The Autonomous City - Alexander Vasudevan

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many observers, the eviction and the police crackdown that followed in its wake represented an experimental ‘laboratory’ for a new form of militarised urban policing. A variety of methods, techniques and weapons were deployed by the authorities in Copenhagen in close cooperation with their European counterparts. The Swedish police loaned twenty of their own vehicles for the operation, while five senior officers accompanied the Copenhagen police. There were, in turn, numerous eyewitness reports of plainclothes officers from other European forces operating at the scene. Their presence as active units was denied, though a Copenhagen police spokesperson conceded that they may have been acting as ‘observers’.10

      For the former occupants of the Ungdomshuset, the loss of the centre was the culmination of a long and violent process of repression and vilification that had its origins in the late nineteenth century and in the struggles of Danish workers. The building in which the centre was housed first opened on 12 November 1897, as the fourth headquarters for the Danish labour movement. The Folkets Hus, or People’s House as it was known, became a key centre and meeting place for a number of movements. It was from the Folkets Hus that International Woman’s Day was first launched in 1910 by Clara Zetkin. The house also played an important role in the storming of the Danish Stock Exchange (Børsen) in February 1918 by a group of unemployed anarcho-syndicalists.11

      By the 1960s, the building was empty. It was later acquired by local Copenhagen authorities who, in an attempt to neutralise the city’s increasingly militant youth movement, donated the use of the house to a group of squatters in October 1982. They quickly transformed the site into an autonomous self-managed social centre, the Ungdomshuset. For the activists running the house, the centre was an opportunity to express their ‘right to difference’ and their commitment to an alternative set of social relations. Many right-wing politicians saw things differently. In their eyes, the ‘pile of rotten stones at Jagtvej 69’ was a major source of nuisance and incompatible with the ‘respectable’ city they envisaged. It was their stated desire to ‘tear the shit down’ and eradicate the site.12

      A fire in the house in 1996 was the excuse that they were looking for. Despite the successful renovation of the building, city councillors decided to sell the house in May 1999 against the wishes of its occupants, for whom it represented an autonomous free space in a ‘sea of hostility’.13 The house was sold in November 2000 to a newly formed company, Human A/S, which was headed by a former municipal lawyer. The shares of the company were sold on a year later to an evangelical Christian sect, Faderhuset (Father’s House). The leader of the sect later claimed that she was acting in response to a sign from God who requested that she remove this ‘abomination’ (‘vederstyggelighed’) and exorcise the streets of Nørrebro.14

      Faderhuset immediately terminated the contract with the group running the Ungdomshuset. The activists refused, however, to leave. They organised open houses to raise public awareness of the centre’s heritage and history. At the same time, a number of other tactics were deployed including a series of public occupations, protest marches and other happenings. Various efforts to secure a positive legal outcome proved fruitless. An August 2006 ruling by the Danish High Court confirmed a string of earlier court decisions that honoured Faderhuset’s claim to private property over the activists’ usufructuary rights. The occupants were ordered out of the houses by 14 December 2006. They were refused any further right to appeal.

      With all legal avenues exhausted, a number of large demonstrations were organised by users of the Ungdomshuset. While a group was set up to purchase the house on behalf of its current users, the Faderhuset refused to sell and the house was finally cleared on 1 March 2007, and demolished a few days later. The protests that erupted in the immediate aftermath of the eviction continued in various forms for over sixteen months, and testified to the profound sense of loss and trauma felt by many activists and supporters of the Ungdomshuset.15 In the face of persistent discontent, Copenhagen authorities decided to gift the former occupants two buildings in the city’s north-west, at Dortheavej 61. They began to move into the new premises on 1 July 2008. Meanwhile, Faderhuset had already sold the old property to an undisclosed buyer. To this day the site remains empty, a vacant plot of land.

      The sheer intensity of the struggle surrounding the eviction of the Ungdomshuset was not unique to Copenhagen, nor were the radical politics of housing and self-organisation that the centre and its supporters embodied. Over the past decade and, in particular, in the years that followed the global financial crisis, a sustained and systematic attack on alternative forms of living and working has taken place in cities across Europe and North America. Authorities have targeted the often informal and sometimes illegal spaces set up by ordinary people. These were people who became squatters in order to take control of their own lives and respond to basic housing needs, but who found in their actions new political possibilities for collective self-empowerment and autonomous political action.

      In a number of European countries, squatting has been criminalised in recent years. In Spain, at the height of the country’s own housing crisis, a series of changes were made to the criminal code in 2010. Article 245 of the code which dealt with usurpació (or trespass) was modified, and the penalty was increased from a fine to a jail sentence of one to two years.16 The same year, the Squatting and Vagrancy Act came into force in the Netherlands. It criminalised squatting in all properties and carried a maximum prison sentence of one year. Two years later, in September 2012, a new law came into force in England and Wales that made trespassing in a residential property with the intention of living there a criminal offence. Finally, in June 2015, the French National Assembly unanimously passed a law proposed by the mayor of Calais that clarified the power of authorities (according to Article 226–4 of the Penal Code) to evict squatters.17 Across the Atlantic, similar legal measures have been rolled out in the states of Michigan and Nevada. Other changes to adverse possession statutes have been proposed in a number of states.18

      The legal attack against squatting has coincided (perhaps unsurprisingly) with a global housing crisis. In cities in the Global North, the symptoms of this crisis have, as David Madden and Peter Marcuse recently argued, acquired a certain ubiquity. Whether it is Berlin, London, Madrid or New York, households are being ‘squeezed by the cost of living. Homelessness is on the rise. Evictions and foreclosures are commonplace.’19 And yet, at the same time homes are being transformed into commodities. Housing is no longer seen as a basic social need. It has become an instrument of profit-making transforming today’s cities into sites of intense displacement and inequality, exploitation and poverty.

      It is, in this context, not hard to see the new wave of anti-squatting legislation as an attempt to protect the ongoing commodification of housing at a moment when many people are looking to alternatives that reassert the cultural, social and political value of housing as a universal necessity and as a source of social transformation. These are, in the eyes of many, laws that are driven by ideological motivations. They seek to uphold the sanctity of private property and defend the interests of ‘hard-working homeowners’ against squatters. They are used as a ‘tool’ or ‘weapon’ to perpetuate domination, accentuate inequality and support a system that is increasingly unsustainable.

      Ordinary citizens and activists have nevertheless fought back. They point out that, for poor working-class communities, the housing crisis has always been the norm. They find common cause in the words of Friedrich Engels, one of the more astute commentators on the ‘housing question’. He noted that ‘the so-called housing shortage … is not something peculiar to the present’. ‘All oppressed classes in all periods,’ he added, ‘suffered more or less uniformly from it.’20

      While Engels was writing in 1872 with the shock cities of early industrialisation specifically in mind, the injustices of housing have only intensified over the past century or so, taking in cities in both the Global North and South. For the oppressed, the history of housing is a history of insecurity and inequality.21 But it is also a history of resistance and possibility; one in which squatters occupy an understudied if important place.

      Squatting can be defined as ‘living in – or using otherwise – a dwelling without the consent of the owner. Squatters take buildings [or land] with the intention of relative (>1 year) long-term use.’22 For

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