Public Goods versus Economic Interests

Global Perspectives on the History of Squatting

Freia Anders, Alexander Sedlmaier

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317313267
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia sociale

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 utilization of urban space. An interdisciplinary 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 cooperation 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 marginalized 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.

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 commissioned 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 favelas”, 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

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 accumulated 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 activity and for a festive culture that is not wholly dominated by commercial considerations. The conflict dynamics that emerged from this provocative 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 common 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 questions 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 judiciary 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 legality 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 importance of resistance for the phenomenon of squatting, a topic that needs further 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 centres, land or buildings that are completely unoccupied, unused, unsupervised or abandoned have become increasingly rare. Modern-day squatting is usually 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 their form of habitation (sometimes including agricultural or commercial uses) is insecurity of tenure. On a more abstract level, squatting is often seen as something illegal that is to be overcome or even exterminated. It is also something out of which the upper classes cannot easily make money.⁵

Research on squatting is still in its infancy. So far largely 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. The topic has been studied on multiple levels, most importantly under the perspective of poverty, urban development, legal issues and social movements.

There is extensive literature on slums and urban poverty in developing 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 countries is clearly a minority phenomenon: 2 per cent of all households according 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 position to extend this permission because the settlements do not meet building regulations, for example, when shanties are built on agricultural land without 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 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 terminological 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.

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 formal 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 hemisphere 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 economist Hernando de Soto prescribes the legalization of the informal assets of the poor, many 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 poverty 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 framing of the informal sector” in transnational policymaking and academic 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 transnational approach, the essays in Roy and AlSayyad’s collection on informal settlements in the developing world have helped to unsettle narrow perceptions of slums and squats. They show that informal housing is not exclusively a domain of the urban poor; contrary to Davis’s dystopian view of a largely isolated informal proletariat, the middle classes and even transnational 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 “everyone in these communities is impoverished and starving.” Not entirely unlike de Soto, he emphasises “the need for organizing in the communities 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 estimating 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 production process, the classical focus of Marxist agitation. Due to the prevailing anti-communism as well as internal disagreements w...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• 1 Introduction: Global Perspectives on Squatting
• Part I Crossing Hemispheres: Beyond Historiographical Divides
• Part II Emerging Economies: Between Both Worlds
• Part III Highly Industrialised Countries: Insecure Tenure under Conditions of Affluence
• Contributors
• Index