Critical geographies of occupation, trespass and squatting

Abstract

At the heart of this Special Feature is a commitment to re-thinking the geographies of occupation, trespass and squatting. The interventions gathered below place particular emphasis on the importance of thinking with squatters, and how they, ultimately, seek to re-make the city on their own terms and with their own needs and desires in mind. At stake here, we argue, is a modest experimental form of ‘concept-work’ that is consonant with recent calls for a more fragmentary and open-ended approach to how we think about and inhabit cities. With this in mind, we offer three orientations that, in our view, advance and re-centre existing frameworks around urban occupation, trespass, and squatting: a critical historical perspective; an empirical focus on everyday geographies; and a theoretical lens that re-casts our understanding of spatial politics.

Keywords:

• occupation
• squatting
• trespass
• archives
• everyday urbanism
• spatial politics
• alternative infrastructures

I think of my friends as blackbirds

screeching from rooftops

murdered by rising rents

Exarchia Kreuzberg Hackney. Sean Bonney (2019, 29)

Occupying was an imperative for all those people, occupying

the squares, the streets, the empty buildings, populating them with

their still solid bodies, with their uncontainable lives. Occupying was a

matter of urgency for bodies, converted into the bluntest of political

acts, confronting the resignation of those who are more serene. Julián Fuks (2021, 119)

As this Special Feature goes to press, we learn of the recent occupation of a building in Vienna at Breite Gasse 15 in protest against rising energy prices.¹ We also hear of the eviction of seven undocumented migrants from a squat on the Rue Élise in Brussels and the clearance of the Olympia Municipal Music Theater Maria Callas in Athens which had been occupied by squatters protesting a government edict that would effectively devalue degrees issued in Greece by schools of theatre, dance, cinema and music.² Finally, we also learn of the recent death of a 46-year-old man in a house fire in Cañada Real, an informal community on the outskirts of Madrid which has been without electricity for over 900 days.³

These brief fragments—and the stories of survival and loss that they encompass—represent only a small cross-section of a more expansive archive of occupation-based activities that have persisted in the face of intense criminalisation and marginalisation. Across Europe and North America, the actions of trespassers and squatters have come under sustained and systemic attack that, if anything, continues to intensify (see Vasudevan 2023). The makeshift and often precarious spaces they create have, in many cases, been destroyed and their occupants forcibly displaced.

At the same time, squatting—the occupation and use of property without the consent of its owner—has also received increasing attention by critical urbanists as part of a growing body of scholarship on housing justice that has emerged in the wake of the global financial crisis. This renewed focus has revived earlier approaches to housing insecurity rooted in social movement historiography. This is work that has sought to document the practices of squatters placing them within a wider repertoire of claim-making and contention (Dee 2018; Owens 2009; SqEK 2013, 2014; Martinez 2013, 2020; Pruijt 2013; van der Steen, Katzeff, and van Hoogenhuijze 2014). Others have, in turn, adopted a more granular optic re-tracing the micropolitics of squatting—the ordinary practices and forms of modest world-making—that came to re-assemble the city as a space of necessity, experimentation and resistance (see Vasudevan 2011, 2015; Burgum 2019, 2022; Bettochi 2022; Grohmann 2020). Others still have zoomed in on the role that migrants have come to play in housing struggles across Europe (Dadusc, Grazioli, and Martinez 2019; Kapsali 2020; Martinez 2017; Raimondi 2019; Tsavdaroglou 2018; Western 2020), while many recent studies have also reminded us of the ‘homegrown’ methods of sheltering and survival adopted by squatters in settings of intense precarity, marginalisation and stigmatisation (Mattern 2020; see Esposito and Chiodelli 2020; Esposito 2022; Herbert 2022; Jordan and Minca 2023; Marin 2021; Pozzi 2023; Tazzioli 2021).

The papers in this Special Feature build on this work by placing particular emphasis on the importance of thinking with squatters and trespassers and how they, ultimately, seek to re-make the city on their own terms and with their own needs and desires in mind. At stake here, we insist, is an experimental form of ‘concept-work’ that is consonant with recent calls for a more fragmentary and open-ended approach to how we think about and inhabit cities (see McFarlane 2021). It is not our intention to offer up a single overarching theory or model of urban squatting or commit to a style of thought that seeks to ‘capture’ occupation or trespass as a major dominant mode of oppositional politics. Rather, we are, in the words of Miller (this issue) interested in ‘how squatted spaces are created in relation to—and are constitutive of—subjectivities, politics and relationalities’. The papers that form part of this Special Feature offer a series of complementary orientations that highlight the enduring significance of occupation-based practices for what Michele Lancione (2020) has recently described as a form of ‘dwelling as difference’. In this context, we find common cause with Cindi Katz's longstanding call for an oppositional mode of theory that is produced ‘in a different register, a minor key if you will’ (Katz 1996, 488). At stake here, following Katz, is a modest concrete form of utopianism (Wilder 2022) that helps us to envision alternative urban futures while recognising, in turn, how squatters and trespassers often worked to escape the unyielding predeterminations of their lives.

In practical terms, we argue that running through and connecting the papers are three main orientations that, in our view, advance and re-centre existing frameworks around urban occupation, squatting and trespass:

(1)	A critical historical perspective that examines how cities have been transformed by residents into living archives of alternative knowledges, materials and resources. This is an approach that highlights the role that alternative forms of archiving play in narrating struggles over housing and spatial injustice (see Burgum 2019, 2022; Vasudevan 2022).
(2)	An empirical focus on the ‘lived experience’ of urban precarity and the everyday geographies of squatting and urban occupation (Lancione 2020, 287). This is an optic that places particular emphasis on the alternative infrastructures—material and affective—assembled by squatters not to mention the various alliances and intersections out of which efforts to cultivate a radical urban commons are developed and sustained.
(3)	A theoretical lens that re-casts our understanding of the urban margins as a generative spatial politics. Squatted spaces were, in many cases, sites of resistance and refusal that challenged long-term capitalist restructuring, the dismantling of the welfare state and the commodification of housing. But they were equally sources of claim-making, experimentation and possibility that anticipate alternative forms of collective city life.

Taken together, these orientations map a critical agenda for re-thinking the geographies of occupation and the efforts of squatters in moving the horizon of housing politics and, in so doing, remaking the city as a space of possibility (see Madden and Marcuse 2016). We take particular inspiration here from the work of Ruth Wilson Gilmore who writes about the role that ‘persistent small changes’ and ‘altogether unexpected consolidations’ play in breaking with an old order while generating alternative forms of political action (Gilmore 2007, 242).

Occupation as radical archives

The papers in this Special Feature offer up a rich archive of radical city-making. This is perhaps unsurprising as squats and occupations often become archives by default insofar as they serve as platforms which support the circulation of knowledge and ideas and the production of alternative forms of urban learning in settings of intensifying precarity (McFarlane 2011). These are, in our view, material places of accumulation and assembly, bringing together not only bodies, but also artefacts including: books, pamphlets, zines, photos, flyers, posters, newspapers, notes, court papers, utility bills, banners, art and graffiti, personal belongings, detritus, tapes, hard drives, websites and social media accounts.

At the same time, urban spaces are radical archives in their own right, imbued with the meaning of past struggles while shaping the structure of contemporary contentious politics (Herrera 2022, 13). To walk with a squatter through the city is to, in many ways, encounter the urban landscape as a vast archive, teeming with possibility even as it is marked by other histories of violence and displacement. Streets, squares, monuments, buildings come alive as the remainders of intimate histories that flicker into view just as other ways of organising collective city life—an ‘otherwise repository’ of action, experimentation and resistance—take shape, even in spaces that appear unchanging and solid (Haley 2021, 106; see Hartman 2020). These are spaces that speak to an alternative rendering of the built form rooted in memory and anchored in ‘the reconstitution of social relations’. These are, moreover, spaces that create, in the words of Vyjayanthi Rao, a ‘zone of anticipation’ (2009, 380). The ‘city-as-archive’ enables, it seems to us, a rather different understanding of housing justice and social transformation.

Archives have traditionally been sites of authority for state projects. As Jacques Derrida (1995) has argued, the state archive is more than a mere space of selection, categorisation and narration. It is a site of commencement and commandment, a place from which historical narratives can be summoned or silenced, remembered or buried. And yet, while archival institutions—museums, libraries, record offices and other official collections, monuments—may appear to represent an authoritative and objective truth about the past, they are contingent upon processes of recall in the present. The archive has a discriminatory gaze which ‘in the end, results in the granting of a privileged status to certain [archives] […] and the refusal of the same status to others, thereby judged “unarchivable”’ (Mbembe 2002, 20). An absence in the archive is an erasure of recognition, a ‘symbolic annihilation’ where ‘members of marginalised groups … are [made] absent, grossly underrepresented, maligned or trivialised’ (Caswell 2014, 27).

On the other hand, it is the very authority and contingency of the archive—which is so often exploited by state projects—that also makes archives strategic tools for communities marginalised from normative ‘mainstream’ narratives of history. Archives from below, which emphasise participatory methods and alternative forms of presentation (Zavala et al. 2017), can help to redress silences in hegemonic accounts of history. In the same way as they are used as the raw material for shaping an imagined community on a national scale, archives can also form an ‘authoritative basis for who we are, where we come from, and where we are going’ (Robertson 2005, 83). They have the potential to facilitate self-representation, identity construction and empowerment (see Burgum 2022, 507–508).

Squats themselves are regularly sites of purposeful (counter)archival projects which aim, we believe, to gather, collect, record, register, exhibit and recall alternative or ignored, often radical, urban histories. European examples of archives stemming from occupied spaces might include the Advisory Services for Squatters (ASS) and 56a Infoshop, in London; The Nomadic Museum in Ruigoord, Netherlands; Papiertiger in Berlin; The Social Movement Archive at the Rote Flora in Hamburg; The Archivio Primo Moroni in Milan; the archive and library in Christiania, Copenhagen and many other spaces. These projects provide the spaces for voices and appearances denied by mainstream archives and narratives. They are histories which only ‘remain visible’ because of grassroots archival practices that bear witness, in the words of one activist, ‘to the continuity of squatting as a political act’. This is not to say that such archiving is without problems. For each squat or occupation that is recognised, there are ‘thousands of people who squatted with little or no connection to the larger and more consciously political squatting scenes whose stories remain invisible’ (x-Chris 2015, 116, 117), although new research is beginning to address these silences and erasures (Begum 2023).

With criminalisation and intensifying media antagonism, squatting has become an increasingly precarious and temporary activity in many cities. But it is the very act of archiving and the archival imagination that is set out in this Special Feature which can provide some sort of longevity, collective identity, and persistence even in short-lived urban spaces. As Katherine McKittrick (2013) reminds us, writing with a rather different context in mind, ‘what stands out [here] are the ways we can trace the past to the present and the present to the past through geography’ (7). Occupations and trespasses are, ultimately, entries into the city as an archive which disrupt, rewrite, unsettle and reorganise existing categorisations of urban spaces, spaces which, in turn, point to different orderings of political action.

Occupation as everyday urban infrastructure

While recent efforts to classify the action repertoire of squatters have been insightful, we seek to question and re-centre approaches that, on the one hand, risk reducing practices to strict typologies and models, while creating, on the other hand, an over-coding of spaces that represent improvisation, possibility, generation and difference (Miller in this issue). Across this Special Feature there is an emphasis on the ‘everyday’ as an empirical focus that offers a more granular approach to the material infrastructures produced by urban occupation not to mention the different structures of feeling elicited by squatters. From short-term licensing (Ferreri in this issue) to digital activism (Nic Lochlainn in this issue), from the everyday rhythms of social reproduction (Grazioli in this issue) to the collective actions of anarcho-feminists (Miller in this issue), the papers gathered together here zoom in on the generative micro-politics of squats and other occupied spaces. At stake here, in our view, is a certain attentiveness to makeshift uncertain spaces that often elude conceptual capture and remain fragmentary and precarious even as they offer sources of care, refuge and solidarity.

To foreground the everyday and the lived materiality of squatting is to, therefore, recognise that squats and occupied spaces have the potential to become spaces, networks and corridors of care (see Dadusc, Grazioli, and Martinez 2019). In this context, we heed Power’s (2019) recent call for greater sensitivity to the makings of alternative infrastructures of care and emergent examples of ‘caring-with’ which speak, in her words, to ‘the depth of emplaced histories, material and political affiliations that shape the capacity and potential for care’ (763-764). Occupation-based practices, in our view, re-imagine the everyday politics of care, by creating the necessary conditions for city-dwellers to meet basic needs while engaging in a range of caring practices (childcare, community health clinics, guerrilla gardening, harm reduction initiatives, migrant solidarity, mutual aid, etc.).

The papers in the Special Feature (especially Ferreri, Grazioli and Miller) also suggest entanglements with feminist and decolonial thought that are already immanent, in many cases, to the storied actions of squatters and housing activists. Such an approach to the recent history of occupied spaces in Europe and North America should not, therefore, be seen as a retrospective re-imagining of often hidden histories of urban mobilisation. Rather, it highlights, as Ferreri argues (this issue), the close relationship between new forms of collaborative housing and ‘their intersections with wider social and political struggles’ from early expressions of queer ‘commoning’ to anti-racist organising. It also points, in a more speculative and tentative register, to an epistemological approach that exceeds (and complements) our taken-for-granted frameworks and opens out to the kind of ‘urban majority’ politics charted by AbdouMaliq Simone and many others (see Simone 2021; Simone and Rao 2022).

This epistemological shake up also links to questions around scholar activism that are central to Milligan's paper (this issue) which places particular emphasis on the ever-shifting contours between political organising and activism. We take inspiration here from Nicole Fabricant's recent work (2022) on youth activism in Baltimore and her account of the everyday successes and challenges that accompany activist fieldwork and community-based organising. This also requires a critical reflection on our own positions within academic hierarchies, as well as our relationship to housing struggles and the communities they encompass, not to mention our capacity to carve out meaningful forms of critical solidarity. As others including Fabricant have shown, the very notion of the ‘activist-academic’ might be more alienating than levelling, adding authority and authenticity to academic practices while maintaining a hyphenated distance with the word ‘activist’ (Rayes et al. 2021). There remains, we insist, a need to act politically and with self-understanding when doing research, ‘informed by a decolonising ethic of attentiveness to place and local struggles’ (Land 2015, 200). At the same time, we recognise, as Milligan argues, that activist research often opens onto everyday spaces of intense antagonism that can be ‘politically and affectively transformative’ (this issue). Squats and occupied spaces are, as Milligan reminds us, sites of intense conflict and struggle, but they can equally act as sites of hope, liberation and resistance. For Milligan, it is these very fragments of refusal and solidarity that linger even when particular spaces disappear; fragments that ultimately help us build and sustain new communities of struggle.

Occupation as spatial politics

At the heart of this Special Feature is a re-thinking of squatting and occupation, more generally, as a generative spatial politics. We recognise that there is a well-established—if sometimes problematically neoliberal and entrepreneurial (see Alsayyad 2004; Bromley 2004)—literature on auto-construction in the ‘global South’. Jorge Hardoy and David Satterthwaite refer, in this context, to ‘the unnamed millions who build, organize, and plan illegally’ as ‘squatter-citizens’ responsible for the creation of ‘a city of pragmatists’ (1989, 15, 18). Others, including James Holston, draw attention to the actions of squatters as expressions of an insurgent citizenship which disrupt ‘established formulas of rule, conceptions of right, and hierarchies of social place and privilege’ (Holston 2008, 274). Holston's references to ‘auto-constructed peripheries’ which assemble, on the one hand, ‘a new realm of participation, rights, and citizenship’ (2008, 6) whilst demanding, on the other hand, ‘full membership in the legal city that expelled them’ is also redolent of the language used to describe squats in Europe and North America, not to mention scholarship on occupation as an expression of a collective ‘right to the city’ (see Vasudevan 2015).

However, we also acknowledge that the language of citizenship, particularly in the context of critical theory surrounding migration and refugee studies, is highly contested (Maestri and Hughes 2017; Dadusc, Grazioli, and Martinez 2019). The ‘acts of citizenship’ mobilised by squatters often challenge ‘static notions of citizenship’, especially when we turn to the practices of migrant-squatters in Europe for whom the very right to remain and be in the city is a source of new subjectivities and spatialities (Dadusc, Grazioli, and Martinez 2019, 523). We share, in this way, Tom Western's understanding of the entanglements between various ‘migratory activism’ and the politics of squatting as so many forms of accommodation—accommodation as shelter and dwelling but also accommodation as adaptation, reconciliation and welcome (2020, 128). Like Western—reflecting on makeshift refugee shelters in Athens—we seek to hold onto an understanding of the ‘messiness of life in protracted displacement’ as a modest source of political agency in the face of persecution and exclusion (124, 126).

This is a reading of the political that recognises the degree to which occupied and squatted spaces remain, in many ways, fragmentary yet full of political possibilities. These are, in other words, social worlds that have emerged out of ‘broken down or inadequate buildings [and] infrastructures’ (McFarlane 2018, 1012) and equally damaged (and hostile) social formations (see Simone 2016). But they also point to spaces of improvisation, maintenance and belonging that, taken together, offer up a kind of reparative urbanism that is itself a source of new identities and relationships as well as the configurations of code/space and the digital counter-spaces that are so central to Nic Lochlainn's (this issue) reading of occupations and digital activism.

It is ultimately with this backdrop in mind that the papers in this special issue speak to a range of spatial grammars of occupation which harness the political potential of the city by ‘staying close’ to the messiness of urban life (Amin and Lancione 2022, 9). This is a critical language that includes insurgency and refusal (Milligan), urban commoning (Ferreri; Grazioli), new forms of digital connection (Nic Lochlainn) as well as intersectional modes of place-making, solidarity and subversion (Miller). We find clear parallels between the emergent spaces created by squatting and occupation and those who write of the ‘propositional politics of liminal spaces (Lancione 2019), the ‘skin of the city’ (Tomás 2022) and of a ‘city yet to come’ (Simone 2004; Gibbons et al. 2020). This is an understanding of urban transformation that operates well beyond the spectacular and visceral creative destruction of the wrecking ball, the cranes and waves of gentrification facilitated by the planners and policymakers of so-called ‘big capital’. Instead, following AbdouMaliq Simone and Vanesa Castán Broto, it is, in fact, an understanding of improvised lives on the margins which demonstrate how ‘urban change does not follow one-off dramatic interventions, but rather, it results from numerous micro shifts constantly occurring in the urban environment’ (2022, 771). These emergent urbanisms are glimpses into the ways that peripheral and marginalised sites of occupation act as generative spaces. Far from being on the edge of the city, these spaces are the city in becoming.

Conclusion

Over the past decade, cities across Europe continue to bear witness to squatting and other forms of occupation. Shaped by a wider housing crisis, new austerity urbanisms, repressive border regimes and climate crisis, these forms of occupation have led to the re-emergence of radical urban movements but also more modest makeshift forms of political action. For marginalised residents—living under intensifying precarity, forcibly displaced across borders, and increasingly reliant on informal access to urban resources—the city has become both a site of containment and exclusion as well as a source of care and hospitality. As this Special Feature shows, the actions of squatters provide a lens onto this urban landscape. Through these emergent geographies—collective, fragmentary and often temporary and fleeting—we show how ordinary citizens, migrants and activists are challenging the very terms of their exclusion, even in the face of increasing criminalisation and repression.

This collection examines the history and nature of ‘occupation’ and the everyday informal practices undertaken by squatters as a means of securing and sustaining a home. In practical terms, it documents the various forms of shelter, refuge and infrastructure which have been assembled by city-dwellers across Europe in settings of heightened scarcity. Our central aim is to recognise the conceptual and empirical richness of trespass, squatting and other occupation-based practices, and how these push us to reimagine the city as a space of dwelling and difference (see Vasudevan 2015, 2023; Lancione 2020). The papers in this collection advance concepts that are, in many ways, immanent to the actions of squatters and constitutive of the urban as a generative space of possibility. They gather together case studies which have been territorialised in different contexts while offering a critical perspective on the richness of situated experiences across Europe.

We realise that our sightlines are, ultimately, focused on Europe, but we believe that there are points of contact with other approaches to urban inhabitation and difference that have, in fact, emerged outside of Europe and which, taken together, point to wider plenary debates in housing justice and radical urban politics. As Gurminder Bhambra reminds us, ‘we are born into pre-existing conversations regarding our pasts and our presents […] [This] necessarily shapes the positions from where we think and argue’ (2007, 10). Building on the papers in this Special Feature, we advocate for an approach—a critical ethos of sorts—that also draws inspiration from decolonial and feminist ways of thinking. What is required, it seems to us, is an empirical approach underpinned by solidarity but which simultaneously recognises the patronising, paternalistic and self-serving way ‘allyship’ can redeploy social hierarchies (Land 2015; Maestri and Monforte 2022; Smith 2012). As such, we agree with Les Back who highlights the need for a kind of global attentiveness which includes rethinking the near at hand and closer to home by asking what we are deaf to because of our own epistemological biases. Our work, Back argues, ‘should be unsettling and uncomfortable’ (Back 2009, 1, 12), because ‘if discomfort is felt, dealing with it becomes an element of the work of critical self-reflection’ (Land 2015, 230).

In a more modest register, we also call for a greater contextualisation of occupation and squatting in wider dynamics of property and trespass. Recent moves in England and Wales to entrench formalised property rights and, in parallel, criminalise trespass, are part of a broader historical and trans-national trend of enclosure (O’Mahony, O’Mahony, and Hickey 2014). By focusing on diverse moments of trespass, we are granted a ‘window onto property’ (Cockburn et al. 2018) and the colonial genealogies of property norms which are only just being traced (Burgum, Jones, and Powell 2022; Bhandar 2018; Blomley 2004; Porter 2016). These are genealogies that admittedly demand forms of understanding rooted in the messy intersections between occupation, settler colonialism and decolonisation. But they are also genealogies, in the final instance, that raise important questions about the relationship between property and personhood and the capacity to live the city otherwise (Roy 2017). To occupy and organise, as this Special Feature has shown, is to not only mark out the coordinates of a particular ‘orientation towards housing justice’ but to actively create new territories for a ‘just urban life’ (Roy et al. 2020, 15).

Acknowledgements

This Special Feature emerged from a panel at the RGS-IBG Conference 2019. We would like to thank everyone who took part in the panel and to all the reviewers whose generous comments helped to support this Special Feature.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

At the time of the original RGS-IBG panel, Sam Burgum was fully funded by the Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship Scheme at the University of Sheffield (Grant reference: ECF-2017-191). At the time of publication, Sam Burgum is 0.5 funded by the ESRC New Investigators Project ID: B130979E Award at Birmingham City University. The original panel builds on work that Alexander Vasudevan conducted while a British Academic Mid-Career Fellow (RA15AZ).

Notes on contributors

Samuel Burgum

Sam Burgum is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Birmingham City University and a Visiting Researcher at the Urban Institute, University of Sheffield. Email: [email protected]

Alexander Vasudevan

Alexander Vasudevan is Associate Professor in Human Geography and Fellow at Christ Church at the University of Oxford. Email: [email protected]

Notes

1 ‘Hausbesetzung in Wien-Neubau’, https://www.derstandard.at/story/2000144978482/hausbesetzung-in-wien-neubau-als-protest-gegen-mieterhoehung-und-gaskonferenz.

2 ‘Brussels: eviction of a squat of 7 undocumented people’, https://en.squat.net/2023/04/10/brussels-eviction-of-a-squat-of-7-undocumented-people/ and ‘Ten arrested after police clears squat in Athens municipal theatre’, https://www.ekathimerini.com/news/1208302/ten-arrested-after-police-clears-squat-in-athens-municipal-theatre/.

3 ‘Fallece un hombre de 46 años en un incendio en la Cañada Real, una zona de chabolas de Madrid sin luz desde hace 900 días’, https://elpais.com/espana/madrid/2023-03-28/fallece-un-hombre-de-46-anos-en-un-incendio-en-la-canada-real-una-zona-de-chabolas-de-madrid-sin-luz-desde-hace-900-dias.html.