Introduction: The Politics of Squatting, Time Frames and Socio-Spatial Contexts (original) (raw)
Related papers
Squatting in Europe: Radical Spaces, Urban Struggles
2012
""Squatting in Europe aims to move beyond the conventional understandings of squatting, investigating its history in Europe over the past four decades. Historical comparisons and analysis blend together in these inquiries into squatting in the Netherlands, Italy, Spain, France, Germany and England. In it members of SqEK (Squatting Europe Kollective) explore the diverse, radical, and often controversial nature of squatting as a form of militant research and self-managed knowledge production. Contents: Hans Pruijt: Squatting in Europe Pierpaolo Mudu: Resisting and challenging Neoliberalism: the development of Italian Social Centres Gianni Piazza: How activists make decisions within Social Centres? A comparative study in an Italian city Miguel A. Martínez: The Squatters’ Movement in Spain: A Local and Global Cycle of Urban Protests Claudio Cattaneo: Urban squatting, rural squatting and the ecological-economic perspective Andre Holm, Armin Kuhn: Squatting and Urban Renewal: The Interaction of Squatter Movements and Strategies of Urban Restructuring in Berlin Linus Owens: Have squat, will travel: How squatter mobility mobilizes squatting Florence Boullon: What’s a ‘good’ squatter? Categorization’s processes of squats by government officials in France Thomas Aguilera: Configurations of Squats in Paris and the Ile-de-France Region: diversity of goals and resources E.T.C. Dee: Moving towards criminalisation and then what? Examining dominant discourses on squatting in England ""
How and why do squatting movements rise, fall, and rise again all over the Europe? The Urban Politics of Squatters' Movements is the systematic attempt to answer these crucial questions, providing rich insight into squatting practices within a geographically broad and historically deep perspective. The authors of this collection, all involved in the Squatting Europe Kollective network (SqEK), explore nine European cities that have been sites of enduring squatting movements from 1960 until today, shedding light on cycles of protests, waves of mobilizations , and processes of institutionalization. Big metropolitan areas scattered in all Europe (Rome, Berlin, Paris, Madrid, Barcelona, and Copenhagen) are analyzed along with smaller urban areas (Seville, Rotterdam, and Brighton); this allows authors to retrace common features between northern and southern towns as well as between cities with different size. With variegated empirical materials and comparative perspective that seeks to gather different cases together, the volume edited by Martínez is a challenging, stimulating contribution to the field of urban and social movements studies. In all the cases squatting implies the use of a building (for living or for performing activities) without the consent of the owner (Pruijt, 2013) but it occurs through different rhythms, forms of expressions, goals, and performances. The book accounts for all these specificities without renouncing to inscribe them into
Squatting in Europe Kollective (Ed.): Squatting in Europe: Radical Spaces, Urban Struggles
2013
"Squatting offers a radical but simple solution to the crises of housing, homelessness, and the lack of social space that mark contemporary society: occupying empty buildings and rebuilding lives and communities in the process. Squatting has a long and complex history, interwoven with the changing and contested nature of urban politics over the last forty years. Squatting can be an individual strategy for shelter or a collective experiment in communal living. Squatted and self-managed social centres have contributed to the renewal of urban struggles across Europe and intersect with larger political projects. However, not all squatters share the same goals, resources, backgrounds or desire for visibility. Squatting in Europe aims to move beyond the conventional understandings of squatting, investigating its history in Europe over the past four decades. Historical comparisons and analysis blend together in these inquiries into squatting in the Netherlands, Italy, Spain, France, Germany and England. In it members of SqEK (Squatting Europe Kollective) explore the diverse, radical, and often controversial nature of squatting as a form of militant research and self-managed knowledge production. Essays by Miguel Martínez, Gianni Piazza, Hans Pruijt, Pierpaolo Mudu, Claudio Cattaneo, Andre Holm, Armin Kuhn, Linus Owens, Florence Bouillon, Thomas Aguilera, and ETC Dee."
Squatting Cycles in Barcelona: Identities, Repression and the Controversy of Institutionalisation
M.A. Martínez López (ed.), The Urban Politics of Squatters’ Movements, 2018
Squatting in the metropolitan area of Barcelona is analysed here by distinguishing protest cycles and larger sociopolitical contexts. We identifythe different social movements related to squatted social centres (SSCs) and, in the most recent time period, housing struggles. Why have SSCs hardly been institutionalised? How have squatting practices evolved throughout the years? We argue that specific political opportunity structures (POS) help explain the different tactics and orientations adopted by the squatters in four consecutive stages covering the period 1977–2013. In particular, legislative changes led to the first change, new forms of global mobilisations influenced the transition from the second cycle to the third, and the emergence of social movements at the national level was the most relevant context at the two final stages. Throughout the entire trajectory of the squatters’ movement, severe state repression narrowed their political opportunities. POS can be described according to six dimensions on which political opportunities may vary. These include (a) the degree of openness of the institutional political system to social movements, (b) the stability of political elites’ alignment, (c) alliances between movements and elites, (d) propensities towards repression of movements, (e) the wider protest cycles at play, and (f) policies responding to movements’ demands (Brockett 1991; Diani 1998; Kitschelt 1996; McAdam 1998; Tejerina 1998). These structures of the political environment can either encourage or discourage collective action. We interpret how the squatters’ movement interacted with the POS by identifying the factors that influence squatters’ strategies while focusing on the continuity of practices, which are related to the dimensions of the POS but not determined by them (Flesher Fominaya 2014; Munck 1997). If structural factors affect activists’ choices, we should also consider the content of these choices and the decision-making processes (Piazza and Genovese 2016, p. 292). Thus, we argue that movements evolve through continuous experimentation and reflexive refinement of political ambitions and organisational forms (Haiven and Khasnabish 2014, p. 15). Although the chapter shows that heterogeneity is characteristic of squatting, we argue that this complexity can be tentatively simplified into three components. The okupa movement refers to the opening, self-management and defence of SSCs. The housing movement, mainly represented by the Plataforma de Afectados por la Hipoteca (PAH, Platform for People Affected by Mortgages), occupies buildings with different purposes and tactics than the okupa movement. A third strand bridges territorialised struggles and more moderate social movements who use squatting to obtain access to space from institutions in order to create legal social centres. In the following sections we also discuss the configuration of these identities along the five cycles of mobilisation.
SQUATTERS IN THE CAPITALIST CITY Housing, Justice, and Urban Politics
2020
To date, there has been no comprehensive analysis of the disperse research on the squatters’ movement in Europe. In Squatters in the Capitalist City, Miguel A. Martínez López presents a critical review of the current research on squatting and of the historical development of the movements in European cities according to their major social, political and spatial dimensions. Comparing cities, contexts, and the achievements of the squatters’ movements, this book presents the view that squatting is not simply a set of isolated, illegal and marginal practices, but is a long-lasting urban and transnational movement with significant and broad implications. While intersecting with different housing struggles, squatters face various aspects of urban politics and enhance the content of the movements claiming for a ‘right to the city.’ Squatters in the Capitalist City seeks to understand both the socio-spatial and political conditions favourable to the emergence and development of squatting, and the nature of the interactions between squatters, authorities and property owners by discussing the trajectory, features and limitations of squatting as a potential radicalisation of urban democracy.
Culure Unbound, 2019
Mainstream mass media and politicians tend to portray squatters as civic evils. Breaking in and trespassing on private property is clumsily equated with the occupation of empty premises. Squatting is often represented as a serious criminal offence even before any legal verdict has been determined. The social diversity of squatters and the circumstances around this practice are usually omitted. Dominant narratives in Western European cities were effective in terms of criminalisa-tion of squatting and the social groups that occupied vacant properties-homeless people in need of a shelter, those who cannot afford to buy or rent convenient venues for performing social activities, activists who squat as a means of protest against real estate speculation, etc. This article reviews the available evidence of those narratives and disentangles the main categories at play. I first examine ho-mogenisation stereotypes of squatters as a whole. Next, I distinguish the divides created by the conventional polarisation between 'good' and 'bad' squatters. It is argued that both dynamics foster the stigma of squatting and facilitate its repression , although these discursive struggles engage squatters as well. As a consequence , I discuss the implications of 'reversive' and 'subversive' narratives performed by squatters to legitimise their practices and movements. In particular, the anti-capitalist features of these counter-hegemonic responses are identified and elaborated, which adds to the topic's literature.
European squatters’ movements and the right to the city.
Cristina Flesher and Ramón A. Feenstra (Eds.) Routledge Handbook of Contemporary European Social Movements Protest in Turbulent Times. Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 155-167., 2020
Squatters’ movement evolved unevenly across European cities over the last four decades, although there are recent attempts to understand their patterns and commonalities as well as their relations with other social movements. A very much discussed topic within these studies is the autonomous political identity of many of the squatters’ movements, but less attention has been paid to frame their demands, practices and achievements according to Lefebvre’s notion of ‘the right to the city’. I argue that there are both strengths and weaknesses in that association. On the one hand, squatters’ claims countered the exclusion of many social groups from the urban core and provided them with non-commercial and self-managed services, dwellings, social encounters, and opportunities for political mobilisation. This centrally engages with Lefebvre’s main concerns on struggles to inhabit, appropriate, and recreate the city. However, the occupation of buildings was ignored in Lefebvre’s agenda. Additionally, squatters have seldom adhered to urban coalitions united under the umbrella of ‘the right to the city’. Instead, most squatters aimed at challenging either the capitalist state broadly or specific speculative dynamics.
SHIFTING SOCIO-SPATIAL CONTEXTS AND THE SPACE OF SOCIAL MOVEMENTS: THE CASE OF SQUATTING IN SEVILLE
. En Miguel A Martínez López (Ed.) The Urban Politics of Squatters´ Movements. New York, Palgrave-Macmillam, 2018, pp. 75-98.
Research on the squatters' movement has focused preferentially on agency, forms of organisation and the legal implications, while its historical dimension and the spatial contexts have been not examined sufficiently. This paper aims at solving this deficit by conceiving the urban space as mediation between squatters' practices and broader economic, political and social processes. Thus, we argue that the development of urban squatting depends on specific socio-spatial conditions in each city or metropolitan region. The empirical support for this thesis consists of the examination of all the cases of squatting in the city of Seville (Spain) from the 1970s onwards. The analysis of the database is combined with the contextual dimensions that help understanding the evolution of this particular urban movement. In the concluding section we explain how shifting socio-spatial structures in the city of Seville have influenced the effective location of squats and the urban strategies adopted by squatters.
Shifting Socio-Spatial Contexts and the Space of Social Movements : Squatting in Seville
2018
Research on the squatters’ movement has focused preferentially on agency, forms of organisation and the legal implications, while its historical dimension and the spatial contexts have not been examined sufficiently. This chapter aims at solving this deficit by conceiving the urban space as mediation between squatters’ practices and broader economic, political and social processes. Hence, the development of urban squatting depends on specific socio-spatial conditions in each city or metropolitan region. The authors of this chapter analyse all the cases of squatting in the city of Seville (Spain) from the 1970s onwards and interpret their contextual circumstances. In particular, they explain how shifting socio-spatial structures in the city of Seville influenced the effective location of squats and the urban strategies adopted by squatters.