Squatting, Globally
Introductory paragraph. Here are some resources considering a global geography of squatting and interconnected struggles.
Vasudevan, Alexander (2014) The makeshift city: Towards a global geography of squatting. Progress in Human Geography.
Responding to contemporaneous work theorizing urbanism as “planetary” and analyzing global megacities and slums, Vasudevan reviews recent work on squatting and urban informality in the Global North and South. He advocates a processual reading of squatting that neither valorizes the practice nor mobilizes it toward critical despair. Instead, Vasudevan synthesizes translocal contexts and practices of squatting to articulate an emergent theory of squatting as “makeshift and experimental, precarious and informal” that can help scholars see global commonalities in urbanization and responses to it (#). This paper is of particular use to students and scholars seeking guidance toward prominent scholarship in urban geography, subaltern urbanism, and informality in relation to squatting.
“While the majority of the world’s squatters continue to live in the Global South, the hidden history of squatting is a global history. This is a history of makeshift rural cottages, precarious and informal urban settlements, experimental housing initiatives and radical autonomous communities.”
“There can therefore be no strict homogeneous theory of squatting and this paper, if anything, sets out to provide some modest conceptual signposts for building alternative approaches to shared city life that resonate both within specific settlements and across a broader translocal landscape.”
“On the one hand, [squatting practice] speaks to the unjust structures of dispossession, exclusion and violence that define and shape the experiences of many of the world’s urban dwellers. On the other hand, it also points to the possibilities – complex, makeshift and experimental – for extending, improving and sustaining life in settings of pervasive marginality.”
Powell, Ryan, and AbdouMaliq Simone (2022) Towards a Global Housing Studies: Beyond Dichotomy, Normativity and Common Abstraction. Housing Studies 37(6):837–46.
Powell and Simone point to recent advances in housing scholarship that reveals “a need to attend to and take seriously the multiplicities of modes of inhabitation (beyond the normative) and the new and dynamic spatial formations they continually (re-)produce across the globe” (#). This piece serves as the introduction to a special issue interrogating the role and nature of housing in the current conjuncture. Of particular interest to those studying squatting is the author’s theorization of the fluid, relational processes of settlement and unsettlement that make urban and rural spaces alike; their advocacy for theoretical conceptualizations that are responsive to changing contexts and practices; and for an expansive, non-normative approach to the wide range of practices of inhabitation.
“we are interested in a process of interweaving - thinking about how disparate built environments, financial mobilizations, and practices of settlement “speak” to each other and enfold particular organizational aspects of each other into their own peculiar functioning”
“advancements in housing scholarship and the nuancing of housing realities point to a continuous need to extend analyses and reconceptualise housing from a range of theoretical standpoints and geographies. In short, a need to attend to and take seriously the multiplicities of modes of inhabitation (beyond the normative) and the new and dynamic spatial formations they continually (re-)produce across the globe. This necessitates a widening of housing’s purview and a renewed and open-minded dialogue across scales and positions.”
Engels, Frederick (1872) The Housing Question.
While authored to respond to then-contemporary debates on the nature and cause of inadequate housing for the working class, Engels’ The Housing Question serves as an early touchpoint for analysis of capitalist housing production and provision. Engels’ prescient observation in Part II of the recurrence of housing struggles continues to echo in contemporary scholarship and practice:
“In reality the bourgeoisie has only one method of solving the housing question after its fashion-that is to say, of solving it in such a way that the solution continually reproduces the question anew.”
SqEK – Squatting Everywhere Kollective (2019) SqEK – Squatting Everywhere Kollective. Radical Housing Journal 1(1):233–35.
The Squatting Everywhere Kollective (SqEK) introduce themselves and the aims and methods of their work. The brief introduction concludes with links to their open-source publications, all of which serve as resources for students and scholars of squatting. Abundant open resources produced by SqEK and others can also be found on their website.
“The discussion on what ‘activist-research’ means busies us on a regular basis. Despite certain inertia towards ‘academicization,’ we define our aim as the production of reliable and fine-grained knowledge about squatting movements as a public resource, especially for squatters and activists“ (234)