« Squatters » by Thomas Aguilera & Alan Smart 2019 in The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Urban and Regional Studies Edited by Anthony M Orum First published: 15 April 2019 Print ISBN: 9781118568453| Online ISBN: 9781118568446| DOI: 10.1002/9781118568446 Copyright © 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. All rights reserved. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/book/10.1002/9781118568446 Squatters THOMAS AGUILERA Sciences Po Paris, France ALAN SMART University of Calgary, Canada Important contributions have been made to our knowledge of squatters in sociology, anthropology, geography, political science, planning, and architecture. In addition, there is research led by international organizations, agencies, and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). This entry will concentrate on key debates among academics and planners. Squatters occupy vacant land or buildings without the consent of the owner. Squatting primarily occurs as a response to precarious situations, but can also be done by more powerful actors. Its forms are affected by public regulation and the spatial environment. To squat involves a wide range of activities, claims, goals, resources, locations, and relationships with authorities. Squatters have very different profiles. A common response has been the creation of typologies. A central problem has been fragmentation of the approaches to the study of squatters. Interested in different dimensions, these literatures are isolated. Five main cleavages can be identified around which research is organized: North/South, urban/rural, survival tactics/social movements, buildings/lands, inhabitants/policies. Distinct approaches by scholars with different backgrounds and theoretical interests limit our ability to understand the phenomenon. This entry addresses the diversity of issues and debates around them. A MASSIVE GLOBAL AND STRUCTURAL PHENOMENON Usually, but not always, squatters live in the shadows of state taxation and census, and official data are missing or flawed. Most works on squatters are case studies. We lack an overview of squatter population at the national and international scales. Reliable quantitative data are rare so it is difficult to generalize about who squatters are, given the diversity of their local profiles. International organizations have done large surveys. United Nations Habitat estimates that more than 1 billion people can be considered squatters. Between 2000 and 2010, the number of squatters increased by 10 percent each year and could grow to 2 billion by 2030 (UN Habitat 2011). Thus, squatters are not at the margin of global urbanism. Along with other informalities, they are at the core of globalization and urbanization. Squatting is not the monopoly of the South. Wealthy cities also have many thousands of squatters. Squatting is not new. While the current economic and migrant crises have shed light on the emergence of massive informal camps and shantytowns in the North, squatting may have existed since cities have been regulated by law. European colonization expanded urban informality. Colonizers imposed rules that excluded indigenous populations from the formal system of property, urbanism, and urban services. But colonization is only one factor encouraging informal settlements. Some parts of European cities developed without any state control on land and buildings, and only a posteriori legalized. The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Urban and Regional Studies. Edited by Anthony Orum. © 2019 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2019 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd. DOI: 10.1002/9781118568446.eurs0320 2 SQUAT TERS With growing housing shortages since the nineteenth century, some activists used squatting as a mode of protest and direct action. fragmented and organized around five main cleavages. 1. FROM A MULTIDIMENSIONAL PHENOMENON TO A FRAGMENTED LITERATURE Squatting has been seen as both problem and solution (Mangin 1967). Settlements have been seen as a symptom of violent exclusionary processes that force people to violate the law to survive. They are the physical and spatial manifestation of urban poverty, inequalities, and urban segregation. On the other hand, squatting is a solution for people who cannot find affordable housing and who develop organizational skills to self-build their house, to create autonomous networks and communities (Turner 1968). Squatters can find hope in slums. Since the 1980s, squatters have been seen less as the problem but rather as victims of housing policy failures and state inefficiencies. Squatters occupy vacant niches left by these failures. Squatters can also be seen as contributing to the vitality of social movements able to challenge political and economic institutions, and develop alternatives. Squatter settlements also represent vast “invisible real estate markets” that develop parallel institutions, values and exchanges. More recently, squatting has been seen as a rent-seeking practice for privileged citizens. Indeed, as squatting needs numerous organizational, technical, juridical, and sometimes financial skills, squatters are not always the poorest inhabitants. In some parts of the world, the poorest inhabitants rather live in deteriorated formal rental housing where constraints on tenants and exploitation relationships are stronger. This diversity of practices and squatters’ profiles has two consequences for the study of squatters. First, the literature on squatters is 2. 3. The literature is partitioned between Northern and Southern studies. There are few empirical comparative studies of squatters in both hemispheres. We cannot see an inclusive theoretical agenda and framework. This partition is confirmed by international organizations that exclusively focus on Southern cities and thus suggest that squatted settlements only exist in the Global South. A second main cleavage divides emphasis on squatters as poor people who seek to survive or activists who want to oppose and change a political system. Many agree that they are both but focus on only one aspect. The literature is partitioned between those who consider squatting as a way to survive in contexts of housing shortage (mainly Southern studies) or as a radical political mode of collective action (mainly Northern studies). The third cleavage is more visible in Northern research. Some scholars only study squatted lands, while others only focus on squatted buildings. This partition is due to the history of slums and camps in Europe, mainly occupied by immigrants and refugees since the 1930s. Historians and migration researchers have been studying slums as a racialized form of precarious housing. After the resurgence of slums in Europe, anthropologists and geographers have begun again to consider squatted lands as a massive contemporary phenomenon. These scholars rarely dialogue with researches on squatting buildings as if physical difference had been reified into sociological difference. Indeed, squatters in buildings, mostly studied by European specialists of social movements, are seen as activists SQUAT TERS who struggle against neoliberal urban policies, against gentrification, for the right to housing, and for daily social emancipation. Squatted social centers are autonomous places where alternatives to capitalism develop and where the city is reappropriated. 4. The fourth cleavage concerns the location. The vast majority of studies focus on urban squatting. Only a few studies focus on the rural squatters that represent a large part of the phenomenon at the global scale. 5. The literature is also divided between scholars who study squatters and their strategies while others prefer explaining public policies targeting them. DIVERSITY OF SQUATTERS’ PROFILES AND GOALS Squatters do not form a homogeneous social group. Some of them find resources in the informal economy while other have legal jobs and stable incomes. Some of them look for legal houses while others would prefer to avoid legal constraints. Some of them aspire to a normalization of their daily life while others conceive squatting as an alternative way of life. Thus the second consequence of the diversity of the squatting landscape is the attempt by scholars to elaborate typologies to make clearer the social and political dimensions they were studying, particularly in Europe where the situations were extremely polarized and where the use of the label “squatters” hides a large scope of wealth, practices, and realities. One of the most used typologies in Europe is a five-fold one by Hans Pruijt (2013): 1. Deprivation-based squatting involves poor people enduring severe housing 2. 3. 4. 5. 3 deprivation, supported by middle-class activists. Alternative housing squatting involves young middle-class people in counterculture movements. They aim to develop daily autonomy and alternative ways of life with few financial resources. Entrepreneurial squatting involves middle-class people who develop specific activities such as bars, galleries, and music venues. Conservational squatters occupy vacant historic buildings targeted by renovation programs. Political squatters are middle-class young and radical activists who seek bases for work against the state. This typology has been developed to distinguish Northern squatters, but is useful to identify different dimensions of squatting in the South. REGULATION OF SQUATTERS AND URBAN POLICIES Despite the efforts some squatters deploy to resist or evade policies, squatters must deal with state agents at one moment or another. Policies on squatters are the central focus of the literature, particularly in the South. Facing the puzzling persistence of squatters in our contemporary cities, research has shown that public policies toward squatting are always ambivalent, oscillating between eviction, legalization, and tolerance. If most studies analyze forced evictions led by national or local governments, this is not the only way public actors intervene. Another common situation is tolerance. This anomalous form of regulation has three main explanations. Tolerance can be seen as a policy failure: public administrations are not able to regulate squatters. Alan Smart prefers a political economy perspective on 4 SQUAT TERS tolerance as a strategy that allows public actors in Hong Kong not to recognize and validate new property rights for squatters while retaining homes in a housing shortage. Toleration consists in avoiding changes and building a stable status quo (Smart 2001). Finally, Ann Varley (1998) invokes a “political use of illegality.” Slum toleration and formalization serve clientelist political strategies and moderate social movements in Mexico by coopting them. The most virulent debates concern legalization of squatted settlements and buildings. The first debate emerged in the South and has concentrated around two main questions. Does legalization – which can take many forms – of squatters’ buildings improve their living conditions? What are the effects of such policies on social groups and spaces? The debate was launched by Hernando de Soto, who claims entitling all informal property is a universal solution to poverty and slums. Formalization would bring squatters into regular housing and mortgage markets, incite them to improve their house, open the door to public infrastructure improvement by authorities, and expand household financial capacities (de Soto 2000). A second option would be not to legalize directly but to first upgrade squatters’ housing units and settlements’ infrastructures in order to improve the living conditions in situ. These theses have been criticized empirically and theoretically, but also for their policy implications for the future urban poor. First, empirical studies have shown the limited impacts of legalization and formalization. Moreover, slum-dwellers do not wait for legal titles to consolidate their houses or improve their neighborhood. What matters is not the legal status but the feeling of security. The causal link can be reversed: nonformalized slum-dwellers invest to improve their house in order to be recognized and legalized. Others have shown that entitlement and upgrading policies do not serve the poorest inhabitants who are less likely to live in targeted slums and because legal titles are expensive (Gilbert 2002). Upgrading programs favor absentee landlords and not tenants. As a consequence, slums become places of speculation as every market and slum-dweller who cannot afford legality is “silently evicted.” There is a risk of commodification of housing and gentrification (Burgess 1982). More recent works assume there is no miracle solution, so that mixed approaches are better. Slums are not isolated, and upgrading and formalization cannot be achieved without considering housing markets around them. Policies have to act both on infrastructures and tenure and adapt to each context. Geoffrey Payne proposes a twin-track approach: upgrading programs and facilitating access to legal rental housing in order to prevent the construction of new slums elsewhere (Payne 2005). The second legalization debate emerged in the North. Does institutionalization of squatter activists provoke the moderation and decline of the squatting movement? The issue emerged in the 1970s, specifically concerning the urban poor social movements. Negotiating with authorities and bureaucratization was seen as a key factor of the decline of social movements that used direct action and mass challenges. European students of the squatting movement are again discussing this issue. Squatters are not isolated and must deal with authorities. But there are different forms of institutionalization (Pruijt 2003) that produce different effects on movements. When terminal institutionalization (conventional modes of action totally replace disruption) is associated with repression by authorities, there is assimilation and the movement disappears. But the most common outcome is flexible institutionalization (conventional tactics complement disruptive ones). Municipalities SQUAT TERS sometimes legalize cultural squats through temporary leases to make city centers more attractive while evicting undesirable squatters (Uitermark 2004; Aguilera 2012). The most moderate squatters may be coopted by public administrations. Some become officials, representatives, or even mayors, while others create political parties on the basis of social center experiences. These recent works show that institutionalization or cooptation do not necessarily lead to the death of a movement. As with all post-Fordist social movements, squatting movements are diverse, conflicted, and fragmented. If some squatters accept legalization, others refuse and keep the squatting movement alive. SQUATTING AND STUDYING SQUATTING IN THE FUTURE The study of squatters requires us to study what has been seen as the shadow margins of the cities (Neuwirth 2004). Yet knowledge is constantly produced on squatters by social scientists and public administrations, by NGOs and international organizations. The phenomenon is more and more documented with extensive data. In this context, it is striking to observe a shift in studies from ethnography to quantitative analysis of squatters’ settlements and programs (Gulyani and Talukdar 2012). By doing so, researchers contribute to changing the perception of international organizations and governments on the problem. Much of the research on squatters has been written by academics, but engaged with political debates on how to improve the living conditions of squatters or support their struggles. On the one hand, some of the pioneers on the study of Southern squatters’ settlements became consultants for international organizations, NGOs, or governments. On the other hand, the specialists of the European squatting movements are 5 close to activists’ spheres and prone to research-action. The literature on squatters is rich in results and debates but not unified into a single field. Dialogue between different studies is not easy because they address different issues. However, some convergence can be observed, on which fruitful cross-cutting discussions can be expected. Occupation of public spaces has been revitalized since the Arab Spring, but also in numerous Western capitals with the Occupy and 15-M Indignados movements. The recent economic crisis, the forms of protests that followed, and the current so-called “refugee crisis” in Europe give the opportunity to add nuance to the analytic and political frontiers. Squatting for survival and squatting as direct political action have converged and recent studies of squatters have begun to cross the lines they constructed. Last, more comparison, particularly between North and South, could be key for better knowledge of squatters and better policies toward them. SEE ALSO: Do It Yourself Urbanism; European Cities; Favelas; Favelas/Squatter Settlements; Housing; Informal Economy; Informal Housing; Informal Land Markets; Informal Settlements; Informal Settlers; Informality; Land Regularization Policies (Latin America); Land Titling; Slumdog Cities; Slums and Shanties; Urban Informality; Urban Social Movements REFERENCES Aguilera, Thomas. 2012. “Gouverner les illégalismes: les politiques urbaines face aux squats à Paris” [“Governing Illegalism: Urban Policies against Squats in Paris”]. Gouvernement et action publique, 3(3): 101–124. Burgess, Rod. 1982. “The Politics of Urban Residence in Latin America.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 6(4): 465–480. de Soto, Hernando. 2000. The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else. London: Bantam Books. 6 SQUAT TERS Gilbert, Alan. 2002. “On the Mystery of Capital and the Myths of Hernando de Soto: What Does Legal Title Make?” International Development Planning Review, 24(1): 1–20. Gulyani, Sumila, and Debabrata Talukdar. 2012. “Slum Real Estate: The Low-Quality High-Price Puzzle in Nairobi’s Slum Rental Market and Its Implications for Theory and Practice.” World Development, 36(10): 1916–1937. Mangin, William. 1967. “Latin American Squatter Settlements: A Problem and a Solution.” Latin American Research Review, 2(3): 65–98. Neuwirth, Robert. 2004. Shadow Cities: A Billion Squatters, A New Urban World. New York, NY: Routledge. Payne, Geoffrey. 2005. “Getting Ahead of the Game: A Twin-Track Approach to Improving Existing Slums and Reducing the Need for Future Slums.” Environment and Urbanization, 17: 135–145. Pruijt, Hans. 2003. “Is the Institutionalization of Urban Movements Inevitable? A Comparison of the Opportunities for Sustained Squatting in New York City and Amsterdam.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 27(1): 133–157. Pruijt, Hans. 2013 “The Logic of Urban Squatting: The Logic of Urban Squatting in Europe.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 37(1): 19–45. Smart, Alan. 2001. “Unruly Places: Urban Governance and the Persistence of Illegality in Hong Kong’s Urban Squatter Areas.” American Anthropologist, 103(1): 30–44. Turner, John. 1968. “Barriers and Channels for Housing Development in Modernizing Countries.” Journal of the American Planning Association, 33(3): 161–181. Uitermark, Justus. 2004. “The Co-Optation of Squatters in Amsterdam and the Emergence of a Movement Meritocracy: A Critical Reply to Pruijt.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 28(3): 687–698. UN Habitat. 2011. State of the World’s Cities. Bridging the Urban Divide. London: Earthscan. Varley, Ann. 1998. “The Political Uses of Illegality: Evidence from Urban Mexico.” In Illegal Cities: Law and Urban Change in Developing Countries, edited by Edesio Fernandes and Ann Varley, 172–190. London: Zed Books. FURTHER READING Alsayyad, Nezar, and Ananya Roy, eds. 2004. Urban Informality: Transnational Perspectives from the Middle East, Latin America, and South Asia. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Cattaneo, Claudio, and Martínez Miguel, eds. 2014. The Squatters’ Movement in Europe: Commons and Autonomy as Alternatives to Capitalism. London: Pluto Press/Palgrave Macmillan. Davis, Mike. 2006. Planet of Slums. London: Verso. Fernandes, Edesio, and Ann Varley, eds. 1998. Illegal Cities: Law and Urban Change in Developing Countries. London: Zed Books. Hernandez, Felipe, Peter Kellett, and Lea K. Allen, eds. 2010. Rethinking the Informal City: Critical Perspectives from Latin America. New York: Berghahn Books. Squatting Europe Kollective. 2013. Squatting in Europe: Radical Spaces, Urban Struggles. Brooklyn, NY: Minor Compositions, Autonomedia.