A radical history of squatting and the struggle for the right to remake the city The Autonomous City is the first popular history of squatting as practised in Europe and North America. Alex Vasudevan retraces the struggle for housing in Amsterdam, Berlin, Copenhagen, Detroit, Hamburg, London, Madrid, Milan, New York, and Vancouver. He looks at the organisation of alternative forms of housing—from Copenhagen’s Freetown Christiana to the squats of the Lower East Side—as well as the official response, including the recent criminalisation of squatting, the brutal eviction of squatters and their widespread vilification. Pictured as a way to reimagine and reclaim the city, squatting offers an alternative to housing insecurity, oppressive property speculation and the negative effects of urban regeneration. We must, more than ever, reanimate and remake the urban environment as a site of radical social transformation..
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Alexander Vasudevan. The Autonomous City
The Autonomous City. A History of Urban Squatting
Contents
Introduction
1. From Shantytown to ‘Operation Move- In’: Squatter Sovereignty in New York
2 ‘Who are the Squatters?’: London’s Hidden History
3. Building a Squatters’ Movement: The Politics of Preservation and Provocation in Amsterdam and Copenhagen
4 ‘The Struggle Over Housing Continues’: Urban Squatting and Violent Confrontation in Frankfurt and Hamburg
5. Reassembling the City: Makeshift Urbanisms and the Politics of Squatting in Berlin
6. Seizing the City: Autonomous Urbanisms and the Social Factory
7. Mudflats Living and the Makeshift City: Settler Colonialism, Artistic Reinvention and the Contradictions of Squatting in Vancouver
8. Reclaiming New York: Squatting and the Neoliberal City
Afterword. From Survival to Hospitality: Reimagining the Squatted City
Acknowledgments
Notes
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Alexander Vasudevan
a more just and sustainable city continue.
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The efforts of the Harlem Tenants League pointed to the many problems faced by blacks living in New York, where they remained barred from renting most apartments. As a radical housing movement, it also anticipated a new wave of activism in which Communists played a central role. With the onset of the Depression, New York tenants faced growing immiseration and unemployment and were forced to scramble to retain or find affordable housing. Hundreds of thousands moved, became lodgers or joined the growing ranks of the homeless that lived on the city’s streets.
Many others found shelter in squatted shanty towns known as Hoovervilles (after then President Herbert Hoover). The most notable encampments could be found on the Great Lawn at Central Park (‘Hoover Valley’), on Houston Street (‘Packing Box City’) and in Riverside Park (‘Camp Thomas Paine’) along the Hudson River at 72nd Street, though the largest Hooverville in New York was actually in the East Village on the East River between 8th and 10th Streets (‘Hard Luck Town’) on a site that later became the Jacob Riis public housing project.40 There were countless other Hoovervilles across the country, from Seattle to Washington, DC, where thousands of veterans erected a vast informal settlement along the Anacostia River and in full view of the Capitol.41
