The Autonomous City. Alexander Vasudevan

      The Housing Crimes Trial was, in the end, much more than a carefully calibrated theatre of protest. On the one hand, it pointed to a long and unresolved history of housing struggles in New York and the various actors, alliances and strategies that it encompassed. But the trial also played a constructive role in the emergence and development of new ways of thinking about and inhabiting the city as a space of political action and self-organisation. Racial inclusiveness and cross-generational collaboration and solidarity were, after all, key features of the trial and Operation Move-In, more generally. These were, moreover, features that pointed to an arena of struggle where local living conditions combined with increasingly militant tactics and an existing infrastructure of tenant-based activism to produce some genuine gains. While many squatters across New York were evicted by the police in a matter of days, the Episcopal Church decided, in the wake of the occupations, to scale back its plans allowing over 400 residents to remain.⁸⁴ A further 200 families on the city’s West Side were able to secure major concessions more than a year after the start of Operation Move-In. City officials conceded that they could stay as long as they paid rent, while a further 946 low-income housing income units were added to the original WSURA plan.⁸⁵ Some squatters in the Lower East Side were also able to reach agreements with their landlords, though the occupants of properties owned by individuals, hospitals and schools were, more often than not, quickly and forcibly cleared.

      The story behind the Housing Crimes Trial and Operation Move-In thus brings together a number of themes that are central to the history of the housing movement in New York: the longstanding importance of squatting, and of the occupation of empty buildings and land, to the wide repertoire of practices taken up by local residents, activists, students and workers in the struggle for affordable housing; the recognition of uneven development and urban renewal as an enduring source of political mobilisation; the formation of new identities and intimacies and the cultivation of solidarities that cut across class, race and gender lines; and finally, the widespread desire to reimagine and live the city differently and to reclaim an alternative ‘right to a city’. For Richard Sennett, writing in The Uses of Disorder, published in the same year as the Housing Crimes Trial and Operation Move-In, it was indeed the dense, disorderly and overwhelming nature of American inner cities out of which, in his view, a radically ‘new social space’ would ultimately emerge.⁸⁶

      The ‘social space’ Sennett imagined never materialised. While housing activists were able to connect the ‘housing question’ to larger struggles around race, class and inequality, their successes, however real and substantive, were short-lived and concessionary. Residential abandonment continued unabated. Public housing and rent control received little support. ‘In the end’, as the historian Joel Schwartz, has argued, ‘it was hundreds of thousands of low-income tenants who found themselves out in the cold’.⁸⁷

      In the decades that followed, housing insecurity and neighbourhood gentrification only intensified as the city ‘yielded to a neoliberal growth model’.⁸⁸ Still, the tactics adopted by squatters and other radical housing activists had some constructive and lasting effects. Low-income housing was saved, new networks were established and a broad albeit fragile infrastructure of tenant activism survived. It was this infrastructure and the fierce opposition from squatters, in particular, that paved the way for a new wave of protests in the 1980s and 1990s and a new generation of activists who were ready to protect and seize their right to housing.

       2

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

      Asses, swine, have litter spread,

      And with fitting food are fed,

      All things have a home but one,

      Thou, Oh Englishman hast none!

      Shelley, ‘The Mask of Anarchy’¹

      I was homeless, pissed off, had nowhere to stay

      Half of fucking London tinned up and grey

      It was then that I noticed every flat in the block

      Had a squatters legal warning and a newly fitted lock.

      Goodbye bed and breakfast, farewell rent

      Why not force a window and take up residence.

      Squatters’ song²

      In 1994, the artist and photographer Tom Hunter began to construct a model of the street in Hackney that had been his London home since 1991. Hunter was part of a community of over a hundred squatters who had occupied a series of Victorian terraced houses on Ellingfort Road, a narrow side street that ran under the Great Eastern Railway line and connected Mare Street with the eastern edge of London Fields. By the early 1970s, many of the houses on the street were run down and in need of serious repair. The London Borough of Hackney (LBH) elected to purchase many of the houses as part of a plan to create an Industrial Improvement Area. Existing residents and businesses were evicted.³

      Squatters soon moved into some of the empty buildings. A group of travellers occupied the yards. While some houses on neighbouring Martello Street were converted into studios with the help of the artist-run organisation Acme, the majority of houses on Ellingfort Road remained empty. Between 1985 and 1992, they were occupied by squatters who transformed the street into a vibrant community. Garden walls were knocked down to create a community garden while a former motorcycle repair shop became a café. There was even a city farm with chickens and goats. As Hunter later recalled, ‘It was all very varied … Two doors down the guys were motorbike dispatch riders – they’d save up enough money and go off to the Far East for a few months. Next door to me there was a builder, and a girl who worked in a casino as a croupier. There were charity workers, people doing hardcore labouring jobs, and others who were saving up. It was a really good mixture.’⁴

      The threat of eviction only served to galvanise the community. In 1994, the LBH unveiled new plans to demolish the houses in order to make way for a new industrial zone that included a frozen chicken warehouse. The squatters as well as other local residents and businesses resisted. They formed the London Fields Renewal Partnership and drew up an alternative plan for the neighbourhood.⁵ In the case of Tom Hunter, resistance also assumed a decidedly aesthetic form. He was in the midst of constructing his final submission for the degree show at the London College of Printing. With his friend, James MacKinnon, Hunter constructed an exact replica model of the street he lived on.

      Hunter began by producing a series of 5 × 4 transparencies using a large-format camera. The transparencies as well as other photographs were combined with wood and cardboard to make the final model. The Ghetto, as it was known, painstakingly recreated the exteriors of the squats as well as the lit-up interiors of the rooms, complete with the people who lived there. In Hunter’s own words, ‘I wanted to make a document of the area before it was bulldozed, that was the idea. Because I wanted to represent everyone’s houses before they were all destroyed so that in generations to come they could see what was there.’⁶ ‘I was trying,’ Hunter added, ‘to get people to look at the urban landscape, for people to look at my friends and the way they live and see that it was quite beautiful and worth having a look at.’

      The final model quickly became a cause célèbre attracting attention from The Guardian and Time Out, as well as the Museum of London. With the media spotlight on the local neighbourhood, the LBH backed down and initiated negotiations with the squatters. It was agreed that the squatters would form a co-operative to purchase and rehabilitate the houses using borrowed money from a housing association. Hunter’s own life took a different turn as he set off across Europe in a repurposed double decker bus named Le Crowbar as part of a touring convoy that organised free gigs, raves and festivals.⁷ His model neighbourhood, in turn, became part of the official exhibition at the Museum of London and is currently on display in the ‘World City Gallery’.

      The model as well as the series of photographs produced by