TEMPORARY ZONES CULTURES
If occupying caves by primitive people and adapting them to livable condition can be called the early form of squatting, then one should claim that squatting is a phenomenon as old as humankind itself. It seems, however, that such far-fetched analogies are not the most useful if one wants to grasp the essence of nowadays overtaking and housing uninhibited buildings, and – what is even more important – to investigate the way in which the phenomenon contributes to the consolidation and reproduction of the foundations of the counterculture philosophy.
What is squatting?
The simplest answer to this question would very well correspond to what was mentioned above about the primitive people, who, in the early stages of humankind development, searching for shelters, occupied niches given to them by nature. Squatting is in a sense similar, as it is inhabiting abandoned buildings. Obviously, in the contemporary world, both the reasons for which some people choose this form of settling and the cultural context have nothing in common with the motives of early homo sapiens. The 60s, the time of cultural revolution, hippies and essential changes in the sphere of customs, were also the time of the birth and flower of counterculture. They contributed to the creation and consolidation of a number of questioning attitudes, at the source of which one should look for what nowadays motivates young people to cultivate types of behaviour different from the mainstream. The revolution of 1968 took place mainly in capitalist countries and being resistant to the reality of such countries, it absorbed leftist ideology. Hence, implementing new ideals manifested itself, among other things, in founding hippie communes (especially in the United States). Living in close communities and according to the ideals of the arising counterculture has had a strong impact on what is currently called squatting. Squatting means not only overtaking uninhibited flats; it means creating community and cooperation, cultural or political activity, or simply sharing everyday life with the group of people professing similar values. In the West the phenomenon appeared about twenty years earlier than in Poland, where political conditions impeded the flow of changes that took place in capitalist countries. Hence, in contrast to the Great Britain, the Netherlands, or Germany, the squat movement is still a niche phenomenon.
The formation of contemporary squatting
Apart from the communist ideals of the western youth in the 60s, there was also another important factor making squatting a social movement – homelessness. The economic situation of the Great Britain at that time led to the social stratification and poverty deepening. Due to the wide public support, the Committee of One Hundred and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament were able to create a strong political opposition organizing protests in which thousands of people took place and introducing the direct action method. The problem of homelessness and a special liveliness of social movements at that time led to the first organized squatting campaign in 1968, whose aim was providing poor people with roofs over their heads. The campaign had no detailed program or ideological background and its only aim was to provide homes to people from the social margin. At the time, the war started that has lasted since then: the war between the building owners and their representatives and people who moved into the buildings. Evictions of squatter communities have always been concomitant with the movement and the biggest conflict entered the history of squatting under the name of the “war of Redbridge”, which after brutal and illegal police action led to the elimination of squatters in this part of London.
Such actions contributed to forming another important characteristic of squatters – a strong anti-state approach. Such conflicts have become to be viewed through anarchist ideology and its perception of a state as an apparatus of oppression towards the poor, which justified overtaking uninhibited flats. The growth in housing problems at the beginning of the 70s led to an increased popularity of squatting. Conflicts become to swell to such an extent that barricades appeared in the streets of the east London and evictions more and more often turned into regular battles. At that time, counterculture went through the “evolution after the failed revolution” and other changes could be noticed in the mentality of youth fighting for an upturn in the reality. The end of the 70s is the time of the birth of the punk movement, which has been engaged in squatting enterprises up to nowadays. The new subculture has been based on anarchist ideology, provocative behaviour and looks and social abnegation. Contrary to the movements of the 60s, filled with student discussions about the future of Marxism and Maoism, and immersed in the atmosphere of the carnival, cultural foundations of the punk movement were more down-to-earth. Economic crises, unemployment and the lack of perspectives for young people, together with the bankruptcy of big factories in the period of Thatcherism gave rise to defeatism. Life according to the motto “no future,” more often declared than realized, was understood as a purposeful sinking into alcoholism and drug addiction, and also – essential for the squat movement – breaking with the life model represented by the middleclass. The last factor is reflected in the still strong relation of the punk and the squat movement. Obviously, squatting is still the domain of both rebellious youth and poor people, most often immigrants, yet no other subculture has been so tightly related to squatting initiatives as anarchist punk. This relation has been maintained also in Polish squatting when it finally appeared. Unfortunately, most of such early initiatives were very unstable and it is difficult to retrace the beginnings of the squat movement in Poland today. Still, for the last few years, squats have appeared regularly in most of Polish cities, the longest existing one being Rozbrat that has been in Poznań for eleven years.
Squatting in the urban landscape
If in Poland squats are rare (most often in one city there are at most four), in the West the whole districts can be overtaken by activists. For instance, Kreuzberg in Berlin, famous for the annual 1st May riots, or Danish Christiania, whose fame has been established by its autonomy from the official law banning the turnover of cannabis products. City autonomous zones disappearing due to more and more strict laws are a peculiar cultural breach in the urban landscape.
Covered with graffiti and adorned with flags, often resembling ruins, squat buildings can be a truly exotic view in the grayness of industrial cities. The relation between squat movement and alternative culture influences the image of communities living in such places. Kreuzberg for an ordinary passerby may seem to be a place filled with weirdoes and eccentrics, yet, it is said to be the European capitol of the punk movement. Christiania, due to its popularity and the availability of drugs has turned into a kind of tourist attraction. Most of the tourist guides warn against visiting the place, but in Christiania functions self-regulated protection against violence and heroin trade; hence, tourists are more attracted than deterred and often visit the place to taste its “truly exotic” atmosphere.
One can paraphrase Edward Said’s notion and claim that specific orientalism of squats is created through the opposition between the middleclass lifestyle and the squat model that questions it, basing on the otherness of subcultural alternative youth. An evidence of public interest in squats is a number of urban legends related to such places. On one hand, they are perceived as attractive otherness, on the other – they are attacked, usually by people who have never visited any squat. An especially common indigenous example of such an attitude is spreading the image of a squat as an alcohol or drug den. Fear of the other easily fosters demonization, whereas the reality does not necessarily confirm urban rumours. In fact, it rarely does confirm them. Since most squats are engaged into social or cultural activities and their inhabitants are careful not to give reasons for which they could lose their home, every manifestation of social pathology is quickly suppressed. Of course, squats are not free from psychedelics, which are an integral element of the tradition of counterculture. And yet, the use of drugs is certainly much more popular in clubs than in squats.
Perceiving squats as dangerous adopts various forms, including right-winged accusations of spreading moral perversity, anti-state attitudes, lack of respect for traditional values, or even promiscuity. On the other hand, squats can also be idealized, viewed as the essence of freedom, a life in a close community according to the ideals of equality, a realization of Thoreau’s economic emancipation from under the state jurisdiction. The truth lies not even in between the two opposite views, as it is usually the case, but beside them, as squatting is characterized most by its diversity through which it constitutes a breach in the monotony of the urban landscape in this landscape’s physical as well as in social dimension.
The revolution of everyday life
Raoul Vaneigem, a Belgian Situationist writer, in his most famous book The Revolution of Everyday Life (Traité de savoir-vivre à l'usage des jeunes générations) formulates the foundations of revolutionary practice directed against the Society of the Spectacle and its characteristic indirect experience. The ideals of self-realization, communication and participation that constitute the unitary triad are to facilitate the reclamation of direct experience and the reversal of perspective to destroy the order of the spectacle and transform a spectator into a participant. The Situationists formulated the principles of the Paris May 1968 rhetoric, but these principles were very different from the social practice related to counterculture, hence, the theme of squatting never appeared in the context. Still, nowadays one is able to notice that the activities of the contemporary questioning movements have put a lot of Situationist theory into practice, and overtaking uninhibited buildings meets the claims of The Revolution of Everyday Life. A life in crude conditions in order to transform everyday life through the realization of principles related to professed values is indeed an implementation of Vaneigem’s idea. It includes all three components of the unitary triad: self-realization in choosing a lifestyle in accordance to one’s worldview, communication as a necessary condition of creating a squat community and common work enabling the survival of the community, i.e., participation.
Bearing in mind the whole diversity of squat cultures, this last feature, participation, seems to be the one that joins them the most. From an anthropologist perspective, an everyday life is a stage on which people play out unconscious cultural scripts. Hence, analyzing the phenomenon of squats from the perspective of culture studies, one should make clear division between what constitutes unwritten rules and customs of a squat and cultural or social activities undertaken by most of squat activists. It is impossible to enclose the nature of the phenomenon in one rule or theory of everyday functioning of such communities. These are more cultures then one culture. And yet, what joins all communities living in the buildings “stolen from the city”, is a common model of social practice, based on anarchist rules of independence from state taxes, separation from the middleclass lifestyle, rejection of the idea of private property and a more or less established rule of common work. All this determines a very strong structure and a stable model of squat social relations that are a dialectic combination of collectivism and individualism, lack of hierarchy and coordination of work or a realization of, whether individual or collective, aims. The coexistence of these ideas is not necessarily peaceful and may lead to conflicts, sometimes even a split-up of a squat community; more often, however, they convey the subversion of the myth of a contemporary squat as a late version of a hippie commune. As Erich Fromm once noticed, freedom is feed-backed to responsibility; and this seems to be an endemic problem of all freedom movements, including squatting. Often, idealized images of squat communities as groups living in an idyllic microclimate become destroyed when faced with crude conditions of such a life and related interpersonal problems, ideological conflicts or neuralgic questions of where freedom ends and compulsion begins.
Temporariness
Apart from overtaking a piece of land or a building without ownership, “to squat” means also “to crouch”. This second meaning conveys well the intentions of squatters. Squatting is not an activity calculated to create a stable, safe social structure allowing people to live a so-called peaceful life. Partly the problem is caused by never-ending fights between the squatters and the police, by evictions and a constant pressure on the part the building owners. On the other hand, however, some squats cease to exist naturally, simply because the collective community splits up. Apart from some rare cases when a strongly integrated community somehow obtains the rights to the building they inhabit, squatting means, to a large extent, reconciling the fact that, at some point, one will have to leave a certain urban space and either move in to another uninhibited building or start living a life according to the rules of a capitalist society. Squatting, understood as a movement generating other cultures together with the freedom ideologies that constitute its foundations, is a particular case of a Temporary Autonomous Zone. According to Hakim Bay, the author of the theory of the third wave anarchism: “The concept of the TAZ arises first out of a critique of Revolution, and an appreciation of the Insurrection…. This is the apotheosis of ‘territorial gangsterism’. Not one square inch of Earth goes unpoliced or untaxed... in theory” (Bay 1985: No pagination). From this point of view, squatting seems a cultural phenomenon manifested not only in overtaking the public space but also in controlling the symbolic sphere. Bey’s insurrection, conceptually corresponding to the foundations of the situationists (from whom Bey drew much of his inspiration), points at the impossibility of revolution understood as a forced upheaval. Instead, it is a gradual searching for niches, in which one can carry on a subversive activity, whose end comes together with a “deconspiration”, i.e., eviction. Temporary Zones Cultures are niches of the urban space, in which legal or state order becomes temporary separate from the domination of any formal structures, and then it is reformulated according to the rules and values of urban nomads.
Counterculture in a space
Squatting often combines everyday life with a cultural or social activity. In the West, a tendency to animate a cultural life within a squat collective seems to be retreating. In Poland, since there are just a few squats, most of them carry on various sorts of activities; there is for example The Centre of Culture Reanimation by Freedom in Wrocław or the Anarchist Library at “Rozbrat” in Poznań. In most cities, squats are the places where many cultural events, organized only by the interested, take place; these are: concerts, happenings, meetings of alternative theatres, film projections, niche literature promotions, exhibitions. This is because of these specific cultural centers that many of such alternative cultural initiatives have had a chance to be realized. Initiatives whose aim is to promote independent culture include various artistic projects: from chamber poetical evenings to festivals of alternative or street theaters that often last for several days. Cultural animation seems to be one of the most important manifestations of the existence of squats in a city. The lack of hierarchical structure of the collectives attracts various artists that want to create often controversial, nonprofit and, most of all, independent art. Hence, squats function as specific niches in which art resistant to the mainstream has a chance to come into being. The popularity of such independent cultural events shows that this cultural margin is quite wide. Squats are also the places where representatives of various anarchist groups meet: Anarchist Federation, Indymedia, feminist groups and other social activists. Squats function then as a free space enabling an efficient activities of freedom groups banned from the public sphere.
Finally, squats are also places where people can meet, exchange their views, realize their ideas in the sphere of art or “politics”, or simply have fun other than in a disco, a fashionable club or a multiplex.
Counterculture has begun the process of creation and cultivation of attitudes opposite to the mainstream. Squatting has enabled its constantly changing location in a temporary space, creating and sustaining international zone of culture-zones. These culture-zones have existed for over fourty years so far, according to the ideas of the first critics of the late capitalism’s social order.
Tadeusz Skowroński
Translated by Grażyna Chamielec
The article comes from the bimonthly Didaskalia issue no. 73-74 (2006)