Squatting in Europe. Radical Spaces, Urban Struggles

Squatting Europe Kollective (eds), Squatting in Europe. Radical Spaces, Urban Struggles Wivenhoe: Minor Compositions, 2013; 274pp; ISBN 9781570272578Squatting in Europe is a collection of sociological analyses of squatting in the Netherlands, Italy, Spain, Germany, France, and England, from a largely autonomist- Marxist perspective. Happily, the majority of the contributors are, or have been, active in squatting movements, so there is a wealth of nuance and great depth of understanding on display throughout the book. Most of the chapters take the form of specific case studies, exploring the various manifestations of squatting in Western Europe (aside from some mentions of East Berlin, the Eastern European squatting experience is largely absent). Hans Pruijt's opening chapter is an exception to the case study format in that it provides an overview of squatting across Europe, and deals more generally with the tensions around different approaches to squatting, problems of repression/legalisation, the dynamics of gentrification etc. This provides a solid grounding for the uninitiated reader to carry into the more specifically focussed chapters that follow. However, Pruijt's is one of six chapters which have been previously published elsewhere - only four are actually newly available here. Some of the reprinted articles are very dated, for example Pierpaolo Mudu's chapter was published in 2004 (nine years before this volume!), and in other instances the data being analysed dates back to the late-1990s (the empirical data collected for both Florence Bouillon's and Miguel A. Martinez Lopez's chapters began in 1998). Lynn Owens's and ETC Dee's chapters at least grope their way towards timeliness with information from early 2011, but many of the other case studies are around ten years old. Even though much of the material here is not new, this volume does usefully bring together a body of work that serves to illuminate some of the common challenges faced by squatters across Western Europe, as well as identifying the peculiar contexts of various countries.The Squatting Europe Kollective, who have edited the book, write that they are interested in how 'academic boundaries [can be] continuously crossed' (p274) to 'shed light on [the repression of squatting in European countries] through the analysis of its different sides, contributions and involved social conflicts' (p273), which takes the form of what they term, 'necessary scientific intervention into current political debates' (p273). This emphasis on science is very apparent. Most of the chapters are laden with typographies, configurations, lists, and tables - which is par for the course in many sociological approaches - but this often detracts from the analytical content. In particular, Thomas Aguilera's chapter on Parisian squats includes one diagram (p217) which is an utterly unintelligible mangle of boxes, axes, lines, and arrows. Another of his figures (over which Aguilera asserts copyright, by the way) is a pie-chart which is rendered useless by being coloured entirely in one shade of grey. In fairness, this latter problem is probably more attributable to a printing/editing error than to impenetrable diagram-fetishism - and indeed, this is not the only editing issue to be found in these pages. …

Перевод пока недоступен