The Autonomous City. Alexander Vasudevan

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The Autonomous City

      The Autonomous City

       A History of Urban Squatting

      Alexander Vasudevan

      First published by Verso 2017

      © Alexander Vasudevan 2017

      All rights reserved

      The moral rights of the author have been asserted

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       Verso

      UK: 6 Meard Street, London W1F 0EG

      US: 20 Jay Street, Suite 1010, Brooklyn, NY 11201

       versobooks.com

      Verso is the imprint of New Left Books

      ISBN-13: 978-1-78168-786-4 (PB)

      ISBN-13: 978-1-78168-785-7 (HB)

      ISBN-13: 978-1-78168-787-1 (US EBK)

      ISBN-13: 978-1-78168-788-8 (UK EBK)

       British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

      A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

       Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

      A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress

      Typeset in Sabon by MJ & N Gavan, Truro, Cornwall

      Printed in the US by Maple Press

      For all the squatters whose struggles to build

      a more just and sustainable city continue.

      Contents

      Introduction

      1.From Shantytown to ‘Operation Move-In’: Squatter Sovereignty in New York

      2.‘Who are the Squatters?’: London’s Hidden History

3.Building a Squatters’ Movement: The Politics of Preservation and Provocation in Amsterdam and Copenhagen

       4.‘The Struggle Over Housing Continues’: Urban Squatting and Violent Confrontation in Frankfurt and Hamburg

       5.Reassembling the City: Makeshift Urbanisms and the Politics of Squatting in Berlin

       6.Seizing the City: Autonomous Urbanisms and the Social Factory

       7.Mudflats Living and the Makeshift City: Settler Colonialism, Artistic Reinvention and the Contradictions of Squatting in Vancouver

       8.Reclaiming New York: Squatting and the Neoliberal City

       Afterword

       Acknowledgments

       Notes

       Introduction

      The most intense point of lives, the one where their energy is concentrated is precisely there where they clash with power.

      There can be truth only in the form of the other world and the other life.

      Michel Foucault¹

      In the early morning hours of 1 March 2007, the Copenhagen police launched a surprise operation to evict the occupants of the Ungdomshuset (The Youth House), a social centre in the district of Nørrebro at Jagtvej 69 that had for many years been run as an autonomous social centre. The house had been established in 1982 after the municipality delegated its running to an undefined group of youth that were connected with a growing squatters’ movement in the city. The house soon became the backbone of the movement and, over the years, it served as a key meeting point within a wider alternative scene. The centre hosted concerts and housed a bookshop, a café, a printing press, a recording studio and a weekly vegan soup kitchen. For many, the Ungdomshuset was synonymous with radical autonomous politics in Copenhagen, and meetings between activists routinely took place there.²

      The police operation was carried out with military precision, personnel and equipment.³ It began at 7:00 in the morning and was over within an hour. The police cordoned off the area around the Ungdomshuset while an airport crash tender was deployed. It sprayed the doors and windows with a strange foam that hardened on impact, preventing the occupants from opening them from the inside. An elite anti-terrorist unit was then dropped on to the roof of the house using an S-61A Sea King military helicopter. Additional units were able to enter the house from the ground and from a series of containers that had been lifted by two boom cranes, which provided access to the house’s upper stories.⁴

      The supporters of the centre were able to regroup in the immediate aftermath of the eviction. They were unable, however, to break the police lines that surrounded the houses. Within a couple of hours, barricades had been thrown up on the Nørrebrogade south of the house as the police moved in to arrest the protesters. Across the city, in Christianshavn, another group of supporters were blocking traffic in solidarity with the Ungdomshuset.

      Over the course of the day, a series of protest marches were held across Copenhagen. The police adopted an increasingly heavy-handed approach as they attempted to disperse and detain a large group of protesters who had once again congregated on the Nørrebrogade. A series of pitched battles erupted which lasted well into the night. The protesters broke into small groups to evade the police. Others occupied a vacant building on the Blågårdsgade. By the early hours of 2 March, relative calm had finally fallen over the city. A total of 219 arrests had been made by the police, including the thirty-six occupants of the Ungdomshuset.⁵

      The repressive tactics adopted by the police did little to quell the anger felt by many activists and young people in Copenhagen. By 3 March, violent protests had once again broken out. In the worst rioting that Copenhagen had seen since the Second World War, Nørrebro was completely overrun as the police were pushed back by the protesters, who coordinated their actions and used burning cars and rubbish bins to barricade streets across the neighbourhood.⁶ In response, the police ‘accidentally’ resorted to the use of lethal Ferret 40 tear gas canisters that are usually used to penetrate doors and walls. ‘We made a mistake’, one spokesman for the police later admitted.⁷

      The following morning, the police launched a major crackdown on alternative spaces across Copenhagen that lasted six days. The (New) Folkets Hus on the Stengade, the squatters’ collective on the Baldersgade, as well as the Solidaritetshuset in Griffenfeldtsgade, were all raided as the police searched for foreign activists linked to the protests. Over 140 arrests on the ‘presumption of dangerousness’ were made, though no crime had been committed by those arrested. In total over 750 people were detained, often illegally and arbitrarily, including a number of minors whose details were entered into the national database. So many arrests were ultimately made that the police did not have enough space in local prisons and had to transport inmates to Jutland. One local prison had to be partially emptied of its normal occupants to make way for the new detainees.⁸

      On the morning of 5 March, the demolition of the now empty Ungdomshuset began, with crowds of supporters gathering to watch as a crane went to work on the top floor of the house. The whole demolition was broadcast live via a webcam on the Danish TV-2 website. What remained of the building was later sold as recycling substrate. As solidarity marches against the demolition were held across Europe and North America, the protests in Copenhagen also continued. From 10–19 March, the districts of Nørrebro and Christianshavn became, under police orders, special zones where anyone could be stopped and searched