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In this, the first book-length study of the cultural and political geography of squatting in Berlin, Alexander Vasudevan links the everyday practices of squatters in the city to wider and enduring questions about the relationship between space, culture, and protest. * Focuses on the everyday and makeshift practices of squatters in their attempt to exist beyond dominant power relations and redefine what it means to live in the city * Offers a fresh critical perspective that builds on recent debates about the \"right to the city\" and the role of grassroots activism in the making of alternative urbanisms * Examines the implications of urban squatting for how we think, research and inhabit the city as a site of radical social transformation * Challenges existing scholarship on the New Left in Germany by developing a critical geographical reading of the anti-authoritarian revolt and the complex geographies of connection and solidarity that emerged in its wake * Draws on extensive field work conducted in Berlin and elsewhere in Germany

This paper introduces a set of analytical frames that explore the possibilities of conceiving, researching and writing a global geography of squatting. The paper argues that it is possible to detect, in the most tenuous of urban settings, ways of thinking about and living urban life that have the potential to reanimate the city as a key site of geographical inquiry. The paper develops a modest theory of ‘urban combats’ to account for the complexity and provisionality of squatting as an informal set of practices, as a makeshift approach to housing and as a precarious form of inhabiting the city.

This paper explores the recent resurgence of occupation-based practices across the globe, from the seizure of public space to the assembling of improvised protest camps. It re-examines the relationship between the figure of occupation and the affirmation of an alternative ‘right to the city’. The paper develops a critical understanding of occupation as a political process that prefigures and materializes the social order which it seeks to enact. The paper highlights the constituent role of occupation as an autonomous form of urban dwelling, as a radical politics of infrastructure and as a set of relations that produce common spaces for political action.

In this paper we examine the precarious everyday geographies of property guardianship in the United Kingdom. Temporary property guardianship is a relatively new form of insecure urban dwelling existing in the grey area between informal occupation, the security industry and housing. Young individuals, usually in precarious employment, apply to intermediary companies to become temporary 'guardians' in metropolitan centres, most notably in London. The scheme allows guardians to pay below market rent to live in unusual locations while 'performing' live-in security arrangements that are not considered as a form of 'work'. The experiences of becoming and living as a property guardian can be ambivalent and contradictory: guardians express economic and social advantages to being temporary, while also exposing underlying anxieties with 'flexible living'. In this paper we offer a detailed description of the various practices of property guardianship and how they must be understood, on the one hand, in light of recent geographical scholarship on housing insecurity and, on the other hand, as an example of a precarious subjectivity that has become normalised in recent decades in cities of the global North. Drawing on in-depth interviews with long-term property guardians in London, we unpack the narratives and rationales of university-educated and highly skilled individuals for whom the city is a site of intensified insecurity and flexible negotiation. In the end, we conclude that the form of permanent temporariness experienced by property guardians needs to be understood as a symptom of wider dynamics of work and life precarisation in urban centres and argue that it is imperative to extend recent geographical debates around work and life insecurity to include new housing practices and their role in co-constituting urban precarity.

In this article I explore the work of the Canadian artist Jeff Wall whose innovative photographic methods have come to challenge the traditional pictorial protocols linking the photographic image with its referent. Wall uses large format images enlarged on transparent synthetic film and mounted in lightboxes as a medium to explore various aspects of everyday life in capitalism. My main purpose is to reflect on the historical specificity and ontological complexity of Wall's turn to deep pictorial illusion. To do so, I argue that Wall's back-lit transparencies point to a re-materializing of longstanding historical connections between pictorial representation and art's social function as a relation of radical critique. Such traffickings between the 'visual' and the 'material' have increasingly become the source of debate with cultural geography and cultural theory more generally, and this article draws particular attention to the various patternings of landscape, spectacle, and everyday life that have come to characterize Wall's formal photographic repertoire. As I hope to show, not only does Wall's work give new credence to the notion of 'representation' but it also testifies to a revivified engagement with the materialities of picture-making. Indeed, what is ultimately at stake in Wall's work is an emphasis on presencing the material possibilities that are, in his view, inescapably inscribed within the practice of photography.

This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the concepts discussed in this book. The chapter relates incidents of various occupations undertaken by the striking refugees in Berlin. These are actions that, on the one hand, imagine a right to participate in the production of urban space. On the other hand, they anticipate and prefigure other forms of care, generosity and dwelling whose history is unthinkable without understanding Berlin as a city of migration. It is the relationship between the history of squatting in Berlin and the making of alternative urbanisms that is at the centre of this book. The book offers a detailed historical reconstruction of Berlin's squatting milieu from the late 1960s, focusing on what squatters actually did, the terms and tactics they deployed, the ideas and spaces they created.

This chapter focuses on how crises of capital became crises of dwelling. It examines how the recent history of housing inequality in Berlin is closely connected to the changing logics of capitalist urbanisation and a product of recurring cycles of creative destruction and accumulation by dispossession which have repeatedly condemned significant numbers of people to misery and prompted many to seek informal forms of housing and shelter. It talks about the making of the Tenement City, rent strikes in Weimar Berlin, and re‐building of a divided city. The main aim of the chapter is to retrace the history of dispossession and displacement, resistance and re‐appropriation and provide a supporting framework for understanding the necessary conditions that contributed to the emergence of Berlin's squatting scene and the various practices of resistance that they adopted.

This chapter refers to the violent eviction of squatters from 12 houses on Mainzer Straße in Friedrichshain on 14 November 1990 after three days of street battles with over 3000 West German police officers that resulted in the arrest of over 400 activists. It examines the emergence of a second major wave of squatting in Berlin in the former East of the city. It seeks to uncover an unbroken line of occupation and resistance linking the two major waves of squatting in Berlin. The first part seeks to reconstruct the relatively unknown history of illegal occupation in East Berlin (Schwarzwohnen). Particular emphasis is placed here on the relationship between Schwarzwohnen and the articulation of alternative forms of domesticity and home‐making that challenged official state priorities. The second part of the chapter tracks the further intensification of the squatting scene and its various material, emotional and political geographies.

The struggle for self‐defined autonomous spaces in West Berlin has a long and contested history that can be traced back to the late 1960s. It is also important to challenge the prevailing mythologising of 1968 and the post‐1968 era which has largely focused on either (1) the retreat of the student movement from active engagement in a public political sphere to various narcissistic experiments with ‘life‐style’ politics; and/or (2) the further radicalisation of particular groups who began to move from the provocative staging of symbolic violence to violent activism. The chapter discusses the relationship between experiments in communal living in West Berlin, early attempts at urban squatting, and wider developments within the extra‐parliamentary opposition. Protest and resistance depended on a new spatial grammar as early experiments in alternative forms of communal living in West Germany responded to the agitations of the late 1960s.