Autonomous City: A History Of Urban Squatting

The Autonomous City is the first popular history of squatting in Europe and North America. Drawing on extensive archival research as well as interviews with squatters and activists, it retraces the struggle for housing in Amsterdam, Barcelona, Berlin, Copenhagen, Hamburg, London, Milan, New York, Detroit, Paris and Vancouver. It looks at the organisation of alternative forms of housing - from Copenhagen’s Christiana ‘Free Town’ to the Lower East Side of Manhattan - as well as the official response, including the recent criminalisation of squatting, new powers of eviction and the vilification of protesters.
As a result, Alexander Vasudevan argues how, through a shared history of political action, community organisation and collective living, squatting has became a way to re-imagine the city. The book challenges the dominant cartography of the ‘neo-liberal city’: housing precarity, rampant property speculation and the negative effects of urban redevelopment and regeneration. In response, it argues that we must re-animate and re-make the city as a site of radical social transformation.