ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the occupation and improvement of underused urban land as a strategy of resistance. In contemporary urban life, conflicts about land and space are pervasive. This is true both where land is intensively used, and therefore scarce and expensive, and where land is abandoned, and therefore abundant and cheap. The decades after World War II saw a massive migration of capital and people out of America’s cities and into its suburbs. This migration, far from being purely an accident of market forces, was actively encouraged and, indeed, subsidized by the federal government. City governments attempted to return their newly acquired property to the private sector by auctioning it to the highest bidder. The official responses to modern urban squatting movements varied widely. President Carter’s Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, Patricia Harris, described squatters in Philadelphia as “no better than shoplifters”. The President of the Philadelphia City Council called the squatting movement the “beginning of anarchy".
