Maestri, G. (2018) “The struggles of ‘migrant-squatters’: disrupting categories, eluding theories”, City: analysis of urban trends, culture, theory, policy, action, 22(1), pp.169-173 (original) (raw)
Related papers
Migrations, Squatting and Radical Autonomy - Introduction
The UK experienced a different pattern: for years, squatting was mainly linked to housing unavailability, but in the last century Social Centers were established (Common Place 2008). We aim to further more detailed discussions based on the analyses of European and North American studies, following the peculiar nature of repressive policies and mechanisms that prevent and control migrations from the most impoverished regions of the world. Secondly, although the book is focused on migrants and squatters, we must be aware of the fact that we are dealing with two heterogeneous groups, convenient for some general discourses but too vague when addressing, in particular, the trends that combine migration and squatting; therefore we explore their meanings in detail in many chapters.
Citizenship Studies, 2019
This special issue focuses on migrants’ self-organised strategies in relation to housing in Europe, namely the collective squatting of vacant buildings and land. In particular, the contributions to this special issue differentiate between shelter provided in state-run or humanitarian camps and squatted homes. Migrants squats are an essential part of the ‘corridors of solidarity’ that are being created throughout Europe, where grassroots social movements engaged in anti-racist, anarchist and anti-authoritarian politics coalesce with migrants in devising non-institutional responses to the violence of border regimes. In these spaces contentious politics and everyday social reproduction uproot racist and xenophobic regimes. The struggles emerging in these spaces disrupt host-guest relations, which often perpetuate state-imposed hierarchies and humanitarian disciplining technologies. Moreover, the solidarities and collaborations between undocumented and documented activists challenge hitherto prevailing notions of citizenship and social movements, as well as current articulations of the common. These radical spaces enable possibilities for inhabitance beyond, against and within citizenship, which do not only reverse forms of exclusion and repression, but produce ungovernable resources, alliances and subjectivities that prefigure more livable spaces for all. Therefore, these struggles are interpreted here as forms of commoning, as they constitute autonomous socio-political infrastructures and networks of solidarity beyond and against the state and humanitarian provision.
Introduction: citizenship as inhabitance? Migrant housing squats versus institutional accommodation
Citizenship Studies, 2019
This special issue focuses on migrants’ self-organised strategies in relation to housing in Europe, namely the collective squatting of vacant buildings and land. In particular, the contributions to this special issue differentiate between shelter provided in state-run or humanitarian camps and squatted homes. Migrants squats are an essential part of the ‘corridors of solidarity’ that are being created throughout Europe, where grassroots social movements engaged in anti-racist, anarchist and anti-authoritarian politics coalesce with migrants in devising non-institutional responses to the violence of border regimes. In these spaces contentious politics and everyday social reproduction uproot racist and xenophobic regimes. The struggles emerging in these spaces disrupt host-guest relations, which often perpetuate state-imposed hierarchies and humanitarian disciplining technologies. Moreover, the solidarities and collaborations between undocumented and documented activists challenge hitherto prevailing notions of citizenship and social movements, as well as current articulations of the common. These radical spaces enable possibilities for inhabitance beyond, against and within citizenship, which do not only reverse forms of exclusion and repression, but produce ungovernable resources, alliances and subjectivities that prefigure more livable spaces for all. Therefore, these struggles are interpreted here as forms of commoning, as they constitute autonomous socio-political infrastructures and networks of solidarity beyond and against the state and humanitarian provision.
Citizenship Studies, 2019
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13621025.2019.1634377 - This paper discusses the struggles of the We Are Here movement in Amsterdam as resistance to both securitarian and humanitarian border regimes. It explores the tensions between everyday forms of commoning emerging in migrants’ squats and technologies of enclosure and capture. In the first place, the paper contends that the creation of housing squats marked an important shift in migrants’ struggles that went from acts of protest to the performance of resistance at the level of the micropolitics of borders. By squatting buildings and creating common living spaces, current struggles mobilize material, affective and political solidarities and constitute a politics of inhabitance beyond and against dependency on the state and humanitarian practices. The second part of the paper discusses the government’s attempts to repress, govern and enclose the We Are Here movement within confined fields of action. With negotiations and humanitarian concessions through the provision of emergency shelters, local authorities attempted to re-direct the movement into politics of rights and recognitions. However, these tactics did not succeed to contain the struggle in its entirety: many migrants rejected humanitarian solutions, continued to create radical home spaces through squatting, enacting a politics of inhabitance beyond citizenship.
As citizenship regulations have tightened across the world, protest and activist movements have also emerged to challenge the violence of border and migration control. Positioned at the intersection of citizenship studies and critical geography, this special issue explores how space is conceived, mobilised, used and, in turn, shaped by these political struggles. The authors argue that citizenship is inextricably and irreducibly spatial, and therefore entangled with the material and discursive dimensions of geographical places and scales. Drawing on a rich set of examples, the contributions of this issue trace how space is actively and strategically used within multiple processes of political subjectivation. Focusing on critical sites through which exclusionary logics materialise -such as camps, borders and the urban space, the papers investigate how marginal(ised) political subjects claim their rights in and through space in different and often ambiguous ways, including contestation and solidarity.
Migrants’ inhabiting through commoning and state enclosures. A postface
Citizenship Studies, 2019
In this paper, I deploy the framework of commons as social systems which I have developed in my last book Omnia Sunt Communia to interpret the debate developed in this issue, enquire on the relationship between commons and citizenship, and ground the question of migrants' inhabiting on the theory of commoning.