ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the historical development of the squatting movement in Berlin from the late 1960s to the present. It charts the everyday spatial practices and political imaginaries of squatters. It examines the composition and assembling of alternative collective spaces in the city of Berlin and takes in developments in both the former West and East Berlin. For squatters, the city of Berlin came to represent a site of both political protest and creative reappropriation. The central aim of this chapter is therefore to show how this squatting can plausibly be understood as one historically specific example of an alternative autonomous urbanism in which theoretical ideas about politics and place were transformed into methodologies for assembling “times and spaces for alternative living” (Pickerill & Chatterton, 2006, p. 743). In particular, I will focus on the role and significance of the German squatter movement (Hausbesetzerbewegung) from the 1960s onwards. Despite a growing body of literature on 1968 as a watershed moment in the evolution of new social movements in West Germany (Von Dirke, 1997; Rucht, 2001; Thomas, 2003), there is little empirical work on the role of the squatter movement within a broader matrix of protest and resistance (cf. Karapin, 2007; Koopmans, 1995). To what extent was the squatter movement in West and later a reunified Germany successful in articulating a creative reworking of the built form and urban space? In what ways were these counterclaims to the city expressed as a form of architectural activism? What “micropolitical” tactics were adopted by squatters in Berlin? In its detailed focus on the practices of squatters, the chapter should also raise questions about the revival of occupation-based forms of resistance in a new age of austerity. To what extent, it asks, can squatting articulate a renewed form of emancipatory urban politics and the possibility of forging new ways of thinking about and inhabiting the city? In what way might squatting connect up with recent struggles for the “right to the city” and new forms of urban commoning?
