Paper short abstract:

The urban gardening movement in Germany transforms the urban landscape by occupying unused space. The established assemblages offer various forms of engagement for city dwellers, fundamentally questioning the predominant way of living in cities in acting out alternatives and enabling participation.

Paper long abstract:

In recent years, new kinds of urban community gardening projects are multiplying in Germany's cities. Occupying unused space and transforming it into gardens, they not only change the urban landscape but create a social space that allows for a different social and experiential reality through enabling various forms of engagement for city dwellers. This paper builds on field research in open urban gardening projects and approaches them as form of resistance that fundamentally questions and challenges the dominant way of living in cities. Going 'beyond gardening', these assemblages address questions of food production and sustainability as well as social, ecological and economic issues. Establishing places for interaction, exchange and transmission of knowledge and skills, the experience and enactment of alternative forms of dwelling in the city becomes possible - with a focus on 'do it together' rather than 'do it yourself'. Who owns the cities, and how to live well in them? How to build community, how to harvest the commons? Collectively, these projects are looking for answers. Further, as 'open' places these creative bricolages allow for and encourage fleeting as longterm engagements, enhancing interagency and widening their audience. Going 'beyond the garden', they form networks that actively seek to influence policies. As such, the urban gardening movement can not only be seen as a form of resistance, but it also produces places to experiment with alternatives in the everyday and foster change on the level of the individual as well as political.

Paper short abstract:

The talk will address the changing arrangements and orientations of a cooperative settlement in a long-run perspective from 1919 to 1969. Special attention is paid to spatial and symbolical aspects of communitization and its limits under different social circumstances.

Paper long abstract:

The Freidorf settlement near Basel was founded in 1919 as a reform-orientated village community. Rooted in the swiss cooperative movement, its aim was to organize numerous domestic, cultural and leisure activities on the basis of mutual support, but also to orient the village towards social reform in a broader sense. It provided new homes for 150 families with at that time remarkable furniture and comfort. The founding concept saw the self-contained dwellings as centerpieces of the cooperative arrangement and therefore ascribed to them specific privileges and obligations. Thus they were embedded in the spatial and symbolic order of the cooperation and reflected the ideological expectations of the founders.

In the long run, however, social change undermined many of the once self-evident basic conditions of family life in the village and its overlappings with the superior cooperative. This was especially true for a second generation of settlers that moved in during the economic upturn of the 1950s and 1960s. Their practices and ideas of housekeeping, use of space, social commitment and cooperative self-help differed fundamentally from the previous customs. The internal handling of this challenge shows a difficult renegotiation of demarcations that were about to expire. In particular this was the case for the structuring of private, collective and public spheres and the involvement of the individual members in the (also changing) cooperative aims and activities.

Paper short abstract:

Neoloberism not only commodifies and reduces public places but in the case of migrants produces exclusion. In our talk we will analyse how people with diversified rights and status fought for dwelling’s right through ‘squatting’ practice.

Paper long abstract:

In Italy, particularly in a big cities as Rome, there is a long history of squatting in house and struggle for the dwelling's right.

The paper will be divided into two parts. The first section It will be focused on the history of the movement that struggle for the dwelling's right in Rome. this social movement in recent years has seen a shift from the struggle for the right to housing to the struggle for dwelling's right and "right to the city"(LeFebvre, H, 2014; Harvey, D., 2013). This change has crossed the struggles of migrants who have transformed the fight for housing rights in a struggle for human rights and a form of resistance to the processes of exclusion (Tyler, I., Marciniak, K., 2013).

The second section, starting from to ethnographic examples on migrants squatting in house in Rome, will explore two topics: 1. the construction of temporary or permanent new social groups in the squatting houses, the dynamics of conflict and relations between migrant groups with different nationalities and different legal status. 2. the practices of resistance of migrants Moroccan women involved in the dwelling's struggles, as acts of resistance, constructing a new citizenship as political belonging.

It conclusion we will reflect in what extend the experience of squatting produces new political subjectivities capable to challenge the neoliberal logic of commodification of urban and dwelling and, finally redrawn and challenged the boundaries between public and private spheres, between legal-illegal and between inclusion/exclusion.

Paper short abstract:

This paper draws from recent scientific interest in 'new' practices of occupying spaces as forms of resistance but challenges their perception as new by giving insight into historic events as e.g. the occupation of construction sites by the Anti-Nuclear-Movement in West-Germany in the 80s.

Paper long abstract:

In 1980 5.000 participants of West Germany's Anti-Nuclear-Movement occupied the drilling site '1004' near Gorleben from May the 3rd until June the 4th. Not only did they slow down the construction of the nuclear reprocessing plant for at least four weeks but built a whole village with community house, public washrooms, communal kitchen, a church and many more wooden facilities. They even proclaimed the 'Freie Republik Wendland' and distributed own IDs to the inhabitants in which they assured that the holder's attitude towards life would be positive and his ability to critical thoughts given. The ID would further be valid as long as the holder doesn't lose his ability to laugh. All decision making processes were organized in a grassroots-democratic way. Thus participants insisted that the occupation was not only a form of resistance but even more a way of 'doing utopia' which means that they tried to cause change within major society by living (!) up to their own standards. These were strongly related to alternative lifestyles and ideologies spread among West-Germany's alternative milieu.

In recent years, spectacular events as e.g. the occupation of the Wall Street performed by the occupy movement have drawn researchers' interest to new forms of protest. Graeber (2013) even published an ethnography about forms of 'direct action', which challenge power relations inscribed in public places in a playful way. This paper deals with the question if those forms really can be labelled as 'new' by pointing out that there have been historical precursors.

Paper short abstract:

How can social movements cope with their eccentricity and eclectic composition? I argue that the creation of spaces without memory, that suppress the political past of new members, is instrumental to loosen the ever-present tension between expansion and mistrust of the outside.

Paper long abstract:

Social movements often struggle with internal coherence. There's a constant tension between the effort to convert individuals to the cause, and the perceived need to protect the community from (disruptive) outside influence. Moreover, the process of acculturation can clash with the previous political affiliation of new members, which tends to create suspicion and mistrust inside the movement itself.

In this paper, I want to suggest that an initial response to this problem is the creation of safe, "forgetful" spaces, which aim to suspend the pre-existing habitus-as-embedded-history of its inhabitants, and serve as the physical and symbolic foundation for the construction of a new social and political praxis. Drawing from my ethnographic research inside a section of the Five Stars Movement, in Italy, I will argue that these spaces define themselves as politically antagonistic, but "historically neutral" and accepting of any and all previous relations with the establishment. The crossing of their threshold acts as the signifier for the rejection of one's political past, and while inside these "forgetful places" there must be no conflict of opposing biographies.

However strong, borders remain inevitably porous, and individual histories can only be temporarily suppressed, never completely erased. So, parallel to the construction of a new habitus, these boundaries are constantly re-designed and re-negotiated, to allow the community to deal with a potentially disastrous "return of the repressed", and to keep dangerous political memories from affecting the non-historical space they are inhabiting.

Paper short abstract:

In this paper I propose to elaborate a reflection on ‘occupation politics’ and spaces of political contention in the urban sphere, taking as point of departure the iconic 1º de Maio square in Luanda.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper I propose to elaborate a reflection on 'occupation politics' and spaces of political contention in the urban sphere, taking as point of departure the iconic 1º de Maio square in Luanda, the historical site of proclamation of Angolan independence in 1975. Progressively established as a landmark of Angolan statehood, since 2011 the square has witnessed several attempts of public demonstration and contestation that attempt a resignification of the square's political envelope. These attempts have been consistently and violently rebuked by governmental forces, in a clear attempt to avoid a new Tahrir Square in the country. Using the case of the 1º de Maio as example, I will discuss the relevance of occupation as a form of resistance-based political praxis.