Abstract
Squatters in the Capitalist City is a comprehensive and engaging examination of urban squatters’ movements across Europe. While other recent books have taken a broader look at squatting worldwide in all its varied manifestations or taken a close look at individual cases, Martinez’s book studies “occupations of empty buildings or flats without the owner’s permission” (5), in European cities. For readers new to the subject, it is important to foreground that these occupations often take place in vacant apartment buildings, schools, or commercial buildings (often government property, though sometimes privately owned), by groups of squatters who have various motivations and goals: some squat because they need housing, others aim to create social centers for art, education, or organizing, while others want to try to forestall problematic urban development projects or preserve historic buildings. Local and regional policies across different European cities have historically been at least somewhat enabling of different facets of squatting such that it has arisen as more of an enduring movement than we have seen in the United States. Martinez tackles many pertinent issues in this book. He begins the book by situating squatting as a social movement, unearthing the social dynamics of the autonomist movement which connects squatters and their diverse goals. In subsequent chapters, Martinez examines the local and regional conditions that give rise to squatters’ movements (such as vacant property) and categorizes the diversity among squatters and their goals. The end of the book turns to analyze different responses by authorities and the increasing criminalization of squatting, and explore the narratives that circulate in the media about squatters that shape their public perception.
Martinez demonstrates the breadth and depth of his knowledge on squatting and uniquely balances the presentation of each throughout the book. As such, readers familiar with or new to the subject will find the rhythm of the chapters useful in different ways. Each chapter offers an extensive literature review, critical discussion, novel argument or synthesis, and then a case study (drawn mostly from Martinez’s own experiences or research) presented so as to concretize the ideas he works through in the rest of the chapter. The book frequently presents Martinez’s or others’ ideas as useful diagrams or tables. For example, in Chapter 4, Martinez critically discusses several different categorizations created by other scholars who have sought to clarify and make sense of the variation among squatters and presents many of these as tables to synthesize their ideas. Integrating other scholarship, he presents a new schema rooted in the social problems that motivate squatting (such as a need for housing or the desire to preserve building threatened with demolition). He considers the tactical or strategic orientations differently motivated squatters have toward their practices to identify likely outcomes of such engagements. Toward the end of the chapter, Martinez delves into several cases of squatting in Madrid to demonstrate the analytic utility of his schema: showing how these different facets intersect to produce different outcomes for squatters.
More broadly, Squatters in the Capitalist City reminds us that the occupation of space can be a protest against many facets of capitalism. Martinez demonstrates how these differences play out even among residents of the same squat. For example, some squatters challenge wholesale the private property regime, aiming to carve a space within the capitalist city for autonomous forms of organization and social engagement—what he calls social autonomism. Others push back against the underutilization of buildings or housing amid widespread need, seeking legalized access to affordable housing. Differences such as these also translate into varied relationships with authorities, mean they are disparately impacted by new laws criminalizing squatting, and are portrayed differently in media narratives.
What can U.S.-focused scholars take way from this? Fascinating and thorough, we ought not eschew the book’s lessons due to locational/contextual differences. Most U.S. cities have not seen what we might call a “squatters’ movement” since some instances in the later twentieth century like squatters in the Lower East Side of Manhattan. More contemporary examples tend to be relatively isolated and dispersed, such as squatters in places like Detroit or Oakland. But nonetheless, there are important take-aways for scholars interested in social movements, spatial justice, housing, and urban law/policy. Recognizing the various challenges squatters can mount to dominant property relations, Squatters in the Capitalist City may be informative for research on, for example, elite residents with second or third houses that sit vacant for much of the year, driving up housing costs in cities like New York or San Francisco; or speculators who sit on disused property in Detroit and let it deteriorate while residents are homeless. More concretely, the state of housing in the United States and the lack of affordability mean more and more residents are turning to nontraditional forms of shelter—from car living to urban camping to even squatting (which I write about in Detroit)—many of which entail illegally accessing space or property just like the squatting movements Martinez analyzes. For social movement scholars, this book highlights the importance of space for carrying out the tactics and strategies of movement activists. As he demonstrates throughout the book (but especially in Chapter 2), squatting can be both a tactic and a strategy: a way to gain access to affordable housing and also an immediate instantiation of a radical revisioning of social relationships. Squatters in the Capitalist City is an engaging and illuminating book that achieves Martinez’s goal of providing a comprehensive examination of urban squatters across Europe.