Ordinary citizens and activists have nevertheless fought back. They point out that, for poor working-class communities, the housing crisis has always been the norm. They find common cause in the words of Friedrich Engels, one of the more astute commentators on the ‘housing question’. He noted that ‘the so-called housing shortage … is not something peculiar to the present’. ‘All oppressed classes in all periods,’ he added, ‘suffered more or less uniformly from it.’20
While Engels was writing in 1872 with the shock cities of early industrialisation specifically in mind, the injustices of housing have only intensified over the past century or so, taking in cities in both the Global North and South. For the oppressed, the history of housing is a history of insecurity and inequality.21 But it is also a history of resistance and possibility; one in which squatters occupy an understudied if important place.
Squatting can be defined as ‘living in – or using otherwise – a dwelling without the consent of the owner. Squatters take buildings [or land] with the intention of relative (>1 year) long-term use.’22 For the anarchist and historian Colin Ward, the place of the squatter in the history of housing is far more significant than is usually realised. Not only is this a global history, as Ward is at pains to argue. It also encompasses, on the one hand, a range of customary beliefs, makeshift practices and coping mechanisms that have emerged in the absence of the most basic of necessities. On the other hand, it is equally responsible for the making of new social forms – often radical and militant – that point to a different understanding of the home as a site of cooperation, emancipation and self-organisation.23
According to the investigative journalist Robert Neuwirth, it is, in fact, squatters who give ‘some reality to Henri Lefebvre’s loose concept of the “right to the city”’. ‘They are excluded so they take,’ he writes, ‘but they are not seizing an abstract right, they are taking an actual place: a place to lay their heads. This act – to challenge society’s denial of place by taking one of your own – is an assertion of being in a world that routinely denies people the dignity and the validity inherent in a home.’24
Neuwirth is one of many writers who have drawn attention to the highly precarious forms of endurance and survival developed by the millions of squatters that continue to live in the cities and towns of the Global South.25 These are accounts that zoom in on the unjust structures of dispossession, exclusion and violence experienced by many squatters as well as their efforts to eke out a viable life in settings of pervasive marginality.
Set against this backdrop, the squatter movements that first emerged in cities in the Global North in the 1960s and 1970s were admittedly smaller in scale – numbering in the tens of thousands – though they played a decisive role in the development of new forms of grassroots urban politics. Outside of well-established activist communities, these are movements that have, until recently, received little recognition.26 It is their story – a shared history of political action, community organisation and collective living – that is the main subject of this book.
The book charts the everyday practices and political imaginations of squatters. It examines the composition of alternative collective spaces in cities across Europe and North America. To do so, it explores why thousands of people in cities such as London and Amsterdam, Berlin and New York, suddenly chose to occupy empty flats and other buildings. Were these actions, it asks, dictated by pure necessity or did they represent a new-found desire to imagine other ways of living together? Who were these squatters and in what way did they promote an alternative vision of the city?
To answer these questions, the book highlights how the actions of squatters, from the spaces they occupied to the terms they used, reimagined the city as a space of necessity and refuge, experimentation and resistance. It retraces the major wave of squatting that began in Europe and North America in the late 1960s, and is the first comprehensive attempt to reconstruct this history as the expression of an autonomous understanding of shared city life. It does so in three ways.
First, it connects the practices adopted by squatters to a search for autonomy in housing and the built form, and a desire to assemble, organise and sustain their own spaces. As the architect and urbanist John Turner famously argued, housing ‘must be autonomous’.27 The immediate context for Turner’s argument was his own practical experience in the 1960s working in the rapidly expanding self-built and self-governing barridas of Peru. For Turner, the most important thing about housing, according to his friend Colin Ward, ‘is not what it is but what it does in people’s lives’.28 According to Turner, ‘when dwellers control the major decisions and are free to make their own contribution to the design, construction or management of their housing, both the process and the environment produced stimulate individual and social well-being’.29
If the work of Turner has been instrumental in rethinking how people learn to house themselves, especially in certain parts of the Global South, the recent history of squatting in Europe and North America may equally be seen as a series of attempts to extend the concept of housing ‘autonomy’. For a number of commentators, the veritable explosion of squatting that began in the late 1960s spoke to the emergence of an ‘autonomous urban movement’ that positioned itself in opposition to the state and as an alternative to capitalism.30
The term ‘autonomy’ is derived, after all, from the Greek auto-nomos, which refers to those who ‘live by their own rules’.31 As an autonomous movement, squatting was a political practice, a way of living and a youth subculture. It drew on a range of radical social movements including the Italian Autonomia of the 1970s and the explosive cycle of youth protests that emerged across Northern Europe in the 1980s.32 In North America, these impulses were more muted, though a strong anarcho-libertarian ethos was certainly present. Taken together, these were movements that shared a radical geographical sensibility that operated at a critical distance from the state. Autonomy was linked, in particular, to the occupation and self-management of urban space. At stake here, was the development of practices that creatively reclaimed the city, often in the face of a specific threat (gentrification, homelessness, police repression, the preservation of public space, urban renewal, etc.).
Finally, as one historian has recently argued, the militancy that often characterised the relationship between urban squatting and ‘autonomous’ politics in the Global North was itself dependent on a mass of young people who found themselves ‘marginal to mainstream society’.33 Autonomy represented far more, however, than an expression of disaffection or obstinacy, freedom or rebellion. It offered an opportunity to become a squatter, to explore new identities and different intimacies, to experience and share feelings and to organise and live collectively. The squat may have been a place that challenged housing precarity, rampant property speculation and the negative effects of urban redevelopment and regeneration. But it was also a place where one could (quite literally) build an alternative world. The composition of squatted spaces varied, and spoke to a diversity of positions within a wide range of anti-authoritarian ideas and politics.
As a housing practice, a social movement of sorts and a set of identities, squatting produced complex networks of activism and solidarity that were shared between squats and ultimately stretched across a number of cities. The replication and repetition of ideas and practices, idioms and forms was, in this way, instrumental in the development of squatting in Europe and North America. And yet, at the same time, squatting remained a heterogeneous phenomenon, specific to the local urban context in which it was formed and developed.34
The history of squatting developed in these pages cannot therefore be reduced to one neat, seamless story. Rather, the book retraces a series of interlocking episodes that, taken together, highlight the importance of squatting as a radical solution to homelessness and uneven urban development. The book reconstructs the history of squatting movements in London, Berlin, Amsterdam, New York and elsewhere from a period of Fordist decline
