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

Public Goods versus Economic
Interests

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 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 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.


Routledge Studies in Modern History
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12 The Ideological Cold War
The politics of neutrality in Austria and Finland
Johanna Rainio-Niemi

13 War and Displacement in the Twentieth Century
Global conflicts
Edited by Sandra Barkhof and Angela K. Smith
14 Longue Durée of the Far-Right
An international historical sociology
Edited by Richard Saul, Alexander Anievas, Neil Davidson and Adam
Fabry
15 Transnational Perspectives on Modern Irish History
Edited by Niall Whelehan
16 Ireland in the World
Comparative, Transnational, and Personal Perspectives
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17 The Global History of the Balfour Declaration
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Maryanne A. Rhett
18 Colonial Soldiers in Europe, 1914–1945
“Aliens in Uniform” in Wartime Societies
Edited by Eric Storm and Ali Al Tuma
19 Immigration Policy from 1970 to the Present
Rachel Stevens
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


First published 2017
by Routledge
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Contents

1 Introduction: Global Perspectives on Squatting

1

FREIA ANDERS AND ALEXANDER SEDLMAIER

PART I

Crossing Hemispheres: Beyond Historiographical Divides27
2 Squatting, North, South and Turnabout: A Dialogue
Comparing Illegal Housing Research

29

THOMAS AGUILERA AND ALAN SMART

3 Squatting in the US: What Historians Can Learn from
Developing Countries

56

JASON JINDRICH

4 Squatting and Encroachment in British Colonial History

78

ROBERT HOME

PART II

Emerging Economies: Between Both Worlds97
5 Squatting and Urban Modernity in Turkey

99

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
Change in Franco’s Spain
INBAL OFER

150


viâ•…Contents
8 Unlicensed Housing as Resistance to Elite Projects:
Squatting in Seoul in the 1960s and 1970s

170

ERIK MOBRAND

9 Living on the Edge: The Ambiguities of Squatting and
Urban Development in Bucharest

188

IOANA FLOREA AND MIHAIL DUMITRIU

10 Informal Settlements in Bangkok: Origins, Features,
Growth and Prospects

211

YAP KIOE SHENG WITH KITTIMA LEERUTTANAWISUT

PART III

Highly Industrialised Countries: Insecure Tenure
under Conditions of Affluence235
11 “The Most Fun I’ve Ever Had”?: Squatting in England in
the 1970s

237

JOHN DAVIS

12 Squatting in the Netherlands: The Social and Political
Institutionalization of a Movement

256

HANS PRUIJT

13 Squatting and Gentrification in East Germany since 1989

278

ANDREJ HOLM AND ARMIN KUHN

Contributors305
Index311


1Introduction
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


2â•… 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 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

Introductionâ•… 3
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.


4â•… 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 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


Introductionâ•… 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 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 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 potentially on all areas of the law. Drawing on contemporary developments in

6â•… 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 justice’â•›” led to “a serious crisis of legality.”32
Ayona Datta, on the other hand, refers to the downsides of the continued “conflation of illegality with informality”. Drawing on the notion of
“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, material, 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 violence 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 judicial treatment of housing and squatting in different European countries.34
Squatting is a firmly established practice and tool in the action repertoire 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
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, dissociating these from traditional movements, especially the workers’ movement.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


Introductionâ•… 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 reaction to [.€.€.] crisis a spatialization of the social took place that established
urban space as a prime object of governmental policies.” He contends further “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 Western Europe belong to the “radical social movements”, which
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 objectives 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 movements in Europe and North America. They pursue the transformative potential 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 corresponds 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
or alternative lifestyles but at the same time are an articulation of “resistance against the valorisation and economisation of the city that is inherent
in its transformation into a ‘business location’ and ‘enterprise’.”44 Drawing 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 material housing need “by an emphasis on creating cultural alternatives,€[.€.€.]
identity politics and a positive acknowledgement that squatting, as a tenure,” did not follow “the dictates of the traditional channels of housing


8â•… Freia Anders and Alexander Sedlmaier
allocation and consumption and traditional power relations between consumer 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
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 contradiction 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 connecting 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 redevelopment policies deemed to be unjust. The militant reference to a right of rebellion 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 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. Contributions 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


Introductionâ•… 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 characteristics of both worlds, and finally contributions on housing struggles, occupied 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 strategies 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 chapters 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 Turnabout” 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
of differences, they address four main aspects: concerning scale, it is obvious 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 selfhelp strategies and resistance of Southern squatters function more silently


10â•… Freia Anders and Alexander Sedlmaier
and with the assistance of various international nongovernmental organizations (NGOs); finally, policy and governance responses are usually continuous, 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 institutionalization and cooptation, especially concerning what they term “the political economy of toleration”. An interesting example is their comparison of
illegal building in China and Hong Kong: the regulation of squatter settlements in Hong Kong was more bureaucratic than political and judicial,
while the handling of illegal land use in China has been dominated by political 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 squatting 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


Introductionâ•… 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 occupation predated the crown grant to white farmers. As a result, colonial officials 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 dispositions 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.

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 squatting 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 projects or as examples of a successful integration of social flashpoints. Moreover, 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 gecekondus erected by rural labour migrants on public land at the margins of
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


12â•… 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 settlement. 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 Ottoman 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 gecekondus “realistic hopes for upward social mobility”, although most did not
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 movements. The military coup of 1980 opened the way for a “drastic program
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 integration 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 fabric were ultimately less weighty. Anthropologist James Holston’s concept
of “insurgent citizenship” provides a stimulating point 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 settlements, 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


Introductionâ•… 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 necessary 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.
Inbal Ofer in Chapter€7 looks at the three barrios of Orcasitas, the largest 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 acknowledgment of two distinct sets of “rights”: those of landowners (propietarios), who did not necessarily reside in Orcasitas, and those of neighbours
(vecinos). According to Ofer, however, the transition period of the second
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 bringing 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 industrial nation. While more and more rural workers came to the squatter settlements 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 million people found housing that way”. Mobrand reconstructs the authorities’
interest in preventing an undue concentration of the country’s population


14â•… 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 squatter 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 apartments or land in new developments they had been awarded. The purposebuilt 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 politics 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.”
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 housing 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 marketoriented transition and the restitution of residential property after 1989,
“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, produced new losers. Other forms of squatting emerged, such as improvised
huts on wasteland along a river or the combination of squatting and subcultural art projects. In the context of the latter, activists—like the occupants


Introductionâ•… 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 ‘informal 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 therefore not be called ‘illegal’ since informal agreements—“often only a verbal accord”—formed a type of customary law. The self-conception of the
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 relations “worked until landowning government departments and state-owned
enterprises began to recognize the commercial value of their land holdings” and “customary law collided with modern property rights.” Simultaneously, 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 contradiction of being both a catalyst for self-reliance and empowerment and
a source of dependency-creating assistance.” Successful organizations of
squatters frequently made headway by financial compensations and landsharing arrangements but at times also provoked violent evictions or largescale 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 Community Organizations Development Institute. This institution “made the ‘community’ the key mechanism to overcome socio-economic difference” by


16â•… 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
Conditions of Affluence
The third section of this book adds what is often perceived as a peripheral and transient phenomenon to our global perspectives on the history
of squatting: case studies on occupations of buildings in affluent and economically highly advanced countries. The three chapters in this section, on
developments since “the social and conceptual turmoil of the 1960s”,50 on
transition periods of social welfare states that embraced neoliberal reforms,
and on urban development programmes that created plenty of opportunities for squatting in unused or derelict buildings, address contexts in which
squatting became a possible way of expressing support for alternative ways
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 phenomenon which however, is not the case. In economically highly advanced
countries, squatting has been a by-product of industrial and urban development and part of social struggles triggered by housing shortages and (mis-)
appropriations of urban space at least since the nineteenth century. Prior
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 transform 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 relations and alliances among squatters, citizens’ initiatives, heritage preservationists, 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 undergoing crisis. Not only the large-scale urban developments but also concomitant life styles increasingly came under crossfire from critical analysis.53


Introductionâ•… 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. Contemporary 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 negotiations 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 marginalised ‘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 neoliberal 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 homeless 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 Family 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 “official” squatters, the number of non-registered squatters rose up to a quarter of a million across Great Britain according to contemporary estimates,
predominantly in London. This “unofficial, unlicensed movement”, dominated 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 external tensions that the movement was facing. The intervention of Trotskyist
groups contributed to a split between the “official” and the unofficial movement. 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 democracy in plenary meetings of squatter communities. Squats suffered physical


18â•… 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 political 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
to the popularization of squatting with their imaginative campaigns, especially the White Housing Plan, which demanded that the city of Amsterdam 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 activism. In the Netherlands as well, it was a particular legal culture that benefited the emergence of a squatting movement; the Supreme Court decided
in 1971 that “the existing practice of evicting 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 conservative 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 occasion, the resistance against evictions led to violent riots, against which the
government employed not only the police but also the military; these skirmishes 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 conservative government, which ended a period of more than 40€years of relatively