ABSTRACT

This book offers a unique contribution, exploring how the intersections among migrants and radical squatter’s movements have evolved over past decades. The complexity and importance of squatting practices are analyzed from a bottom-up perspective, to demonstrate how the spaces of squatting can be transformed by migrants. With contributions from scholars, scholar-activists, and activists, this book provides unique insights into how squatting has offered an alternative to dominant anti-immigrant policies, and the implications of squatting on the social acceptance of migrants. It illustrates the different mechanisms of protest followed in solidarity by migrant squatters and Social Center activists, when discrimination comes from above or below, and explores how can different spatialities be conceived and realized by radical practices.

Contributions adopt a variety of perspectives, from critical human geography, social movement studies, political sociology, urban anthropology, autonomous Marxism, feminism, open localism, anarchism and post-structuralism, to analyze and contextualize migrants and squatters’ exclusion and social justice issues. This book is a timely and original contribution through its exploration of migrations, squatting and radical autonomy.

chapter |32 pages

Introduction

Migrations, squatting and radical autonomy

part I|32 pages

Borders and frontiers

chapter 1|6 pages

From the desert to the courtroom

35Challenging the invisibility of the Operation Streamline dragnet and en-masse hearings

chapter 3|7 pages

Undocumented territories

Strategies of spatializations by undocumented migrants

chapter 4|11 pages

Trapped on the border

A brief history of solidarity squatting practices in Calais

part II|53 pages

Squatting for housing

chapter 5|12 pages

Why migrants' squats are a political issue

67A few thoughts about the situation in France

chapter 8|5 pages

Palazzo Bernini

An experience of a multicultural squatted house in Catania

part III|61 pages

Resistance to exclusion, criminalization and precarity

chapter 10|10 pages

Space invaders

121The ‘migrant-squatter’ as the ultimate intruder

chapter 12|19 pages

Emancipation, integration, or marginality

The Romanian Roma in Bologna and the Scalo Internazionale Migranti

chapter 13|18 pages

“We are here to stay”

Reflections on the struggle of the refugee group “Lampedusa in Hamburg” and the Solidarity Campaign, 2013–2015

part IV|41 pages

The difficulties of defining and arranging diversity among heterogeneous subjects

chapter 14|7 pages

Sacred squatting

183Seeking sanctuary in religious spaces

chapter 15|18 pages

Beyond solidarity

Migrants and squatters in Madrid

part V|65 pages

Social centers, radical autonomy and squatting – beyond citizenship and borders

chapter 17|8 pages

Beyond squatting

225An autonomous culture center for refugees in Copenhagen

chapter 18|16 pages

When migrants meet squatters

The case of the movement of migrants and refugees in Caserta

chapter 19|9 pages

Migrant squatters in the Greek territory

Practices of resistance and the production of the Athenian Urban Space

chapter 20|15 pages

Natural resource scarcity, degrowth scenarios and national borders

The role of migrant squats

chapter 21|3 pages

Euro trash in Loïsada, New York