Metropolitan Preoccupations: The Spatial Politics of Squatting in Berlin

Abstract

While reading Alexander Vasudevan’s monograph on squatting in Berlin, the Rigaer Straße in Berlin-Friedrichshain has again exploded into violence. First occupied during the second wave of squatting in 1990, Rigaer 94 has been both an important cultural centre for the autonomist Left and a menace for city officials for decades. Authorities have repeatedly tried to clear the building only to be met with violence such as in January and June 2016. Responding to a court decision ruling the latest attempt to clear the squat illegal, it is rumoured that the Berlin Senate will try to purchase the building for 4 million euros. Such conflict speaks to the timeliness of Vasudevan’s intervention and one of his central claims: that the history of squatting is ongoing, despite efforts of the neo-liberal order to shut down alternative visions of the ‘right to a city’. Vasudevan argues that his history of squatting seeks to spatialize the New Left by attending to the ways occupation challenges the positive democratic narrative of the 1960s even if inspired by it. To do so, the author examines how squatting was a means of ‘world-making’ whereby new collectives imagined alternative cities, identities and experiences (emphasis in original, p. 15). Tracking the history of housing precariousness plaguing Berlin since the founding of the German Empire in 1871, the author shows how the rapid expansion of the city was contested as land speculation and the erection of the typical five-storey Mietskaserne dispossessed residents. Adequate housing remained a concern throughout the Weimar and Nazi periods but the destruction of the city during WWII gave city planners a blank slate to work with, and who proceeded to envision a modern city which would necessitate the demolition of older, inner-city housing, to make way for newer, higher-rent buildings.

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