A.2.c. Homeless Campaigns and Occupations

There have been two main types of movement to occupy empty buildings or land: action by the homeless to find somewhere to live, and counter-cultural initiatives to create new social spaces, forms of social activity and a model of society in miniature within modern cities. In the former category is the 2013 occupation of land in Cato Crest, Durban, by about 1,000 people, who had been illegally evicted by their municipality . They named their new settlement Marikana. In the latter category are the Kabouters (successors to the Dutch Provos) in the 1970s, and the independent community of Christiane founded on an old military base in Denmark in 1971 and continuing until today, though after state pressure in the 2000s there have been changes in its status. But this distinction is not absolute – some movements aim both to provide social housing and to offer a new model of society. A third type of action was launched by the Occupy London campaign in 2011, involving widespread squatting in empty commercial property, partly to underline their anti-capitalist message (see A.8.)

Governments, especially right wing ones, have periodically evicted squatters and tried to make it more difficult. Parisian police evicted up to 1,000 West African immigrants living in a disused university residential block in August 2006 – a move criticized as a publicity stunt for presidential hopeful Nicolas Sarkozy (Guardian, 18 Aug 2006, p.25). The British Coalition government made squatting in residential buildings illegal in 2012 – members of the Squatters’ Housing Action Group had earlier climbed onto the roof of the Justice Secretary’s London home in protest against a criminalization of a solution to homelessness.