The World Turned Upside Down: The Trials of Freeborn John

This international history makes the case for squatting as a radical alternative to neoliberal urbanisation and a shared vision of the city

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/mar/16/the-autonomous-city-by-alexander-vasudevan-review-squatting

Thursday 16 March 2017

In February this year squatters moved into a £14m mansion near Buckingham Palace. It was the third such luxury property occupied in a matter of weeks by members of the Autonomous Nation of Anarchist Libertarians, or Anal for short, part of a campaign to highlight the scandal of empty properties at a time when homelessness and inequality are soaring. The number of people sleeping rough in England has risen steadily for the last six years.

Alexander Vasudevan’s study is the first comprehensive attempt to reconstruct the history of squatting as “the expression of an autonomous understanding of shared city life”. Each of his eight chapters takes a specific city and charts the evolution of squatting since the radical social movements of the 1960s, showing how the occupation of buildings became a way of reimagining the city “as a space of necessity and refuge, experimentation and resistance”. As well as providing an instant solution to the need for housing, squatting was also a way to reclaim the city in the face of gentrification and urban renewal schemes that were stripping it of public spaces and displacing working-class populations.

But Vasudevan goes further, claiming that squatters were also urban pioneers who explored a new kind of lifestyle, reclaimed spaces and asserted, to use Henri Lefebvre’s phrase, a universal “right to the city”. Squats became laboratories in which people experimented with new identities and collective living. In cities across Europe and the US, squats were places “where one could build an alternative world”.

Vasudevan sees his book not merely as a dry contribution to urban history, but as celebration of the vital ideas and achievements of those squatters who dared to imagine an alternative vision of life, an alternative to the neoliberal city and the urbanisation that is still engulfing the world. His highly original argument is that the history of squatting reveals “the potential reorganisation of our cities along more collective, socially just and ecologically sustainable lines”. Using archives created by squatters themselves, documenting their evanescent experiments, Vasudevan demonstrates that “the squat was a place of collective world-making: a place to express anger and solidarity, to explore new identities and different intimacies, to experience and share new feelings, and to defy authority and live autonomously”.

His opening chapter on New York City explores how a squatting movement emerged out of tenant activism. By 1960, 30% of New York’s non-white population were living in dilapidated housing and a series of rent strikes helped to draw the community together, giving tenants the confidence to fight for improved standards. In spring 1970 a squatter movement appeared called Operation Move-In. By the summer it had placed 150 working-class families, mostly of African American or Latino background, in abandoned apartments scheduled for demolition as part of a plan to build housing for middle- and upper-income families. One parent told a reporter: “We’ve been living in horrible places with horrible people for a year. This is … a nice community.”

Initially the city responded by destroying the plumbing and fixtures in all its empty properties. But eventually Operation Move-In forced the authorities to back down and allow the squatters – who had repaired and renovated their homes – to stay. Nearly a thousand housing units were also added to the urban redevelopment plan on the Upper West Side. Operation Move-In was a success, not only winning more housing but raising the issue’s profile through publicity stunts such as a “Housing Crimes Trial” attended by 1,500 people. The movement encouraged “new ways of thinking about and inhabiting the city as a space of political action and self-organisation”.

In London, the roots of squatting go back to the immediate postwar period when war veterans and Communist party activists occupied empty properties in 1946. For a time squatters even moved into luxury flats in Duchess of Bedford House, Kensington. But it was not until the 1960s and 70s that squatting became a more widespread phenomenon. At one point, a group living in a row of derelict GLC properties on Freston Road, west London, declared independence from the UK. The Free Independent Republic of Frestonia even wrote to the UN requesting a detachment of peacekeepers to prevent their imminent eviction. The UN didn’t respond, but the publicity generated by the squatters led to negotiations with the GLC and eventually the site was given to the Notting Hill housing trust.

Vasudevan’s argument is compelling and supported by impressive research. His account takes in the “alternative self-organised community” of Christiania, established in an abandoned barracks in Copenhagen in 1971, and the Berlin pensioners who occupied their community centre which was threatened with redevelopment, as well as the vibrant scene in Amsterdam where as many as 70,000 people were squatting between 1964 and 1999. Vasudevan shows how the occupation of vacant properties became “a radical urban social movement”, shaping the recent development of many cities. By occupying and renovating derelict houses, and – as happened in Berlin’s tenement buildings – creating a whole alternative social infrastructure with cafes, day care centres, workshops, concert venues, clinics, cycle repair shops and even a children’s petting zoo, squatters provided their cities with examples of collective living and social transformation.

It is, of course, deeply ironic that this “makeshift urbanism” – the radical repurposing of defunct urban spaces to create alternative communities – has now made cities such as Berlin highly attractive to businesses and gentrifiers: revolutionary ideas reduced to urban “branding assets”. As the moneyed classes and developers move into an area, the authorities begin clearing squatters. Indeed most of the spaces Vasudevan discusses have long since been redeveloped and the occupants evicted. In part, therefore, his project is an attempt “to reconstruct and reanimate these spaces”, preserving their “alternative vision of collective city life”.

The role of squatting has changed – it’s less about the wider housing movement, more to do with diverse protest cultures
In recent years the role of squatting has changed, becoming less about the wider housing movement and more to do with diverse protest cultures, such as the anti-globalisation campaign. Vasudevan points out that in the wake of the financial crisis “a sustained and systematic attack on alternative forms of living and working has taken place in cities across Europe and North America”. As rents and house prices soar, homes have become commodities and cities have been turned into “sites of intense displacement and inequality, exploitation and poverty”. Many people have been left without adequate housing, and radical housing movements have re-emerged in Berlin, New York and Paris, as well as in Greece, Italy and Spain, where 20% of the country’s housing stock now lies empty. In London, too, the age of austerity has prompted a revival of squatting, embodied in groups such as Focus E15 in Newham and Sisters Uncut in Hackney. However, on 1 September 2012 it became for the first time a criminal offence to squat a residential building in the UK.

The implications of the legislation are poignantly illustrated by the fate of Daniel Gauntlett, who was charged under the new anti-squatting laws. He froze to death outside an empty bungalow in Aylesford in 2013. As Vasudevan’s scholarly and illuminating study shows, for today’s squatters as for their predecessors, the urgent issue of housing is part of a broader concern. For squatting – in its radical incarnation – is about the future of our cities and about how all of us, as citizens, have a right to remake them into fairer, more humane places in which to live.

• PD Smith’s most recent book, City: A Guidebook for the Urban Age, is published by Bloomsbury. The Autonomous City: A History of Urban Squatting by Alexander Vasudevan is published by Verso. To order a copy for £16.99 go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min. p&p of £1.99.

Judge criticises Bristol City Council as Tent City homeless people celebrate victory in banning case

By Tristan_Cork | Friday August 26, 2016

Bristol City Council solicitor Shazia Daya’s signature on court papers
http://www.bristolpost.co.uk/judge-criticises-bristol-city-council-as-tent-city-homeless-people-celebrate-victory-in-banning-case/story-29657790-detail/story.html
A senior judge has criticised Bristol City Council for attempting to effectively banish a group of homeless people from the entire city, after the group won a major victory in court to stop the ban.
Council chiefs backed down in their attempt to impose a court injunction on the so-called ‘Tent City’ group of around 10 homeless people who have been camping for months in a park in Easton, and agreed a deal with them.

The council had tried to evict the 10 from the park and pass an injunction which would have meant they would be committing a crime if they slept rough of camped on council-owner public spaces anywhere else in Bristol effectively banning them from the city.
The original injunction made it a crime for them to sleep rough anywhere in Bristol
But just minutes before the case at the Bristol Civil Courts, council legal chiefs backed down. Instead, the out-of-court deal they agreed with the homeless people was that they would be evicted from the Peel Street Park in Pennywell Road in 28 days, and that the injunction would only apply to that park, not the whole city, and only for six months.
Judge Roderick Denyer QC welcomed the climbdown, criticised the council and praised the homeless people, who included an injured ex-serviceman, for challenging it.
“The injunction as sought initially was far too wide, that was the view I had two weeks ago,” he told the court. “I take on board fully that the ex-serviceman, for instance, served his time in the armed forces, was badly injured and spent a long time in hospital.
“I’m pleased it’s been able to be resolved. There’s a limit to what I can do in this situation. I don’t have any magic powers to deal with Bristol’s homelessness crisis and I would like to thank all the homeless people and the supporters for coming today. It’s an emotional area but I am very, very grateful, and I am pleased that this injunction is now in a much, much more sensible form,” he added.
The group of people living in the park had been supported by Bristol Housing Action Movement (BHAM), and an online crowd-funding appeal raised enough money to hire Derek McConnell, from South West Law, to represent them in court.
He slammed the council too, for the way officers had treated the homeless people. “There are other issues not covered, including the extent to which the authorities advise people if they don’t have local connections that is quite wrong legally, and the sooner the authority get away from this gate-keeping mentality to people presenting themselves as homeless the better,” he told the court.
The ex-serviceman, who asked not to be named in reports, said he was hopeful now that a home could be found for him. “I’ve gone from being told to get out of the city entirely, to now being told I’m an urgent priority, which is a good thing,” he said.
“They tried to put me in one of the ‘crash pads’ for homeless, but they are a hell-hole. We have people coming from those crash pads to stay at the tent city for a bit of peace and quiet. I’ve felt a lot safer there, and I’m going to stay with the lads until I’m sorted we’ve got a good community down there,” he added.

Another Tent City resident, a Polish man called Hubert, said he was pleased the council backed down. “I’ve been in England 12 years and worked and paid taxes for ten years, but ended up homeless after I lost my documents and can no longer work legally. When I get the documents again, I’ll be back on my feet,” he said.
“I’m really glad that the council aren’t doing this. I was feeling that they were going to force me out of the city, so I’m happy. I’m glad a lot of help and support from the local community, and from Richard and that can influence a judge and the council,” he added.
“It’s a definite victory,” said BHAM’s Richard Lloyd. “The residents of Tent City were going to be faced with a real problem in that they were going to have nowhere to live and nowhere to even be homeless in Bristol.
“It would’ve added a huge problem but now they can at least carry on trying to make a life for themselves here in Bristol. The judge said the original injunction was far too wide, and several times that a court can’t pass an injunction that it knows cannot be enforced. No one wants to jail homeless people.
“An injunction just for the park itself and just for six months is reasonable. The council lacks the resources to meet the need out there, but there needs to be a better dialogue between housing officers and the homeless people, and the likes of BHAM and Acorn Bristol on what homeless people’s rights are and what support they can get,” he added.
Bristol Mayor Marvin Rees, said the council ‘always tries to avoid’ taking court action against homeless people. “We always try to avoid taking this sort of action and we have spent a great deal of time engaging with the people in Peel Street Park since we first made contact with the camp back in April,” he said.
“However, we do not permit camping or sleeping rough in tents within our parks and open spaces, as we have to protect these areas and make sure they are available to everyone. The council and its partners understand that sometimes tents or temporary shelters are erected by vulnerable people in need of help and support. Those camped on the land have all been offered the support of St Mungo’s Outreach Team which is commissioned by the Local Authority to provide support to people sleeping rough.
“St Mungo’s visited the camp more than 18 times and spoke to 15 different people. In addition the council’s Streetwise team, which deals with anti-social behaviour issues, has visited the camp five times.
“At least three members of the camp have been supported into accommodation, with one of them also finding employment. A number of people were found to have connections with other areas and they were offered help with travel to that area and information on how to access further support once there. This offer was not always taken up, with some people choosing to remain in the camp. Those with a local connection to Bristol or no local connection to any local authority area, were offered a bed in a night shelter. An action plan was also drawn up for each person.
“The council works closely with its partners to ensure that those that are homeless are supported to access help and accommodation in the city. This support is ongoing and we will continue to engage with the people still left at the camp.
“The Rough Sleeping Partnership and other agencies are working to address the issue of homelessness in the city, as we believe that no one should be forced to sleep rough in Bristol. A number of extra bed spaces have been made available thanks to the partnership, with another two guardianship properties set to open in the coming weeks. We will continue to look at how we can all work together to support people and help them off the street as quickly as possible, as this remains one of our key priorities,” he added.

Victory for Tent City homeless as judge slams council

————————————————————————————-

The defendants and their supporters who attended the hearing were all pleased with the result.
Richard Lloyd from the Bristol Housing Action Movement said: “We’re very very happy. The injunction the council originally applied for was draconian and unhelpful and there was no way that was going to get through court, whereas the revised injunction they just conceded a lot down to a level that is really quite reasonable.”
An ex-serviceman and resident of Tent City who asked to remain anonymous told Bristol24/7 that he was badly injured and spent a lot of time in hospital.
Another resident, a Polish man who gave his name only as Hubert, said that he has lived in Bristol for 12 years but added that he lost all forms of ID and can no longer work legally.
The residents now have 28 days to leave Peel Street Park and move elsewhere, whether this be to another spot in their tents or into accommodation provided by a housing association.
Bristol mayor Marvin Rees said that the city council tries to avoid taking court action against homeless people and has spent “a great deal of time” engaging with the people in Peel Street Park since first making contact with the camp in April.
“However, we do not permit camping or sleeping rough in tents within our parks and open spaces, as we have to protect these areas and make sure they are available to everyone,” Rees said.
“The council and its partners understand that sometimes tents or temporary shelters are erected by vulnerable people in need of help and support.
“Those camped on the land have all been offered the support of St Mungo’s Outreach Team which is commissioned by the local authority to provide support to people sleeping rough.”

LookLeft: Ultán Gillen’s original article – Citizen Press Ltd., 24a/25 Hill St, Dublin 1.

Michael Davitt (1846-1906) is one of the most important figures of modern Irish history. A member of the Irish Republican Brotherhood (the Fenians) from the 1860s, Davitt went on to play a leading role in the Land War of the 1880s that helped break the power of the landlords in Ireland and eventually led to the transfer of the ownership of the land of Ireland to the people. Thereafter, he advocated socialism. His success came from mixing direct struggle by the people for social justice with political action, writes Ultán Gillen.

Fully up-to-date as of late 2016 and including everything you need to know to stay as long and as comfortably as possible in your new home. Squatting is a 21st century growth industry as The City encourages house price inflation and increasing use of ‘property’ as ‘investment’ for those on the QE ‘funny money’.

Chapters on: squatters’ rights; property guardians; first steps; finding a place; securing the place; dealing with alarms; proving it’s not residential; visitors to your place; dealing with the police; immigration; dealing with security guards; a note on filming; dealing with ‘owners’; fixing your place up; electricity; defending your home in court; enforcement of possession orders; enforcement of possession orders when places have been previously squatted; railway property; living in vehicles; gypsies and travellers; debt collectors; injunctions; organising; some squatting history; glossary of jargon and terms; further resources

Available from Bookfinder.com and Amazon.co.uk

Isabelle Fraser – 8 JANUARY 2017

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/property/house-prices/robbthe-housing-crisis-has-spread-everybody/

From the roof of the east London office of the charity Shelter, you can see the remnants of over a century of the capital’s housing policy. Old terraced houses, turn of the century estates, oppressive Sixties tower blocks, the Modernist grandeur of the Barbican, and the knot of skyscrapers in the City beyond.

Years before he became chief executive of Shelter, Campbell Robb lived in a Peabody estate, much like the one below. Well-built and available at affordable rents, these kinds of homes are increasingly unavailable for London’s burgeoning Generation Rent, which PwC estimated that will increase from 40pc in 2000, to 60pc in 2025.

Downstairs in Robb’s office, there is a poster with ‘Enough is Enough!’ written in big red letters, commissioned for the charity’s 50th anniversary this year. Shelter started life campaigning for the millions of ‘hidden homeless’, who lived in slums; it was the same year as Kathy Come Home, Ken Loach’s famous film about homelessness.

It is now a powerful voice calling for ways to help solve the housing crisis, and ameliorate conditions those renting privately or struggling to find anywhere to live. Recent victories include the Government’s announcement in the Autumn Statement to ban letting fees for tenants; the charity continues to campaign for long tenancies for renters and runs a helpline for homeless people.

Now, Robb is leaving his post after seven years in the top job to head up the Joseph Rowntree Foundation. “One of the biggest challenges has been…to get enough people to recognise this was a housing crisis that was beginning to impact every bit of society. People thought it only affected certain kinds of people, the very poorest in slum conditions that Shelter was founded on,” he says. Since he joined, housing has made it way up the public’s priority list. When he arrived in January 2010, housing came in 18th on Ipsos Mori’s survey which finds the “single biggest issue” for Britons. In November 2016, it came fifth.

“The reason for that is affordability,” he says. The housing crisis “has spread to everywhere. It’s not just poor people, or those who are just managing, it’s right up there.” The average house price in the UK has climbed 29.4pc in the last seven years; in London it has soared by 69.6pc, far ahead of wage increases.

As a result, it has become a hot potato. “It’s a political issue that has become real for a lot of people across the country. Not just in Labour seats, but Conservative MPs have people in their constituencies who are saying my children can’t afford to buy,” he says. “We have a group of people who are in their 50s and 60s for the first generation since the Second World War, looking at their children’s housing prospects, and they are worse than their own.”

Not only is there political pressure coming from voters, but also from big companies.

Deloitte and KPMG both bought flats in the capital for their graduates to live in, and Shelter has teamed up with companies such as Starbucks to introduce a rental deposit scheme which workers can pay back, interest free.

It could have been even worse, he says. “In the last seven years, if interest rates had gone up by 2 or 3pc you would have seen a raft of repossessions like those in the 80s. You would have seen a crisis beyond what we already have. So in some ways housing policy has been lucky.”

This affordability crisis has been compounded by a “failure of certain policies”, he says, as well as the financial crisis and the austerity that followed. The previous governments, including New Labour and the coalition, all failed to build enough and put little focus on the supply side, he argues. They all “believed the way to solve the housing crisis was on the home ownership and on demand side, to effectively make money available cheaply through Help to Buy-type products, [which enables first-time buyers to purchase a home with a 5pc deposit] and less so in direct investment in house building.” Help to Buy was a crucial policy after the downturn, designed to get house builders moving again by stimulating demand. But that policy has continued, even while house builders are posting record profits once again.

There’s a problem with this model of solving the housing crisis, says Robb: “it’s broken”. “With the death of public housing and local authorities, the private house builders have had to carry that weight and they can’t,” he says. Part of the problem is due to the land market; the high cost of land forces developers to keep upping prices and making homes smaller. “You can’t criticise them for doing what they were set up to do, they are there to maximise profit for their shareholders,” he says. “That doesn’t necessarily translate into the best housing policy for Britain. That’s why you need more small builders, more land available – public and private – and you need public building”.

With the new Government, the rhetoric has changed noticeably. “This is a government that’s got more sense of a failed housing market than any of the previous ones,” he says. It has become more interventionist, even pinching policies from the Labour party’s manifesto, as was the case with banning letting fees. There is less focus on the importance of home ownership, and more money for affordable homes and talk of other types of housing, such as the private rental sector. Now, after seven years, the “house building budget has come back to what it was in 2008,” he says. “So we have seen a very big cycle”.

Part of the policy shift is a recognition that the market has changed remarkably during that time. “Over those seven years there was a massive growth of people in the rental sector, and the Government is finally catching up with the need to regulate that.”

Another change is the recognition of housing being a form of infrastructure, which Robb describes as “a big step”. “It’s never done that – it’s always separated it from roads and transport. They seem to finally recognise that investment will be an improvement to the economy like other types of infrastructure.”

Small movements and policy tweaks such as these are key to making up the deficit of homes that must be built, rather than big, sweeping changes, he argues. “It would be good if the Government had lots of different small things [planned for the upcoming housing white paper] because actually with a bit of investment, and a bit of policy and political will you can make this happen.”

Where others may see as an insurmountable challenge, Robb is hopeful about ending the housing crisis. “I am optimistic that it can be fixed. Having waited seven years, I have a government whose public pronouncements… are more nuanced and thought through than many of the previous governments’,” he says. With a promising Autumn Statement which promised billions to affordable housing, and a housing white paper on the way, “they may be swallows that don’t make a full spring but we can begin to hope that if they follow those things through, we might begin to see a start… I’m optimistic until I’m proven otherwise.”