In an era of extreme housing precariousness, a new book looks at the history of a radical alternative.
Desperate times may call for what seem to be desperate measures. Squatting, for one, seems to be a radical act, even an anarchist’s play—but as Alex Vasudevan, a scholar of human geography at the University of Oxford, deftly shows in a new book, the occupation of wasted and abandoned space may have philosophical and practical lessons to teach gentrifying cities struggling to keep roofs over heads. In The Autonomous City: A History of Urban Squatting (Verso Books, on sale April 4), Vasudevan traces more than a century’s worth of struggles, successes, and failures in alternative housing, in Amsterdam, Berlin, New York City, Milan, Vancouver, and beyond. He talked with CityLab about why self-determined space matters now.
In the case of squatters, the very act of occupying points less to a need to generate profit than a desire to use space in more equitable and socially just ways. The very idea of “waste” is a source of experimentation and endurance, survival and subversion. A very basic, if potent, act of reclamation is, after all, at the heart of what they do, whether it is repurposing found materials or skipping food.
It strikes me that squatters are often able to reanimate wasted urban spaces and shape them in ways that point to a rather different understanding of what cities are and how we might live in them. I think we can still learn a lot in this respect and in terms of how we house ourselves.
In the book, you identify three themes that tie together your stories and examples: squatting as housing practice, squatting as social movement, squatting as form of identity. Can you talk about these paradigms and how they intersect?
I was trying to find a way of gathering together different singular histories of places, and these were the things that seem to cut across place. I had to talk about producing autonomy through the idea of dwelling and housing.
One point of reference was John Turner’s work in Latin America in the 1970s, around autonomous housing projects in Peru, and the trafficking of those ideas back to other places in Europe and North America. What was circulating, in that era especially, was a commitment to self-built and self-governing housing.
Emerging out of this, I found people who talked about these practices shared a set of contentions, often connected to social movements positioned in opposition to the state, and to capitalism, that ebbed and flowed over time. And then there are multiple different identities that form around this concept of autonomy, the ways that people see and practice squatting as a way of moving beyond predeterminations that shape their lives. The spaces that they produced provided a platform for personal exploration.
What do squatted spaces look and feel like?
It’s a wide range that really comes down to the legal or illegal, formal or informal divide. In some places, a state of disrepair was the norm. Electricity or water weren’t always working. Other squatters learn on the hoof to remake the spaces they live in, and some have really creative strategies: There’s one image in the book where they’re using old milk cartons to make insulation in a squat in the Lower East Side.
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