. Slab City is a community that varies seasonally between populations of about one hundred to several thousand, and for the last half century has existed on the site of a former military camp thanks to the benign neglect of the State of California. This research focuses on participant observation as a research methodology to understand the spatial creation of inhabitants’ claims of territory. It uses the concepts of “heterotopia”, as put forward by philosopher Michel Foucault, “neo-tribalism” as described by sociologist Michel Maffesoli, and “cosmopolitan canopy” by sociologist Elijah Anderson to place inhabitants’ claims in theoretical context. I conclude that these spatial claims, far from being ephemeral and flexible, become even more salient to conceptions of home, territory, and self in the absence of legally codified land rights, and that the mixed methodology of historiography and participant observation is useful in deciphering complex palimpsests of Landscape.