While homelessness is rampant worldwide, the production of empty spaces is a regular feature of contemporary society. When buildings sit empty for a long time while homelessness persists, it is clear that in these cases markets and states fail to fulfill their expected role as effective allocators of space. Often, people decided to take matters into their own hands by squatting a diversity of spaces: office blocks, factories, theaters and bars as well as houses. For some squatters, squatting is a purely individual solution; others feel that the possibilities of squatting should be developed further, feel solidarity towards other squatters and work to build a squatters’ movement.

Squatting is also an intervention in urban development and renewal, i.e. urban and housing politics and spatial adjustment, which is reinterpreted and shifted. Squatting often involves attempts to practice non-hierarchical and participatory organizational models. Squatted social centers offer an alternative mode of activities such as critical and radical political meetings and countercultural events outside of, and in antagonism with, commercial circuits. Social center activists and squatters are thus often engaged in broader protest campaigns and social movements, fighting against precariousness, urban speculation, racism, neo-fascism, state repression, militarization, war, locally unwanted land use, privatization of education/university reforms. By drawing attention to the existence of vacant buildings, sometimes on prestigious locations in metropolitan areas, squatters question neo-liberal ideology. An example is a demonstrative Parisian squat that existed just in front of the Presidential Palace. Squatting helps to show the vacuity of current political debate. Politicians call for social cohesion and self-responsibility. However, when people actually take these values seriously by engaging in squatting, they are often treated as criminals who undermine social integration.

Squatting may not be seen to be a very powerful movement. However, looking at its history and reflecting on the links with other movements and its international dimensions makes one realize that it is by far not as marginal as it may seem at first glance.