How Do Squatters Deal with the State? Legalization and Anomalous Institutionalization in Madrid

Radical and autonomous urban movements like the European squatters' movement tend to resist integration into the institutions of the state, although particular legal and political conditions in each country or city may significantly alter this tendency. In this article, I examine the controversial issue of ‘institutionalization’ among squatters, focusing on the few cases of legalized squats (social centres) in the city of Madrid. Negotiations with the state authorities and processes of legalization are the major forms of institutionalization involving squatters. However, an anomalous kind of institutionalization also emerges once squats, whether legalized or not, become consolidated and socially accepted. For squatting to have a successful impact, then, depends on both the type of autonomy achieved by squatters and the different outcomes of the processes of institutionalization. The case of Madrid provides empirical evidence that: (1) negotiations with state authorities were very frequent among squatters, but most were defensive; (2) the few cases of legalization were due to specific conditions such as the urban centrality of the squats, single‐issue identities, social network solidarity, favourable media coverage, formal organizations working as facilitators and the squatters' leadership of the process. Furthermore, legalized squats in Madrid preserved a high degree of autonomy, self‐management and ties to other radical social movements. In conclusion, both the legalized squats and the squatters' movement in Madrid as a whole, avoided ‘terminal institutionalization’ and, instead, gave shape to a ‘flexible’ one.     

From Occupation to Recuperation: Property,Politics and Provincialization in Contemporary Madrid

Recent debates have once again engaged with the substance and meaning of urban politics within our increasingly complex and startling contemporary landscapes. Yet these debates, while giving nods in the direction of feminist and postcolonial scholarship, largely work through traditional lenses of class, labor and the dynamic workings of neoliberal capitalism. In this article, I focus on spaces of difference and their engagement with the urban to demonstrate how politics ‘happens' in locations often left off the map of both scholarship and popular imaginaries, and, crucially, how those locations can, in fact, illuminate shifting political arrangements elided by other methodologies. By juxtaposing European okupa debates with postcolonial discussions of urban informality, I trace what I argue is a new iteration of squatting within a city both ravaged by edicts of neoliberal austerity and buoyed by the efflorescence of social movements and alternative political projects. I then explicate the role of property in constituting the urban within Spain, using the concept of ‘provincialization'. In doing so, I think relationally between systems of property and emergent forms of insurgency to argue that we are witnessing an anticipatory politics that fundamentally challenges hegemonic relationships between everyday citizens and regimes of property ownership.     

Practicing Openness: Investigating the Role of Everyday Decision Making in the Production of Squatted Space

By means of illegal occupation, squatters produce (urban) space. Previous studies have predominantly focused on the external dimensions of this process (e.g. squatters' negotiations with authorities), while the few studies that have analyzed the internal processes of producing squatted space have mainly focused on formal and explicit decision‐making processes. The effect of everyday practices and improvised decision making on the production of squatted space, however, has been overlooked. This article aims to fill this gap in the literature. It draws on five months of ethnographic fieldwork in two ‘entrepreneurial squats' (in the Netherlands and France) to analyze how, on an everyday practical level, squatters seek to reconcile a frame that advocates ‘open space' with contradictory practical or emotional needs. It finds that squatters regulate the openness of the spaces they occupy by putting into place spatial, temporal and social boundaries that define who and what is more or less in place. Based on a level of personal or ideological identification, then, the squatters establish a sense of community, distinguish between desirable and undesirable activities and create spatial meaning.     

The Nomad,The Squatter and the State: Roma Racialization and Spatial Politics in Italy

What happens when Roma people move from the space of an informal settlement to that of a squat of a housing rights movement? In this article, which is based on the analysis of housing squats involving Roma people in the Italian capital city of Rome, I argue that this move is more than a housing solution: it is a new form of contentious and aesthetic politics. In Rome approximately 7,000 Roma face extreme housing deprivation and segregation, in both official and makeshift camps. While different associations have for many years advocated Roma housing inclusion through a minority and human‐rights framework, in the aftermath of the 2007/2008 economic crisis an increasing number of Roma have moved to squats set up by social movement activists. The aim of the article is threefold. First, it illustrates the collective action repertoire of Roma‐squatting. Secondly, it considers its aesthetic politics, which through spatial dislocation unsettles the racializing discourse endorsed by policymakers that underpins the segregation of the Roma. Finally, this article unpacks the process of politicization of Roma‐squatting and discusses the urban frames and material resources that consolidate this transformation through a comparison of four housing squats that Roma people joined.