city issue: 29.5-6

founding editor: bob caterall

city: issue 29.5-6

editor: city editors

editorial: Property/trespass and squatting in cities

Samuel Burgum

“The spaces we need are already all around us.” 

“Squatters are people using their city.” 

“Squats are a window onto the city.” 

I started writing something about squatting in London.But you soon find yourself pulling on threads entangled across diverse urbanhistories and borders, unravelling complex genealogies of land use, settlement,property, ownership, entitlement, boundaries, and enclosure. I needed anapproach which might help me begin tracking how ‘squatting’ travels across these, whilst remaining open to the complexities of context. Here, by presentingan unsatisfactory definition of squatting, my aim is to start with something I canthen set about disentangling:Squatting is (1) a specific type of trespass of unused and wasted properties motivatedby an ongoing need for space, and (2) a type of occupation which seeks to justify itselfthrough use rather than ownership or permission.Part (1) is intended to be specific. By intentionally using the term ‘trespass’ I meanto position squatting in opposition to property as ownership. When an action islabelled, stigmatised, and criminalised as ‘trespass’, it implies a construction ofproperty ownership: i.e. an entitlement claim over the space and a moral ‘right’ ofthe owner to possess, control, and exclude (Singer 2000). The types of actions andpeople labelled ‘trespass’ are historically constructed, bringing specific lineagesof normative power and violence. On the ground, spaces are being (re)performedeveryday in ways that continually blur and crossover boundaries of propertyentitlement. But whenever trespass is designated, and ownership is reasserted,the aim is to shut down, reduce, simplify, and tidy up this kind of complexity,into the simple binary of formal owner vs. non-owner. Or as Nick Blomley putsit, under ownership, ‘the meaning of property appears settled … [it] presumesclarity and determinacy in the definition of what property is, and tells us whichrelationships between people and scarce resources are to be valued as such,and which are not’ (2004, xiv). Ownership, in other words, makes the questionof how space is distributed abstract, removing it from material realities on theground, and towards technologies such as surveys, titles, registers, contracts,court orders, police, bailiffs, military …

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