Public goods versus economic interests global perspectives on the history of squatting

So far neglected by historical inquiry, squatters have played an important role in the history of urban development and social movements, not least by contributing to change in concepts

Squatting is currently a global phenomenon A concomitant of economic development and social conflict, squatting attracts public attention because—implicitly or explicitly—it questions property relations from the perspective

of the basic human need for shelter So far neglected by historical inquiry, squatters have played an important role in the history of urban development and social movements, not least by contributing to change in concepts of property and the distribution and utilisation of urban space An interdisci-plinary circle of authors demonstrates how squatters have articulated their demands for participation in the housing market and public space in a whole range of contexts and how this has brought them into conflict and/or coop-eration with the authorities The volume examines housing struggles and the occupation of buildings in the Global “North,” but it is equally concerned with land acquisition and informal settlements in the Global “South.” In the context of the former, squatting tends to be conceived as social practice and collective protest, whereas self-help strategies of the marginalised are more commonly associated with the southern hemisphere This volume’s historical perspective, however, helps to overcome the north–south dualism

in research on squatting

Freia Anders is student counsellor and lecturer, History Department,

Johannes-Gutenberg University Mainz

Alexander Sedlmaier is reader in Modern History at Bangor University.Public Goods versus Economic

Interests

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20 Public Goods versus Economic Interests

Global Perspectives on the History of Squatting

Edited by Freia Anders and Alexander Sedlmaier

Public Goods versus Economic Interests

Global Perspectives on the History of Squatting

Edited by Freia Anders

and Alexander Sedlmaier

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1 Introduction: Global Perspectives on Squatting 1

FREIA ANDERS AND ALEXANDER SEDLMAIER

PART I

Crossing Hemispheres: Beyond Historiographical Divides 27

2 Squatting, North, South and Turnabout: A Dialogue

THOMAS AGUILERA AND ALAN SMART

3 Squatting in the US: What Historians Can Learn from

Emerging Economies: Between Both Worlds 97

ELLINOR MORACK

6 Beyond Insurgency and Dystopia: The Role of Informality

in Brazil’s Twentieth-Century Urban Formation 122

BRODWYN FISCHER

7 “Right to the City”: Squatting, Squatters and Urban

INBAL OFER

vi Contents

8 Unlicensed Housing as Resistance to Elite Projects:

ERIK MOBRAND

9 Living on the Edge: The Ambiguities of Squatting and

IOANA FLOREA AND MIHAIL DUMITRIU

10 Informal Settlements in Bangkok: Origins, Features,

YAP KIOE SHENG WITH KITTIMA LEERUTTANAWISUT

PART III

Highly Industrialised Countries: Insecure Tenure

under Conditions of Affluence 235

11 “The Most Fun I’ve Ever Had”?: Squatting in England in

13 Squatting and Gentrification in East Germany since 1989 278

ANDREJ HOLM AND ARMIN KUHN

Contributors 305 Index 311

1 Introduction

Global Perspectives on

Squatting

Freia Anders and Alexander Sedlmaier

In June 2013, Japanese artist Tadashi Kawamata built eighteen crudely constructed huts in the style of a favela as part of an installation commis-sioned by Art Basel, one of the most important contemporary art fairs in the world The public sculpture functioned as a café and, upon completion

of the fair, was supposed to become the property of the city of Basel to continue as a catering area However, it soon attracted controversy and was eventually cleared by Swiss police The artist stated that his main interest was design and structure: “I am not concerned with poor people’s way of life, but with material, size, arrangement.”1 Already during the opening, images of decadent art lovers enjoying champagne in a fake favela in one

of the richest countries of the world drew critical comments Within a few hours, posters showing starving ‘Third World’ children were pinned to the

huts Activists of the group Basel wird besetzt (Basel is being occupied),

which is part of the “right to the city” movement, demanded “Respect las”, added a few somewhat less artistic shanty shacks to the ensemble and called for an evening protest street party on the site of the fair.2 Initially, the fair organizers tolerated these activities but threatened anyone with criminal charges who failed to clear the area by 8 pm The event ended in a bloody confrontation between protesters and police who used tear gas, pepper spray and rubber bullets.3 A lucid comment compared the event with “real squatting”: “It’s built on public land, gets inhabited by people who don’t have legal permission to be there, who are tolerated or ignored for a while, and who then get attacked and dispersed by riot police when someone with power decides it’s time for them to go.”4

fave-The events in Basel highlight the wavering boundary between art and reality They raise questions as to what constitutes art and what it is allowed

to do; the same goes for political dispute Moreover, they show the variety

of needs, interests and political claims that are usually articulated and mulated in unauthorized occupations of space The Swiss protest activists were not only declaring their solidarity with the poor of the world, but they were also demanding their share of public space, both for political activ-ity and for a festive culture that is not wholly dominated by commercial considerations The conflict dynamics that emerged from this provocative

accu-2 Freia Anders and Alexander Sedlmaier

appropriation of a provocative art event contains a number of elements that can also be recognized in many other conflicts over squatting on land and in buildings This pertains to the legally controversial occupation, by persons who are not formally authorized to do so, of land or buildings that are either in the public domain or can at least be seen to serve the com-mon good in one way or another Such acts of temporary appropriation—at most ignored or tolerated—usually trigger a negotiation process, which at least implicitly, questions existing property and power relations and often culminates in the threat or application of state violence concerning eviction, clearance or demolition

A concomitant of economic development and social conflict, squatting has attracted public attention because—implicitly or explicitly—it ques-tions property relations from the perspective of the basic human need for shelter Usually, it involves competing and contested claims and notions of legitimacy and entitlement Issues of political economy lay at the heart of frequently occurring conflicts between squatters—often part of larger social movements—and the landowners, municipal authorities, police and judici-ary forces they were facing Sustained squatting has provoked far-reaching decisions by political and legal institutions concerning social and economic interests Squatting can therefore not be reduced to a mere problem of legal-ity but has always been part of debates over the legitimacy of certain ways of appropriating space and of political expression, far beyond local contexts.Squatting can thus have elements of resistance involved, but many who lived on land without full title or in buildings they did not own or rent were

in the first place interested in the material reality of accommodation and sought to be included in a ‘mainstream’ housing market they were unable

to access with conventional means rather than challenging it in principle Different research traditions have placed diverging emphasis on the impor-tance of resistance for the phenomenon of squatting, a topic that needs fur-ther comparative discussion Squatting is used for many purposes, and the conditions for identifying it as ‘resistance’ or ‘protest’ need to be carefully spelled out

Squatting has been a form of human habitation since the earliest systems

of land tenure Wherever land or buildings could be owned, there was the possibility of occupying and using these—if they were unoccupied, unused, unsupervised or abandoned—without permission or title At present, land and living space are more than ever subject to capital development This holds true for the metropolises of the Global North just as for the informal settlements of the Global South Especially in densely populated urban cen-tres, land or buildings that are completely unoccupied, unused, unsupervised

or abandoned have become increasingly rare Modern-day squatting is ally the act of taking a position in a complex web of property relations by making a corporeal claim to the residential use of a piece of land or building which, at least potentially, has multiple claimants including those that base their claim on ownership For most squatters, the decisive characteristic of

his-countries A high-profile 2003 UN report titled The Challenge of Slums

put the total population of slum dwellers in the developing world at about

900 million people, 43 per cent of the urban population in these countries.6

According to these data, around 20 per cent of all households in the world were squatters in 2003 Two-thirds of these lived in insecure tenure The remaining third enjoyed relative tenure security because of their ascent on the “formal–informal housing continuum” where, short of being granted formal title, they enjoyed relative persistence, protection, acceptance or even semiformal recognition of their settlement In contrast to these considerable figures, squatting in Western Europe and other highly industrialised coun-tries is clearly a minority phenomenon: 2 per cent of all households accord-ing to the UN habitat report.7

The literature differentiates between “squatter slums” that have emerged from land invasion and “informal slums” where dwellers have the explicit

or tacit consent of the owner of the land but this owner is legally in no tion to extend this permission because the settlements do not meet building regulations, for example, when shanties are built on agricultural land with-out building permission.8 The collective term for both types is “informal settlements”.9 This means that the term ‘squatter’ has two meanings: in the narrower sense it means only those dwellers who lack permission from both owner and authorities, while the broader sense includes those who have the permission of the owner, many of whom are informally paying rent.10

posi-The total number of squatters in the narrower sense is tending to decrease

in the course of economic development, while unauthorized settlements are

on the increase.11 Both types have in common that squatting occurs when people have no claim to the land or building where they have erected their habitation that can be upheld in law.12 We have not prescribed any strict definitions to the authors of this volume but have respected their termino-logical preferences when, for example, they wanted to avoid the pejorative connotations often attached to ‘illegal squatters’ (which we do not share) and also because it makes sense to regard squatting as a part of the formal–informal housing continuum that should not be seen in isolation Squatting, however, has played a role in virtually all informal settlements, especially in their historical dimension

4 Freia Anders and Alexander Sedlmaier

The bestseller Planet of Slums by urban theorist Mike Davis draws on the

2003 UN report when painting a picture of a massive threat to the future of humankind emanating from a billion slum dwellers excluded from the for-mal economy The “gigantic concentration of poverty” in the “megaslums”

of the Global South appears as a culmination of the crisis of capitalism, when a historically unprecedented global proletariat is inexorably pushed to the periphery, not only of the cities but of the world economy.13 Davis sees the origins of the recent urban impoverishment in the immense rural exodus triggered by the debt crisis of the late 1970s and 1980s, when the World Bank and International Monetary Fund forced their repayment conditions and austerity programmes on the indebted countries of the southern hemi-sphere and thus prevented state investments into the public services sector, healthcare, education systems and structural support for rural regions.14 In this worldview, the accelerated deregulation and privatisation of the 1990s contributed to a situation that is increasingly producing ethnic, religious and racist violence

The opposite position also hinges on poverty and violence Peruvian omist Hernando de Soto prescribes the legalization of the informal assets

econ-of the poor, many econ-of whom are squatters, as a cure for poverty.15 Seeking

to pre-empt left-wing revolutionary ideas, he points out that movements like the Shining Path, Mao Zedong’s Communist Party of China and Ho Chi Minh’s Viet Minh gained acceptance from “organizing squatting and property titling in shantytowns [ .], protecting the possessions of the poor, which are typically outside the law.”16 A classic example of a state-driven pre-emption of illegal squatting—cited by de Soto—is the “Homestead” principle in the US that was formalized with the adoption of the Homestead Act of 1862.17 De Soto’s vision of the slum dweller, equipped with formal title and thus turned into a small entrepreneur as an important agent of growth, is criticised by Davis: “Praising the praxis of the poor became a smoke screen for reneging upon historic state commitments to relieve pov-erty and homelessness by demonstrating the ability, courage, and capacity for self-help.”18

Richard Harris points out that the debates that have emerged between researchers on informal settlements and policymakers have been

polarized between those who emphasized free market efficiency and those who advocated the achievement of social justice through socialist style redistribution Because it rejected state solutions but appeared to fall outside the market, squatting, combined with self-help construction, was variously condemned, romanticized as an expression of grassroots agency, and eventually recognized as necessary [ .] Markets now rule in the pages of academic and policy journals, just as they do in the cities.19

Ananya Roy goes a step further when she diagnoses an “aesthetic ing of the informal sector” in transnational policymaking and academic

fram-Introduction 5

research, “where a First World gaze sees in Third World poverty hope, entrepreneurship, and genius” that has a tendency of silencing “the voices and experiences of informal dwellers and workers.”20 With their transna-tional approach, the essays in Roy and AlSayyad’s collection on informal settlements in the developing world have helped to unsettle narrow percep-tions of slums and squats They show that informal housing is not exclu-sively a domain of the urban poor; contrary to Davis’s dystopian view of a largely isolated informal proletariat, the middle classes and even transna-tional elites are also involved in this informal economy

A rare and impressive view from within squatter communities is given

by Robert Neuwirth’s book Shadow cities: A Billion Squatters.21 Based on participant observation while living among squatters in Istanbul, Mumbai, Nairobi and Rio, it highlights not only the scope of the phenomenon but also its innovative nature Neuwirth sets out to refute the popular myths that squatter communities are “emblems of human misery” and that “eve-ryone in these communities is impoverished and starving.” Not entirely unlike de Soto, he emphasises “the need for organizing in the communi-ties to secure title, access to services and avoid evictions”, but for this he does not look to “global institutions” but to “successful initiatives from the squatters themselves.”22

Research on the rich countries of the Global North has only rarely related the topics of poverty and squatting to each other Little is known about

‘slums’ in the outskirts of European big cities, where Roma, migrants and other people marginalised by market economies are settling.23 This is despite the United Nations Economic Commission for the Europe region estimat-ing more than 50 million people to be living in informal settlements.24

Research that establishes a historical connection between failed housing or social policies and squatting25 is as rare as studies that look at squatting as

a result of war-induced destruction of living space.26 Up to the 1950s, local communist groups were often involved in the organization and support of squatters, despite the fact that their struggles were not located in the pro-duction process, the classical focus of Marxist agitation Due to the prevail-ing anti-communism as well as internal disagreements within organizations and movements, these connections have largely fallen into oblivion.27

Concerning legal issues, research is more advanced Social and political responses to squatting need to be seen in the context of competing claims over use and ownership of urban space; this dimension forms a core element

of urban history and is embedded in legal structures and their development Studies on the Global South, in particular, underline the relation between property law and ‘illegal’ settlements and pursue the implementation and impact of legalization laws, land titling and regularization programmes in developing countries.28 Another focus has been established on the property law consequences of economic system change, for example, in China.29

However, squatting does not only touch upon property law but tially on all areas of the law Drawing on contemporary developments in

poten-6 Freia Anders and Alexander Sedlmaier

Britain, Lorna Fox-O’Mahony and Neil Cobb have developed a matrix that makes it possible “to consider the legal construction of the squatter and the landowner through a range of legal lenses: crime, housing, limitation, property, and human rights.”30 This perspective, which transcends different disciplines of the law, emphasises the central role of legal discourses and of international judicial institutions, such as the European Court of Human Rights, for the social and political acceptance of squatting Research on developing countries has shown that social movements play an important role in the formation of different “degrees of legality”,31 according to which some forms of illegality are tolerated or transformed into legal status, while others are not At times, social movements’ “attempts to participate in decision-making and their identification of some principles of ‘popular jus-tice’ ” led to “a serious crisis of legality.”32

Ayona Datta, on the other hand, refers to the downsides of the ued “conflation of illegality with informality” Drawing on the notion of

contin-“lawfare”, pioneered by the anthropologists Jean Comaroff and John L Comaroff, that is “the increased judicialization of politics and the use of brute power in a wash of legitimacy, ethics, and propriety”, she points out that “for those living in squatter settlements, illegality is a legal, mate-rial, and cultural violence [ .] When their settlement is deemed illegal and hence slated for demolition, [ .] their practices of everyday life are threatened through the violent enforcement of law Negotiating this vio-lence requires a functional and rudimentary knowledge of constitutional rights [ .] for bargaining with the state.”33 Recent developments in West European countries, especially the criminalization of squatting in Great Britain and the Netherlands, show that the legal toleration of squatting is a precarious phenomenon In a contribution to a critical debate of European security policies, Mary Manjikian shows how the recent currency of urban security approaches has created new pressures in the governmental and judi-cial treatment of housing and squatting in different European countries.34

Squatting is a firmly established practice and tool in the action toire of social movements Manuel Castells conceptualizes an urban social movement as “collective conscious action aimed at the transformation of an instituionalized urban meaning against the logic, interest and values of the dominant class”, which influences structural social change and transforms urban meanings.35 His ideas from the 1980s, which resulted from work on Europe and the Americas, also in a historical perspective, have been taken

reper-up particularly with regard to Latin America.36

In Western Europe, an independent thread of social movement research has developed that interprets the West European squatting movements of the 1970s and 1980s as part of the so-called new social movements, dis-sociating these from traditional movements, especially the workers’ move-ment.37 However, squatting often remains at the periphery of such studies Recently published transnational approaches, often without pronounced theoretical ambition, tend to see squatting as an expression of the youth

Introduction 7

and/or autonomist movements that emerged simultaneously.38 Case studies are rare that take into consideration the context of economic crisis, which many cities experienced during this period In addressing contradictory interpretations, Jan-Henrik Friedrichs argues convincingly “that as a reac-tion to [ .] crisis a spatialization of the social took place that established urban space as a prime object of governmental policies.” He contends fur-ther “that the transformation of social problems into questions of spatial order was mirrored in a growing reference by non-conforming youth to space as a site of liberation.”39

According to Cesar Guzman-Concha, the squatting movements of ern Europe belong to the “radical social movements”, which

West-pursue an agenda of drastic changes that concerns a broad range of issues, especially the political and economic organization of society, whose implementation would affect elite interests and social positions

In order to implement their agenda, they [ .] perform a repertory of contention characterized by the employment of unconventional means, specifically civil disobedience In addition, these groups adopt [ .] counter-cultural identities that frame and justify unconventional objec-tives and methods, although this identity might not be present at early stages.40

In the currently crisis-ridden countries of southern Europe, squatting movements are being investigated as part of alter-globalization movements.41

The approach of the Squatting Europe Kollective, a network of researchers and activists, explicitly aims at fostering the development of squatter move-ments in Europe and North America They pursue the transformative poten-tial of radical squatting movements and the free spaces of alternative centres against the backdrop of the prevailing neo-liberal market logic.42 Bent on political potential, they tend to exclude those squatters whose “actions are almost exclusively intended to satisfy an immediate need in response to a desperate situation.”43

The strong focus on subcultures and aspects of movement politics responds to public perceptions of the squatter movements Peter Birke, on the other hand, calls attention to the origins of the housing conflicts in large Western European cities that did not only result from a desire for free spaces

cor-or alternative lifestyles but at the same time are an articulation of ance against the valorisation and economisation of the city that is inherent

“resist-in its transformation “resist-into a ‘bus“resist-iness location’ and ‘enterprise’.”44 ing on a comparison of three squatting movements in England (after 1945, during the 1970s and at the beginning of the twenty-first century), Kesia Reeve shows how the social sciences have played a part in overlaying mate-rial housing need “by an emphasis on creating cultural alternatives, [ .] identity politics and a positive acknowledgement that squatting, as a ten-ure,” did not follow “the dictates of the traditional channels of housing

Draw-8 Freia Anders and Alexander Sedlmaier

allocation and consumption and traditional power relations between sumer and provider.”45 On a higher level of analysis, squatting has to be seen in the context of discourses and practices of political economy In his analysis of the West German radical left from the double perspective of the history of consumption and the history of violence, Alexander Sedlmaier shows how squatting was essentially a conflict over the public commodity

con-of urban living space that responded to both political and market impulses Violence was interwoven in the conflict because the squatters, the state, the police and the houseowners, each with a degree of efficacy, used discourses and practices of violence to further their respective claims to urban space

in a fight over what Sedlmaier calls conflicting “regimes of provision”.46

Such “inversionary” legitimizations of violence in the context of conflicts over squatting in the early 1980s contributed decisively to the emergence of another social movement: the autonomists Confronted with the contradic-tion that emerging subcultural infrastructures ultimately contributed to the economic upgrading of the disputed quarters and thus to gentrification, they responded with the development of their concept of militancy.47 By con-necting the question of the legitimacy of squatting with the question of the legitimacy of militant resistance, they wanted to contribute to an unveiling

of state violence and of the structural violence embedded in the prevailing socio-economic system that manifested itself in the housing and redevelop-ment policies deemed to be unjust The militant reference to a right of rebel-lion under natural law and to both universally moral and constitutionally protected values became an important factor for the mobilization within the movement.48

In the present volume, an interdisciplinary circle of authors demonstrates how squatters have articulated their demands for participation in the hous-ing market and public space in a whole range of contexts and how this has brought them into conflict and/or cooperation with the authorities Con-tributions share a historical approach that analyses conflicts and dynamics between private economic interests and collective concepts of public goods based on the following questions: Which different forms of squatting can

be discerned in historical and comparative perspectives? Who were the squatters in terms of their social, cultural and political backgrounds? How did owners and authorities respond to the phenomenon, and how did their strategies of toleration, containment, transformation or repression change? How did different actors constitute and legitimize their claims to urban space? To what extent did socio-economic change, political developments, urban planning and social protest feed into the development of squatting? Can the emergence or persistence of squatting in a particular context be seen

as an indicator of social, economic, and/or political upheaval? In pursuit

of these questions, this collection explores and contextualises squatting in

a historical perspective To do so, it seeks to continue Roy and AlSayyad’s quest to unsettle the “hierarchy of development and underdevelopment by looking at some First World processes of informality through a Third World

Introduction 9

research lens.”49 However, we would like to suggest that a non-hegemonic scholarly perspective particularly on the history of squatting in emerging economies and highly developed countries might be beneficial for a more nuanced understanding of informal housing in the rest of the world as well.Chapters are separated into three broad categories: essays that explicitly cross the historiographical divide between the Global North and the Global South, approaches focused on emerging economies that show characteris-tics of both worlds, and finally contributions on housing struggles, occu-pied buildings and precarious tenure under conditions of affluence in highly industrialised countries Together, they work towards a clearer picture of the profound impact of squatting in the history of the modern world

Crossing Hemispheres: Beyond Historiographical Divides

This volume treats housing struggles and the occupation of buildings in the Global North as well as land acquisition and informal settlements

in the Global South In the context of the former, squatting is mostly concerned with the occupation of existing, often derelict, buildings and tends to be conceived as social practice and collective protest, whereas the untitled acquisitions of land to construct housing and self-help strate-gies of the more or less marginalised are more commonly associated with the southern hemisphere This volume’s historical perspective, however, helps to overcome the North–South dualism in research on squatting It draws attention to the processes of public negotiation that determined in both contexts to what extent squatters could or could not claim various degrees of legality and/or legitimacy To that end, the first group of chap-ters provides a conceptual and historical account of how squatters in both hemispheres have been perceived and researched, including the underlying assumptions of various research strands

Thomas Aguilera and Alan Smart in “Squatting, North, South and bout” show that informality plays an important role in both hemispheres and that people have started to recognize that it is not wrong as such They examine divergences between, and common features of, the ways people have squatted, how policymakers have governed them and how squatting has been linked to other areas of social movement activism, not only in the Global North, where this connection seems almost self-evident In terms

Turna-of differences, they address four main aspects: concerning scale, it is

obvi-ous that the often temporary and scattered squats of the North are much smaller and thus economically less important than the squatter settlements

of the South; the physical appearance and infrastructure of such “parallel

cities” means that their inhabitants are more likely to have de facto security

of tenure than their Northern counterparts, whose dwellings and position are mostly ephemeral and fragile; the latter are therefore more prone to seek

strong organization and to use squatting as a political tool, while the

self-help strategies and resistance of Southern squatters function more silently

10 Freia Anders and Alexander Sedlmaier

and with the assistance of various international nongovernmental

organiza-tions (NGOs); finally, policy and governance responses are usually

continu-ous, specialised and institutionalized in the South, while the authorities in highly developed countries tend to react to emergencies in a fragmented, situational and even chaotic manner Noting squatters’ effects on public policies, urban development models and the way urban governance and life are conceived by citizens and policymakers in both hemispheres, Aguilera and Smart stress that future research should seek to locate different groups and types of squatters more accurately in historical processes of institution-alization and cooptation, especially concerning what they term “the politi-cal economy of toleration” An interesting example is their comparison of illegal building in China and Hong Kong: the regulation of squatter set-tlements in Hong Kong was more bureaucratic than political and judicial, while the handling of illegal land use in China has been dominated by politi-cal influence and complicit self-interest and is only recently moving towards

a clearer ‘rule of law’

Next, in Chapter 3, Jason Jindrich opens up a new dimension by giving

an innovative twist to the widespread argument that models for solving the problems of land tenure in present-day slums of the developing world could be found in the historical development of the US His examples from nineteenth- and early twentieth-century US history show the scope and importance of informal and illegal urban settlements and help to qualify the common assumption that squatting has become a peripheral phenomenon

in American history since the Homestead Act Instead, Jindrich illustrates how social constellations and attitudes, not least concerning race and class, influenced whether a certain form of informal settlement was perceived as squatting or not On a more general level, squatting appears as a Janus-faced phenomenon: its Northern variant is usually seen as “a trivial outlier, a form

of social protest or a transient indication of economic distress”, unlike the results of “generalized social and policy failures that sap the possibility of general prosperity” that are diagnosed for less-developed countries (LDCs) Together these notions reinforce perceptions of LDCs as ungovernable and dysfunctional, while the Global North emerges as a model of successful urban development Jindrich demonstrates that informal settlements in the history of the US essentially resemble their successors in the Global South Ultimately, he suggests that American urban historians have more to learn from present-day squatter colonies than the other way around

Robert Home in Chapter 4 traces the history of encroachment and ting in the British Colonies, especially concerning their legal implications, drawing on evidence and examples from the US, Australia, Kenya, India, the Caribbean, South Africa and Palestine While more or less unregulated land seizure was characteristic of the Australian agricultural economics of the first half of the nineteenth century, the gold rushes from 1851 onwards created the demand for regulation that was supposed to enable the upper echelons of colonial society to acquire legal title to land, some of which they

squat-Introduction 11

had already occupied as pastoral squatters Eventually, the resulting Torrens title system became pervasive throughout the British colonial empire In this perspective, legislation often condoned the land-grabbing of white settlers while classing settlements of indigenous or ‘subaltern’ populations as illegal squatting One of Home’s instructive examples is how in Kenia “Africans living on white-owned farms were classed as squatters” even if their occupa-tion predated the crown grant to white farmers As a result, colonial offi-cials were in a position to justify racial exclusion measures with reference

to different administrative categories of settlement permit The systematic denial of land rights to indigenous people, Home argues, created “a wound

at the heart of the colonial constitutional order” Postcolonial land tions struggled with this legacy, he notes, as the desire for a more equitable distribution of land often conflicted with the guarantees of private property rights

disposi-Emerging Economies: Between Both Worlds

Since the differences between various developing and emerging economies are gradual, the question arises whether structural similarities across the North–South divide are reflected in the history of informal housing Despite the considerable geographical distances and historical differences among countries like Turkey, Brazil, Spain, South Korea, Romania and Thailand, they do share a number of common features as the historical phenomenon

of squatting and its specific development was ultimately a reflection of the economic transition these countries underwent during the twentieth century The chapters in this section highlight migration as a central cause of squat-ting and informal housing, both as a result of rapid economic development and of warfare or shifting borders They also underscore that squatting and informal housing almost inevitably became a dilemma for the authorities

as a contradiction arose between the governments’ interest in containing or overcoming squatting for sanitary, regulatory or political reasons and their interest in the people affected—or at least in the images that emanated from them—for example, as a profitable workforce, as subjects of nationalist pro-jects or as examples of a successful integration of social flashpoints Moreo-ver, the following chapters show that the intention—both from above and from below—was almost always to integrate squatters in one way or another into the broader urban development Contestations about what constituted squatting (or informal housing) and how it was to be defined were part and parcel of the contemporary discourses and conflicts that ensued

In Turkey, the dominant type of informal housing is called gecekondu,

a house put up quickly without proper permissions Settlements of kondus erected by rural labour migrants on public land at the margins of

gece-major cities like Istanbul, Izmir and Ankara during the second half of the twentieth century were integral to the country’s rapid urbanization Ellinor Morack’s chapter shows that the appropriation of property without the

12 Freia Anders and Alexander Sedlmaier

owner’s consent goes back to the nineteenth century In the Ottoman Empire waves of internal migration called for more regulated mechanisms of settle-ment In the interest of the agrarian economy, the Ottoman land law of 1856 allowed for the issuing of land titles to those who cultivated a piece of land, even if this had been done without permission With the demise of the Otto-man Empire and the Greco-Turkish War of 1919–1922, and especially as a result of the Armenian genocide and the population exchange with Greece, squatting became a much debated issue, particularly in Izmir Morack shows how squatting in the residential properties that Greeks and Armenians had left behind—often justified along nationalist lines—became a challenge for the administration of the new republican government, which also claimed the property of the Greeks and Armenians but eventually acceded to the legalization of such cases of squatting After World War II, the demand for construction and factory workers in aspiring cities in parallel with a policy

of forcing the remaining non-Muslim population into emigration, which the

government pursued up to the 1970s, gave the (illegal) inhabitants of kondus “realistic hopes for upward social mobility”, although most did not

gece-have any satisfactory infrastructure and were under threat of destruction

by government measures Not least the squatters’ protests and their votes

contributed to the gecekondu law of 1966, which allowed for squatters to

become taxpaying owners When the Turkish left of the 1970s tackled the

issue of land speculation in emerging gecekondu neighbourhoods and thus

mobilized many informal settlers, an urban movement emerged—just like

in many other countries—that had varied connections to other social ments The military coup of 1980 opened the way for a “drastic program

move-of neoliberal deregulation” Gecekondu dwellers on state land found it ever

more difficult to obtain property rights Large-scale commercial enterprises established a system in which developers no longer bought land from its owner but illegally parcelled it out and sold it to buyers who then constructed illegal buildings This system worked because it was effectively controlled by the local municipalities

In the sixth chapter, Brodwyn Fischer demonstrates the effective gration of informal settlements into Brazil’s urban formation and its legal regimes and, in turn, demonstrates that the forms of crisis and rebellion that set informal settlements in opposition to the rest of the urban fab-ric were ultimately less weighty Anthropologist James Holston’s concept

inte-of “insurgent citizenship” provides a stimulating point inte-of departure for

an analysis of the historical experience of Recife such that the following assumptions—curiously shared by Holston and de Soto despite obvious political differences—are questioned: that popular engagement with law and citizenship is a historically novel phenomenon, that legalization and rights are the natural goals of social movements rooted in informal settle-ments, and finally that insurgencies dedicated to these goals have been the most transformative impulses in Latin America’s poorest urban districts Fischer asks whether insurgency is the dominant characteristic of struggles

Introduction 13

for property and rights to the city, whether legal rights were their central aim and whether it still makes sense to view the most recent period as uniquely transformative The economic and bureaucratic realities of most Brazilian cities did not allow for an easy extension of legality to informality For over a century, Brazilian governments of differing provenience have failed

to muster the financial and regulatory resources that would have been sary to eliminate informality At least in the case of the relatively stagnant Recife, it makes thus more sense to assume a long-standing and persisting symbiosis between the informal and the formally regulated city, in which struggles for rights to the city have always played an important role among other concerns and in conjunction with various social movements; at the same time insurgent citizenship remained curbed, and change was piecemeal rather than game-changing

neces-Inbal Ofer in Chapter 7 looks at the three barrios of Orcasitas, the

larg-est of the shanty towns that sprang up on the outskirts of Madrid during the last two decades of the Franco dictatorship In April 1971, the Ministry

of the Interior and of Housing approved a plan to clear the area and let private developers rebuild it Ofer argues that the dwellers of Orcasitas, in their struggle to establish their right to the land they occupied, succeeded

in asserting the claim that ownership could not take precedence over land

use Their demand to be resettled in the renovated barrios was ultimately

met After a protracted struggle and planning process during the final phase

of the dictatorship and the transition period, in which the neighbourhood association became increasingly more accepted and involved, it was decided

in 1977 that Orcasitas in its new form would belong to the people who lived

in it: former chabolistas were turned into owners of newly built apartments

Ofer attributes this success to the neighbourhood association’s

acknowl-edgment of two distinct sets of “rights”: those of landowners ios), who did not necessarily reside in Orcasitas, and those of neighbours (vecinos) According to Ofer, however, the transition period of the second

(propietar-half of the 1970s was a unique highpoint of the grass-roots participation that Spanish Neighbourhood Associations mobilized: to protest against urban policies once they were established differed greatly from the ability to take part in their regular formulation

Erik Mobrand’s chapter contributes another example of squatting ing an authoritarian regime to the limits of its exercise of power During the 1960s and 1970s, under the leadership of Park Chung-hee, South Korea was transformed from a developing country into an export-oriented indus-trial nation While more and more rural workers came to the squatter set-tlements of Seoul that had already emerged with the demise of Japanese colonial rule and the Korean War, the city government under Mayor Kim Hyŏn-ok—nicknamed “Bulldozer Mayor”—was pursuing the ambitious target “to completely eliminate squatting from a city where over one mil-lion people found housing that way” Mobrand reconstructs the authorities’ interest in preventing an undue concentration of the country’s population

bring-14 Freia Anders and Alexander Sedlmaier

and industrial resources in the capital region while seeking to create what they considered a modern cityscape State plans to resettle squatters to new housing projects in the periphery of the capital to destroy the old squat-ter settlements reached the limits of economic feasibility and encountered diverse resistance from the squatters, who resorted to bribing subordinate officials but also to demonstrations and street fighting Large-scale attempts

at resettlement failed because many squatters simply sold the titles to ments or land in new developments they had been awarded The purpose-built city that was meant to serve as the main relocation site became an object of financial speculation and a scene of massive riots, which ultimately led the authorities to give up their resettlement plans and to legalize existing settlements instead Mobrand gathers from this that a history of squatting can contribute to a scrutiny of common views of Korean history: “the poli-tics of squatting serves as a reminder that the South Korean state, even at its most brutal and ambitious moments, was by no means wholly effective in implementing elite projects to transform society.”

apart-Ioana Florea and Mihail Dumitriu’s survey of different types of illegal and informal dwelling in the Romanian capital Bucharest from the second half

of the nineteenth century up to the most recent past is inspired by the ideas

of American urban sociologist Herbert Gans, who predicted in the 1960s that the large-scale urban renewal measures of the time would miss their sociopolitical targets Squatting serves them as an example of what Gans establishes to be the “positive uses of poverty for the more affluent parts

of society”, especially “as a factor in value creation and development” The case of Bucharest is another one where the authorities, ever since the nineteenth century, tried to resume control over the expansion of informal settlements by means of legalization and housing projects However, even the ambitious measures of the interwar period and the nationalization of residential property paired with enormous construction activity during the socialist era between 1948 and 1989 did not cause informal types of hous-ing to disappear entirely The immense influx from rural regions since the 1950s implied that not even the workforce needed in construction could

be provided with regular accommodation in the capital With the oriented transition and the restitution of residential property after 1989,

market-“real estate speculation and evictions developed rapidly.” Homelessness and informal housing in decaying tenement blocks became a visible factor of urban life, especially for members of the Roma minority, which attracted the attention of the United Nations Development Programme and of other international aid organizations Their resources did contribute to some upgrading in Bucharest, but the benefits that the squatters drew from this were limited The new housing market that resulted from the privatisation

of tenement blocks, including many legalized informal occupations, duced new losers Other forms of squatting emerged, such as improvised huts on wasteland along a river or the combination of squatting and subcul-tural art projects In the context of the latter, activists—like the occupants

pro-Introduction 15

of the “independent cultural centre” Carol 53—sought to give squatting

a positive connotation of cultural innovation and social distinction while decrying a general lack of effective participation in urban life Although this did not go unchallenged, they managed to claim some “cultural capital” in Bourdieu’s sense The urban poor, on the other hand, found this much more difficult as they tended to be trapped in stereotypical perceptions Owners of listed buildings tolerated ‘poor’ squatters to circumvent preservation orders and to obtain wrecking and development permits for buildings that they managed to present as dilapidated because of the squatters

Yap Kioe Sheng prefers to avoid the term ‘squatting’ in favour of mal housing’ because of the former’s connotation of illegality, which he does not want to attribute sweepingly to the settlements of the urban poor in Thailand Here, too, domestic migration from the countryside into the cities was the decisive cause for the growth of informal settlements in the 1960s Problems intensified drastically during the 1980s when the constitutional monarchy, shifting back and forth between representative government and authoritarian rule, joined the most rapidly growing economies of the world Social inequality between regions and capital swelled the number of people living in Bangkok’s informal settlements into the millions Yap distinguishes two basic forms of Thai informal settlements: those that arose on privately owned land rented out for an indefinite period and settlements on public land tolerated without rent payments Both types of settlement can there-fore not be called ‘illegal’ since informal agreements—“often only a ver-bal accord”—formed a type of customary law The self-conception of the

‘infor-settlers was rooted in the rural practice of chap chong (grab and reserve),

according to which land belongs to those who work it Such informal tions “worked until landowning government departments and state-owned enterprises began to recognize the commercial value of their land hold-ings” and “customary law collided with modern property rights.” Simul-taneously, the problem of insecure tenure underwent a politicisation of its inherent conflict of interest through the emergence of NGOs, which found themselves in a double-edged role: they had to “deal with the inherent con-tradiction of being both a catalyst for self-reliance and empowerment and

rela-a source of dependency-crerela-ating rela-assistrela-ance.” Successful orgrela-anizrela-ations of squatters frequently made headway by financial compensations and land-sharing arrangements but at times also provoked violent evictions or large-scale fires that solved the problem in the interest of owners who wanted to put their land to a new use Moreover, an increasing institutionalization of the conflicts reflected clashes of political interests within the authorities Yap describes the learning process that the Thai authorities underwent since the early 1990s They met the experience of governmental housing programmes—which in Thailand, like in South Korea, hardly met the actual needs of the inhabitants—with the establishment of the so-called Commu-nity Organizations Development Institute This institution “made the ‘com-munity’ the key mechanism to overcome socio-economic difference” by

16 Freia Anders and Alexander Sedlmaier

assuming the mediation role and by supporting the urban poor’s negotiating position in the purchase or long-term rental of land

Highly Industrialised Countries: Insecure Tenure under

eco-of collective consumption and resistance against urban alienation They analyse what Hans Pruijt calls the “political and social institutionalization” (or deinstitutionalization) of social movements

In this context, squatting has almost always been perceived as a new nomenon which however, is not the case In economically highly advanced countries, squatting has been a by-product of industrial and urban develop-ment and part of social struggles triggered by housing shortages and (mis-)appropriations of urban space at least since the nineteenth century Prior

phe-to World War I and in the interwar period, organized rent strikes flared up along with squatting in many European cities, such as Barcelona, Berlin and Glasgow Government plans to tear down historical districts that were deemed to be unhygienic met with protest and at times practical resistance from squatters.51 The blatant housing shortage that followed the destruction

of World War II gave birth to squatter organizations in France, Britain and the Netherlands By and large, their activities were met with acceptance and toleration In many other countries, local authorities also sought to trans-form tacit squatting into regular housing

Beginning with the 1960s, the character of squatting movements changed fundamentally insofar as elements from the action repertoire of protest movements were taken up, especially due to the global radiance of ‘1968’

At the same time, the social sciences identified resistance against investors, regulatory authorities and urban development programmes that manifested itself in rent strikes and squatting as an object of research; in turn the fruits

of this research often entered the politics of activists.52 The complex tions and alliances among squatters, citizens’ initiatives, heritage preserva-tionists, semi-public building societies and municipal governments of the 1970s emerged against the backdrop of a growing belief that modernity’s planning utopias—as cast into concrete in European cities—were undergo-ing crisis Not only the large-scale urban developments but also concomi-tant life styles increasingly came under crossfire from critical analysis.53

rela-Introduction 17

At the beginning of the 1980s, squatting movements reached a climax in almost all West European countries, which ran in parallel with a general expansion and sociocultural embedding of social movements Contempo-rary public perceptions of squats as “places of deviance” and youth protest have left a strong legacy This perspective implies a certain depoliticisation

of the squatters’ aims and came alongside the slander and criminalization that squatters encountered from politicians and the media They had to position themselves vis-à-vis these impulses When they entered into nego-tiations with the authorities, they had to deal with outcomes—for example tenancy agreements—that had the potential of splitting their unity because they did not necessarily meet the needs of some groups, such as marginal-ised ‘subsistence squatters’ who encountered practical and formal obstacles

to benefitting from what the authorities had to offer, or members of the emerging autonomists who were hoping to mobilize revolutionary potential from the squatting movement A further challenge has emerged since the late 1980s and especially during the 1990s: under the conditions of neolib-eral real estate valorisation and its concomitant displacement of less affluent social groups, squatters have been facing an intensifying debate concerning their own role in processes of gentrification.54

John Davis examines a little-known aspect in the history of one of the world’s largest financial metropolises He shows how various groups of London activists adopted rather different styles and approaches in their use of squatting to scandalise housing shortage Members of contemporary social movements, such as the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign, organized squatting activities for the home-less in the hope of triggering a mass movement against the “breakdown of social housing provision” They benefitted from the fact that “mere trespass was not a criminal offence in English law”, which however, did not save them from evictions The London Squatters Campaign, later renamed Fam-ily Squatters Advisory Service, used legal procedures to ensure that homeless families were allowed to use publicly owned buildings on a transitory basis

in more than 2,500 cases Despite this possibility of registering as cial” squatters, the number of non-registered squatters rose up to a quar-ter of a million across Great Britain according to contemporary estimates, predominantly in London This “unofficial, unlicensed movement”, domi-nated by members of subcultural milieux in search of experimental fields for alternative lifestyles who formed flat-sharing communities and centres for underground cultural and political activities, became emblematic for the squatting movement of the 1970s Davis describes the internal and exter-nal tensions that the movement was facing The intervention of Trotskyist groups contributed to a split between the “official” and the unofficial move-ment The squats’ attractiveness to members of marginalised social groups, ethnic minorities, homosexuals, former convicts and drug addicts meant a further endurance test for the social cohesion and the aspired direct democ-racy in plenary meetings of squatter communities Squats suffered physical

“offi-18 Freia Anders and Alexander Sedlmaier

destruction from groups of thugs from the neo-fascist British National Front

as well as from police operations A general loss of social legitimacy was furthered by press coverage and mirrored in the “moral panic legislation” of

1977 In the end, the conservative government of the 1980s under Margaret

Thatcher succeeded in transforming “an ad hoc network of squats into a

regulated cluster of housing co-operatives”

Hans Pruijt investigates conditional factors for the social and cal institutionalization of squatting movements in the Netherlands from the 1960s up to the most recent past These were heterogeneous in their motives and value concepts Pruijt distinguishes different sub-movements according to the aims of their activists and especially the presence or absence of explicitly political goals In the Netherlands as well, widespread vacancies were produced by the urban planning ambitions of the 1960s coupled with real estate speculations Initially, this vacant living space was only occasionally appropriated by people seeking a flat In the mid-1960s, Provo, the famous neo-anarchist counterculture movement, contributed

politi-to the popularization of squatting with their imaginative campaigns, cially the White Housing Plan, which demanded that the city of Amster-dam legalize and sponsor squatting as a revolutionary solution to the housing problem Along similar lines to the activities of London squatters, organizations formed that started to organize people in search of housing, wresting concessions from the authorities In doing so, they were closely associated with the flourishing alternative culture of Amsterdam, which tended to absorb them again after periods of more or less successful activ-ism In the Netherlands as well, it was a particular legal culture that ben-efited the emergence of a squatting movement; the Supreme Court decided

espe-in 1971 that “the existespe-ing practice of evictespe-ing squatters as if they did not enjoy the normal right of domestic peace was not consistent with the law.” Also conducive was a concurrence of interests with more conserva-tive citizens’ initiatives demanding the preservation of historical quarters threatened by demolition With the formation of a movement in the late 1970s and the emergence of the autonomists in the early 1980s, squatters who aimed to radicalize the movement in a revolutionary direction gained influence because they offered tangible support against evictions On occa-sion, the resistance against evictions led to violent riots, against which the government employed not only the police but also the military; these skir-mishes belong to the most violent conflicts in the post-war history of the Netherlands While the government entered negotiations with a part of the movement and legalized roughly 200 squats, the militant wing lost public support and became increasingly insignificant Episodes of squatting have reoccurred since the peak phase of the movement up to the present day However, according to Pruijt, the social and political institutionalization

of squatting has reached its limits: the establishment of an anti-squatting industry and the anti-squatting law of 2010, pushed through by a conserv-ative government, which ended a period of more than 40 years of relatively

to make use of a “gap between a delegitimized public administration [ .] and the not yet legally manifest powers of private owners” What might be called “silent appropriation”—the tacitly tolerated use of empty flats—had already existed in the GDR, but after the fall of the Berlin Wall alternative subcultures emerged around the squats that left an impact on entire neigh-bourhoods Drawing on the examples of East Berlin, Potsdam, Leipzig and Dresden, the authors investigate how far the squatting movements exerted a sustained influence on urban politics: whether they succeeded in establishing

a “new regime of urban renewal” and “practical alternatives to capitalism”— which corresponds to the self-conception of many squatting activists in the cities of the Global North—or whether squatting was merely a point

of departure for gentrification, as often claimed in the relevant literature Their case studies show that squatting and gentrification “were not caus-ally related” The specific conditions of reunification with its transition to

a market economy in an age of neo-liberalism, however, prevented squats from disrupting the realisation of commercial real estate interests in any sus-tained way The East German squatting movement did succeed in legalizing

a considerable number of squats and in contributing to the preservation of

a segment of affordable housing in areas affected by gentrification, but the challenge they represented for official programmes and institutions originat-ing from West Germany remained limited Ultimately, the authorities suc-ceeded in co-opting and adapting “aspects of the movement into new forms

of urban governance”, resulting “in a neutralisation of squatting in terms of urban politics and its de-politicisation more generally.”

Overall, this volume shows that squatting was and is a much more sive phenomenon than is often acknowledged In our historical perspective,

perva-it appears as a subsistence strategy that across historical times, national boundaries and economic systems has helped to secure basic human needs for living space and communal living in the short and medium term After all, a right to housing is far from being secured for the vast majority of human beings, even where such a right was or is constitutionally guaranteed and despite various efforts to anchor a “right to the city” in a global charter The appropriation of land and living space is an urban innovation resource for the development of social and cultural interests ‘from below’ and is a challenge to regimes of provision that frame property relations and the par-ticipation in common goods This applies equally to contexts of the Global South and the developed North

20 Freia Anders and Alexander Sedlmaier

The topic of squatting is rewarding because it allows for insights into some of the mechanisms that produce spatial and social relations in a his-torical process, and into the consequences that are experienced by those who, successfully or not, confront this process with their needs Due to the way that the phenomenon varies from acceptance by default or informal toleration to formal or violent repudiation, the parties concerned act in a relational field of tension Conflicts of interests over public space are accom-panied by legitimacy discourses that are ultimately decisive for the success

or failure and the persistence or ephemerality of squatting A potential for violence that results from the questioning of property relations in specific economic constellations is inherent in these conflicts, while tactics and strat-egies of the conflict parties and the nature of the particular political system are other contributing factors Squatter movements of the South and of the North (or the social movements in which they are embedded) will, despite all their contradictions, continue to play a role in shaping the nature of public space, depending on whether and, if so, how they will succeed in addressing the social question, which is inherent in their struggles against poverty, alienated lifestyles, privatisation and displacement The case stud-ies of this volume—just like the ‘favelas’ of the Art Basel—make these rela-tions recognizable

Notes

1 Marco Krebs, “ ‘Ich weiss um den provokativen Gehalt meiner Arbeiten’:

Inter-view mit Tadashi Kawamata”, TagesWoche, 20 June 2013.

2 Matthias Oppliger, “Ein Eselchen auf dem Messeplatz”, TagesWoche, 14 June 2013; Gabriel Vetter, “Wem gehört Basel? Party in der Favela”, Woz, 20

June 2013.

3 Matthias Oppliger and Hans-Jörg Walter, “Video: Gewaltsame Polizeiräumung

am Messeplatz”, TagesWoche, 14 June 2013.

4 “Police vs ‘Favela Café’: Occupation at Art Basel (Switzerland)”, http://art-leaks org/2013/06/17/police-v-s-favela-cafe-occupation-at-art-basel-switzerland/ (accessed 15 August 2015).

5 UN HABITAT, The Challenge of Slums: Global Report on Human Settlements

set-to formal rules, standards and institutions” Sasha Tsenkova, Self-Made Cities:

In Search of Sustainable Solutions for Informal Settlements in the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe Region (New York: United Nations, 2009), 5.

10 UN HABITAT, The Challenge of Slums, 82–83.

11 Ibid 168.

12 Ibid 105.

13 Mike Davis, Planet of Slums (New York: Verso, 2006), 5.

14 See Sebastian Mallaby, The World’s Banker: A Story of Failed States, Financial

Crises, and the Wealth and Poverty of Nations (London: Macmillan, 2004).

Introduction 21

15 Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital (New York: Basic Books, 2000).

16 Hernando de Soto, The Other Path: The Economic Answer to Terrorism (New

York: Basic Books, 2002), xxiv.

17 See the chapter by Jason Jindrich in this volume.

18 Davis, Planet of Slums, 72.

19 Richard Harris, “Urban Landmarkets: A Southern Exposure”, The Routledge

Handbook on Cities of the Global South, ed Susan Parnell and Sophie Oldfield

(New York: Routledge, 2014), 108–120, 118.

20 Nezar AlSayyad, “Urban Informality as a ‘New’ Way of Life”, Urban

Informal-ity: Transnational Perspectives From the Middle East, Latin America, and South Asia, ed Ananya Roy and Nezar AlSayyad (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2003),

7–30, 24; Ananya Roy, “Transnational Trespassings: The Geopolitics of Urban Informality”, Ibid 289–317.

21 Robert Neuwirth, Shadow Cities: A Billion Squatters, a New Urban World

“Myth and Reality in the Amsterdam Squatters Movement, 1975–2012”, The

City Is Ours: Squatting and Autonomous Movements in Europe From the 1970s

to the Present, ed Bart van der Steen, Ask Katzeff and Leendert van Hoogenhuijze

(Oakland: PM Press, 2014), 21–62, 53.

24 See Tsenkova, Self-Made Cities, 9.

25 Kesia Reeve, “Squatting Since 1945: The Enduring Relevance of Material Need”,

Housing and Social Policy: Contemporary Themes and Critical Perspectives, ed Peter Somerville and Nigel Sprigings (New York: Routledge, 2005), 197–217, 197.

26 For Great Britain see James Hinton, “Self-help and Socialism: The Squatters’

Movement of 1946”, History Workshop Journal 25 (1988): 100–126; Howard Webber, “Domestic Rebellion: The Squatters’ Movement of 1946”, Ex Historia

4 (2012): 125–146 Also see Eliane Gebrane-Badlissie, “Le Phénomène de térisation à Beyrouth”, Maghreb-Machrek 143 (1994): 186–189.

27 Hinton, “Self-help and Socialism”, 100; Minayo Nasiali, “Citizens, ters, and Asocials: The Right to Housing and the Politics of Difference in Post-

Squat-Liberation France”, American Historical Review 119,2 (2014): 434–459,

445–448 For Brazil see Brodwyn Fischer, “The Red Menace Reconsidered:

A Forgotten History of Communist Mobilization in Rio’s Favelas, 1946–1956”,

Hispanic American Historical Review 94 (2014): 1–33.

28 Ignacio A Navarro and Geoffrey K Turnbull, “Property Rights and Urban Development: Initial Title Quality Matters even when it no Longer Matters”,

Journal of Real Estate Finance and Economics 49 (2014): 1–22; Lucy Earle,

“Stepping Out of the Twilight? Assessing the Governance Implications of Land

Titling and Regularization Programmes”, International Journal of Urban and

Regional Research 38, 2 (2014): 628–645; Jan K Brueckner, “A Theory of Urban Squatting and Land-Tenure Formalization in Developing Countries”,

American Economic Journal 1 (2009): 28–51; Ann Varley, “Private to Public:

Debating the Meaning of Tenure Legalization”, International Journal of Urban

and Regional Research 26, 3 (2002): 449–461.

29 Hualing Fu and John Gillespie, Resolving Land Disputes in East Asia: Exploring

the Limits of Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014).

30 Lorna Fox-O’Mahony and Neil Cobb, “Taxonomies of Squatting: Unlawful

Occupation in a New Legal Order”, The Modern Law Review 71, 6 (2008):

878–911, 879.

22 Freia Anders and Alexander Sedlmaier

31 Ann Varley and Edésio Fernandes (eds.), Illegal Cities: Law and Urban Change

in Developing Countries (London: Zed Books, 1998), 4–5 Also see Jorge E

Hardoy and David Satterthwaite, Squatter Citizen: Life in the Urban Third

World (Hoboken: Taylor and Francis, 2014).

32 Edésio Fernandes and Raquel Rolnik, “Law and Urban Change in Brazil”,

Illegal Cities, ed Varley and Fernandes, 140–157, 146.

33 Ayona Datta, The Illegal City: Space, Law and Gender in a Delhi Squatter

Set-tlement (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), 8–11 For the United States and including

a historical perspective, see Hannah Dobbz, Nine-Tenths of the Law: Property

and Resistance in the United States (Edinburgh: AK Press, 2012).

34 Mary Manjikian, Securitization of Property Squatting in Europe (London:

Rout-ledge, 2013) For Great Britain see Lorna Fox-O’Mahony, David Fox-O’Mahony

and Robin Hickey (eds.), Moral Rhetoric and the Criminalisation of Squatting (London: Routledge, 2014); Rowland Atkinson and Gesa Helms, Securing an

Urban Renaissance: Crime, Community, and British Urban Policy (Bristol: Policy

Press, 2007); for Denmark see Amy Starecheski, “Consensus and Strategy: ratives of Naysaying and Yeasaying in Christiania’s Struggles Over Legalisation”,

Nar-Space for Urban Alternatives? Christiania 1971–2011, ed Håkan Thörn,

Cath-rin Wasshede and Tomas Nilson (Vilnius: Balto PCath-rint, 2011), 263–278; for the Netherlands see Hans Pruijt, “Culture Wars, Revanchism, Moral Panics and the Creative City – A Reconstruction of a Decline of Tolerant Public Policy: The Case

of Dutch Anti-squatting Legislation”, Urban Studies 50,6 (2013): 1114–1129.

35 Manuel Castells, The City and the Grassroots: A Cross-Cultural Theory of

Urban Social Movements (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 305.

36 Gerd Schönwälder, Linking Civil Societies and the State: Urban Popular

Move-ments, the Left and Local Government in Peru (University Park: University of

Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 12–28.

37 Jan Willem Duyvendak, The Power of Politics: New Social Movements in an

Old Polity, France 1965–1989 (Boulder: Westview Press, 1995); Hanspeter

Kriesi, “New Social Movements and the New Class in the Netherlands”,

Ameri-can Journal of Sociology 94, 5 (1989): 1078–1116.

38 Van der Steen/Katzeff/van Hoogenhuijze (eds.), The City Is Ours; Andreas Suttner, “Beton brennt”: Hausbesetzer und Selbstverwaltung im Berlin, Wien

und Zürich der 80er (Vienna: LIT, 2011) Also see the recently published study

on Berlin: Alexander Vasudevan, Metropolitan Preoccupations: The Spatial

Pol-itics of Squatting in Berlin (Chichester: John Wiley&Sons, 2015).

39 Jan-Henrik Friedrichs, Urban Spaces of Deviance and Rebellion: Youth,

Squat-ted Houses and the Heroin Scene in West Germany and Switzerland in the 1970s and 1980s (PhD diss.: University of British Columbia, 2013).

40 Cesar Guzman-Concha, “Radical Social Movements in Western Europe: A

Con-figurational Analysis”, Social Movement Studies (2015), http://www.tandfonline.

com/doi/abs/10.1080/14742837.2014.998644?journalCode=csms20 (accessed

2 December 2015).

41 Miguel Martinez, “The Squatters’ Movement: Urban Counter-Culture and

Alter-Globalization Dynamics”, South European Society & Politics 12, 3 (2007):

379–378; Lina Leontidou, “Urban Social Movements in ‘Weak’ Civil Societies:

The Right to the City and Cosmopolitan Activism in Southern Europe, Urban

Studies 47, 6 (2010): 1179–1203.

42 Squatting Europe Kollective (ed.), Squatting in Europe: Radical Spaces, Urban

Struggles (New York: Minor Compositions, 2013).

43 Claudio Cattaneo and Miguel A Martínez, “Introduction: Squatting as an

Alternative to Capitalism”, The Squatters’ Movement in Europe: Commons

and Autonomy as Alternatives to Capitalism, ed Squatting Europe Kollektive

(London: Pluto Press, 2014), 1–3.

45 Reeve, “Squatting Since 1945”, 197.

46 Alexander Sedlmaier, Consumption and Violence: Radical Protest in Cold-War

West Germany (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014), Chapter 6.

47 Freia Anders, “Wohnraum, Freiraum, Widerstand: Die Formierung der Autonomen in den Konflikten um Hausbesetzungen Anfang der achtziger Jahre”,

Das alternative Milieu: Unkonventionelle Lebensentwürfe und linke Politik in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland und Westeuropa 1968–1983, ed Sven Reich-

ardt and Detlef Siegfried (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2010), 473–498.

48 Freia Anders and Alexander Sedlmaier, “The Limits of the Legitimate: The Quarrel over ‘Violence’ Between Autonomist Groups and the German Authori-

ties”, Writing Political History Today, ed Willibald Steinmetz, Heinz-Gerhard

Haupt and Ingrid Gilcher-Holtey (Frankfurt: Campus, 2013), 192–218; Anders/ Sedlmaier, “ ‘Squatting means to destroy the capitalist plan in the urban quar-

ters’: Spontis, Autonomists and the Struggle over Public Commodities (1970– 1983)”, Fighting for/in the City: Social Movements, Heritage and Urban Politics

in Italian and West German Cities of the 1970s, ed Martin Baumeister, Bruno

Bonomo and Dieter Schott (Frankfurt: Campus, 2017, forthcoming).

49 Roy/AlSayyad (ed.), Urban Informality, back cover.

50 Bishwapriya Sanyal, Lawrence J Vale and Christina D Rosan, “Four Planning

Conversations”, Planning Ideas that Matter: Livability, Territoriality,

Govern-ance, and Reflective Practice, ed Bishwapriya Sanyal, Lawrence J Vale and

Christina D Rosan (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012), 1–32, 18.

51 For Sweden see Håkan Thörn, Stad i rörelse: Stadsomvandlingen och striderna

om Haga och Christiania (Stockholm: Atlas akademi, 2013).

52 Margit Mayer, “Städtische soziale Bewegungen”, Die sozialen Bewegungen

in Deutschland Seit 1945: Ein Handbuch, ed Roland Roth and Dieter Rucht

(Frankfurt: Campus, 2008), 294–318; also see Mayer, “The ‘Right to the City’

in Urban Social Movements”, Cities for People, Not for Profit: Critical Urban

Theory and the Right to the City, ed Neil Brenner, Peter Marcuse and Margit

Mayer (Abingdon: Routledge, 2012), 63–85.

53 International classics in this respect: Henri Lefebvre, Le droit à la ville (Paris: Anthropos, 1968); Manuel Castells, Luttes urbaines et pouvoir politique (Paris: François Maspero, 1973); David Harvey, Social Justice and the City (Oxford:

Basil Blackwell, 1973).

54 See the chapter by Andrej Holm and Armin Kuhn in this volume.

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26 Freia Anders and Alexander Sedlmaier

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Part I

Crossing Hemispheres

Beyond Historiographical Divides

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2 Squatting, North, South and

The paucity of comparisons between Northern and Southern squatting

is striking and unfortunate There may be good reasons not to compare The situations might be incommensurable Any attempt to compare faces overwhelming obstacles: is this one doomed to fail? We think a North–South squatting comparison is possible, desirable and heuristically fruitful

We engage in a dialogue about how to develop an integrative comparative research agenda The literature in the North and the South varies by the objects the researchers try to study, the way they are investigated, their theo-retical orientations and their results When we travel between South and North we can immediately see that squats and squatter settlements differ, as

do the urban contexts and policies that target them They are generally larger

in the South; they also tend to be more durable Their social movements for resisting policies are stronger Public policies towards squatting in the South are often institutionalized, rarely in the North Northern research focuses

on squatting buildings as collective action, sometimes neglecting squats as refuges for the urban poor Those who study squats tend to not engage with another emergent focus on Roma living in structures illegally erected on vacant lands The stigmatization process appears in this research as a key explanation of repression and urban segregation.1 Southern research con-centrates on irregular occupation of land to construct structures (not exclu-sively residential but also including agriculture, commerce and industry) They are more likely to integrate investigation of public policies to better understand the dynamics that illegalities take These streams are occasion-ally brought together in overviews of housing, but overall there is little dia-logue or cross-fertilization In this chapter, two scholars2 who work in these distinct research streams address the reasons for this separation, examine what might be learned through careful engagement with the other tradi-tions, and compare similarities and differences between the two kinds of squatting and public policies towards them Discussion of the practical and policy implications have also largely developed in isolation, and we begin to consider how lessons learned in one context might be applied in the other

30 Thomas Aguilera and Alan Smart

Ananya Roy conceives “slum as a theory” and suggests that slums are nowadays the metonym of the urban Global South.3 She rejects the ontolog-ical and topological approaches of urban informality but does not introduce Northern slums into the concepts she builds (peripheries, urban informality, zones of exception and gray spaces) On the one hand, Northern schol-ars working on urban informality may choose their objects in the South to inform their understanding of the urban North Should they not also do fieldwork in the North to better serve this goal? On the other hand, South-ern scholars tend to specify and reify Southern experiences Is it impossible,

or a waste of time, to join such Southern and Northern theories? We think not and offer thoughts on how to theorize squats and slums What can

we learn from these urban shadows and policies towards them? These ficulties and differences do not prevent comparison but make it potentially more fruitful In writing this chapter we tried to overcome this divide from two sides at the same time We first explore what each side has to offer the other and then consider the theoretical, political and interpretive barriers that have impeded dialogue One barrier lies in differences in terms used

dif-A ‘squat’ usually refers to an occupied building in the North, while ern researchers tend to discuss ‘squatter settlements’, made up of individual

South-‘squatter structures’ or South-‘squatter dwellings’ Many other terms have been used for this kind of construction, ranging from ‘irregular’ to ‘spontane-ous’ to ‘self-built’, plus local terms such as ‘favelas’ and ‘bustees’ In the North, ‘squats’ and ‘slums’ are distinguished, representing two different situations ‘Squat’ designates the illegal occupation of a building without authorization by the owner ‘Slum’ is used to designate illegal occupation

of land without the owner’s authorization, usually accompanied by built housing without legal access to basic services and infrastructures Both terms have uses but we need to specify the context as slums can designate very deteriorated housing without being illegal for some researchers What Northern researchers refer to as ‘slums’ is very close to the core meaning of

self-‘squatter settlement’ in the South But in North America and in most of the literature on housing in the Global South, ‘slum’ refers instead to dilapi-dated but formally legal private housing, occasionally extended to include public housing in bad condition The key referent is to the quality of the housing and amenities but in the past was seen as distinct from squatter set-tlements Terminological confusion does not help build bridges between the two research traditions Imposing a new, unified set of terms at this point may not be productive, so the reader will need to read the terms within the respective research traditions being discussed To reduce the difficulties, no use will be made of the term ‘slums’ when referring to Southern squatting, except in quotations

In the first section, we respectively present contributions from the ern and Northern literatures.4 In the next section, we examine divergences and common features about the way people squat and how policymak-ers govern them The puzzling question of the persistence of squatting is

South-Squatting, North, South and Turnabout 31

particularly fruitful to cross the two hemispheres by focusing on toleration

In the third section, we offer directions for a synthesis and separately tify opportunities that could be seized to build a truly comparative frame-work Finally, we map some options to consider for the future comparative research agenda we, and the current volume, would like to open

iden-Contribution from Two Hemispheres

Representations of Squatting in the World

We start from representations, the first obstacles for an effective son The first impression of those who travel to Southern squatter areas

compari-is the size and the nature of the landscape Everyone has an image of the gigantic favelas of Rio, Soweto Township in Johannesburg or Kibera in Nairobi They contrast with small plots occupied by 400 people between

a railroad and a highway in the periphery of European cities The second image is poverty Squatter settlements in Africa, Latin America or South Asia look poorer, with living conditions so bad that they may be life-threatening.5 People also think that Southern shanty towns are dominated

by gangs, drug traffic and violence Fear mixes with fascination for informal worlds—the combination of self-organization and skills in addition to ille-gality and social legitimacy Illegally squatted lands seem exotic, supporting the assumption that they only exist in the South This vision is encouraged

by movies depicting favelas.6 Western tourists love coming back home after holidays to tell their friends and family that they visited poor and dangerous places and met gangsters Tours to these areas have grown rapidly, a phe-nomenon now known as “poorism”.7 However, if Northern observers were

to look at their own cities they would realise that they can find the same and maybe worse at their own doorstep How could it be seen as worse? It’s because of the greater contrast between the affluent city and these territories

of extreme poverty; because slums are smaller, more ephemeral and thus less organized; because inhabitants do not consolidate their houses as they are evicted by the police twice a year or even deported from the country when they are migrants

Contributions from the South

The greater magnitude of Southern squatting has large consequences While irregular housing has often been discussed as “marginal”,8 it is far from marginal to the process of urbanization over the last century and into the foreseeable future What seems distinct about Southern cities is the extent and prominence of spaces and practices of illegality and irregularity Yet, riveted by the immensity of the Southern situation, we may ignore that such spaces and practices are important in all cities, for example, in red light districts and strolls Often half or more of all housing in Southern cities was

32 Thomas Aguilera and Alan Smart

initially developed extralegally, even if subsequently regularized Squatting contributes to the basic character of these cities There are at least a billion squatters,9 and an estimated 40 per cent of the residents of poorer cities live and work in illegal conditions.10 Perhaps 85 per cent of all new hous-ing in the world is produced outside of locally prevailing rules.11 Future impact may be even greater since an estimated 95 per cent of all increases

in the world’s urban population until 2050 will be in Southern cities.12 By contrast, Northern squatting is quantitatively not very significant,13 but its qualitative importance is considerable, as other contributions to this volume stress Northern squats tend to be ephemeral with fewer long-term conse-quences for the urban fabric, or legal property regimes, in most cases.While the rhetoric of Northern squatters is much more radical than that of

Southern squatters, radical practice, in terms of the self-organization of

dra-matically different kinds of urban form, is more evident in Southern cities.14

We need to be careful not to make assumptions about self-organization in these communities While there are indeed many cases of activist invasions

of vacant space which attempted to create communities of non-commodified housing, markets emerge in most squatted areas Self-building is less domi-nant than often presented Even when self-building is the dominant form

of initial construction, rental and purchase markets emerge.15 The many examples of Southern squatters organizing their community and infrastruc-ture, while sometimes effectively pressuring politicians to provide infra-structure beyond their capabilities, provide evidence of remarkable feats of self-organization and cooperation They should inspire anarchist Northern squatters In cities where housing is unaffordable, people turn vacant space into housing, which frequently becomes well-organized neighbourhoods independently of government planning or corporate property developers Jeffrey Hou16 has discussed how people have occupied and transformed poorly used public and private spaces, constructing “insurgent public spaces” that challenge conventional notions of space Such actions respond

to cities where public spaces and communities have increasingly been vatised, gentrified, securitized and otherwise “protected” from the uses of non-elite citizens This kind of action is widely seen by urban activists as legitimate, even when illegal, because they try to restore more authentic urban places lost through neoliberal privatisation and the individualization

pri-of cities The creation pri-of housing for more than half pri-of the population pri-of many Southern cities by squatters takes such insurgency to much greater scales with much wider consequences

Southern squatting has much to offer to research fields such as urban ies and housing studies Many prominent urban scholars have announced that informality “is back on the agenda of international development and urban planning”.17 This is part of a “Southern turn” against the Eurocen-tric predominance of Western cities in urban studies,18 focused particularly

stud-on informal parallels to formal or Northern standards and interventistud-ons.19

How governments respond to squatters has great importance for the cities,

Squatting, North, South and Turnabout 33

their economies, and the inhabitants Clearance, the demolition of an entire area rather than only specific structures, is one of several outcomes for a squatter settlement, which might also continue to be tolerated, experience squatter upgrading, or be regularized and converted into a legal part of the urban fabric In policy circles, de Soto’s prescription for curing pov-erty by legalizing the informal assets of the poor has been widely attended

to by think tanks and development agencies.20 Formalization programmes, particularly titling of squatter property, have been widely adopted around the world As Southern cities continue to become the vast majority of the global urban population, and as more of the world’s economic growth, already more than half, is based in them, policy responses to their distinc-tive informal “idioms of urbanization” will take on increasingly crucial importance.21

Contributions from the North

In the North, squatting lands or buildings are not practiced by the same groups, for the same purposes, in the same zones The literature on squat-ting is divided into three categories that tackle different dimensions that can however converge The first sees squatting buildings as collective action The second considers squats as roofs for the poor The third studies occupation

of vacant land and migrant camps In Europe, squatting buildings has been practiced since the nineteenth century as part of a repertoire of collective action.22 Squatting is seen as a radical option against ownership, the state and gentrification Generally, European works23 consider squats as “social centers”, radical places involved in struggles against neoliberal policies,24

against urban renewal policies,25 for the defense of the right to the city,26 and for social innovation and emancipation of everyday life.27 They can also be places where cultural and underground practices develop28 or where alter-globalization protests consolidate.29 Scholars who first consider squatting as access to shelter, without a political agenda, are a minority because precari-ous squatters are more invisible in Western cities and because the political use of illegalities attracts more attention from social movements’ students However, squats also function as discreet shelters for migrants, homeless and the urban poor in general.30

Typologies to classify different kinds of squats have been proposed.31

Ultimately, these typologies distinguish three dimensions: resources, goals and attitudes towards institutions Squatting can be a tool to claim and get something more or an end in itself (a roof to escape the street, a non-institutional space to live outside the ownership system or a countercultural space) Public actors’ reactions largely depend on the type of squat Hans Pruijt argues that squatters who see squatting as an end in itself, or do not make a difference between end and means,32 are more likely to be repressed, while squatters within housing movements can negotiate and get new benefits.33 To the contrary, Justus Uitermark argues that countercultural