Alexander Vasudevan

The autonomous city: Towards a critical geography of occupation

This paper explores the recent resurgence of occupation-based practices across the globe, from the seizure of public space to the assembling of improvised protest camps. It re-examines the relationship between the figure of occupation and the affirmation of an alternative ‘right to the city’. The paper develops a critical understanding of occupation as a political process that prefigures and materializes the social order which it seeks to enact. The paper highlights the constituent role of occupation as an autonomous form of urban dwelling, as a radical politics of infrastructure and as a set of relations that produce common spaces for political action.

The makeshift city Towards a global geography of squatting

This paper introduces a set of analytical frames that explore the possibilities of conceiving, researching and writing a global geography of squatting. The paper argues that it is possible to detect, in the most tenuous of urban settings, ways of thinking about and living urban life that have the potential to reanimate the city as a key site of geographical inquiry. The paper develops a modest theory of ‘urban combats’ to account for the complexity and provisionality of squatting as an informal set of practices, as a makeshift approach to housing and as a precarious form of inhabiting the city.

Metropolitan preoccupations : the spatial politics of squatting in Berlin

Series Editors Preface viii List of Figures ix Acknowledgements xi 1 Introduction: Making Radical Urban Politics 1 2 Crisis and Critique 27 3 Resistance and Autonomy 53 4 Antagonism and Repair 86 5 Separation and Renewal 133 6 Capture and Experimentation 164 7 Conclusion: Der Kampf geht weiter 196 References 209 Index 231

Dramaturgies of dissent: the spatial politics of squatting in Berlin, 1968–

This paper builds on an emergent scholarly interest in the political geography of the contemporary city. If recent struggles over the meaning of urban space testify to the interarticulation of neo-liberal norms with an increasingly revanchist approach to local governance, the main aim of the paper is to acknowledge various attempts to contest these developments. More specifically, it seeks to highlight the role and significance of the German Hausbesetzerbewegung (squatter movement) from the 1960s onwards. Despite a growing body of literature on the role of ‘1968’ as a watershed moment in the evolution of new social movements in West Germany, there remains little empirical work on the role of squatter movements within a broader matrix of protest and resistance. To what extent was the squatter movement in West Germany successful in articulating a creative reworking of the built form and urban space more generally? In what way were these counterclaims to the city performed? And how were these alternative cartographies organised at the level of the everyday? The paper proposes to answer these framing questions with particular reference to Berlins squatting scene and longstanding struggles since the late 1960s over architectural space, ecological practice and ‘insurgent’ forms of citizenship.

Experimental Urbanisms: Psychotechnik in Weimar Berlin

That the historical geography of the modern city is intertwined with the practice of biopolitics has in recent years gained wide currency. In this paper I seek to deepen and complicate this perspective by focusing on Weimar Berlin (1919–33) and on the active role of the experimental life sciences in manufacturing a new habitus for a rapidly modernising metropolis. To do so, I investigate the ways in which contemporary psychiatric theories and experimental practices seized on and transformed different aspects of the metropolitan experience, and turn, in particular, to accounts of the psychotechnical testing enterprise (Psychotechnik). In addition to the development of a series of experimental embodiments which were scientifically fashioned and tested, I also shift attention to the widespread dissemination of new realms of everyday conduct that were equally tasked with accommodating the impact of the modern urban experience. Ultimately, I hope to show to what extent the various incarnations of Weimar psychiatry were themselves enrolled in a larger project of policing and recuperating a national Gemeinschaft. As I argue, these experimental arrangements not only represented another example of the pervasive injunction of the period to ‘perform or else,’ but also spoke to the wide governmental reach of a pouvoir psychiatrique (Michel Foucault, 2003 Le Pouvoir Psychiatrique Seuil, Paris) through which experimental procedures for analysing, shaping, and regulating a new habitus were introduced, tested, and widely circulated.

Symptomatic Acts, Experimental Embodiments: Theatres of Scientific Protest in Interwar Germany

The author builds on recent geographical approaches to the investigation of scientific experimentation. While a number of studies have explored the various sites of scientific practice and the role of space in the constitution of experimental matters of fact, far less attention has been directed toward the cultural geographies of experimental science and the extrascientific zones in which modes of experimental practice were themselves developed and contested. Drawing on the reception of professional psychiatry in interwar Berlin (1919–1933), the author traces an alternative set of ‘experimental systems’ which seized on and countered the credibility of psychiatric expertise. The focus is on a series of modernist experiments in interwar Germany which actively reconfigured psychiatric science as a series of critical aesthetic interventions themselves tasked with performing ‘scientific experiments’. The paper is triangulated around three case studies, which chart the multiple traffickings between psychiatric experimentation and modernist art. The first revisits the traumatic reenactments of Berlin Dada in the broader context of mechanized war, rationalized work, and metropolitan life. The second explores the psychotechnical techniques that were crucial to the operations of Brechtian epic theatre, and the third case study explores the relationship between clinical therapy and modernist fiction as it came to characterize the work of Alfred Döblin during the 1920s. The paper concludes with further reflections on the significance of the ‘modern experimental turn’.

Geographies of Forced Eviction: Dispossession, Violence, Resistance

Today, forced evictions in the name of ‘progress’ are attracting attention as growing numbers of people in the Global South are ejected and dispossessed from their homes, often through intimidation, coercion and the use of violence. At the same time, we have also witnessed the intensification of a ‘crisis’ urbanism in the Global North characterized by new forms of social inequality, heightened housing insecurity and violent displacement. This introductory chapter examines how these developments have led to an explosion of forced evictions supported by new economic, political and legal mechanisms, and increasingly shaped by intensifying environmental change. It does so with reference to the 8 chapters on forced eviction that follow from across urban Europe, Africa, Asia and Latin America.

Zwangsräumungen in Berlin: Towards an Historical Geography of Dispossession*

This chapter explores the recent rise of forced evictions (Zwangsraumungen) in Berlin focusing on the relationship between housing insecurity and the emergence of new forms of urban displacement. While it is often argued that the elementary brutalities of forced evictions are symptomatic of a wider austerity urbanism that has recently emerged in the cities of the Global North, these are developments that must also be seen, as this chapter argues, within a much wider historical frame. The chapter thus provides, on the one hand, an overview of the contemporary logics of forced eviction in Berlin focusing on how evictions take place and the various arrangements, materialities and practices that they depend on. On the other hand, it re-positions the relationship between forced evictions and struggles over housing in Berlin within a much longer history of dispossession, insecurity and resistance.

Testing Times: Experimental Counter-Conduct in Interwar Germany

Writing at the end of their now classic study on the experimental landscape of Restoration England, Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer reflect on what they believe to be “the origins of a relationship between our knowledge and our polity that has, in its fundamentals, lasted for three centuries” (Shapin & Shaffer, 1985 p. 342). It is, they insist, “far from original to notice an intimate and an important relationship between the form of life of experimental natural science and the political forms of liberal and pluralistic societies” (p. 342). But as they go on to suggest, “we are no longer so sure that the traditional characterization of how science proceeds adequately describes its reality, just as we have come increasingly to doubt whether liberal rhetoric corresponds to the real nature of the society in which we now live” (p. 343). Although written over 20 years ago, their remarks still seem on the surface to be tellingly apposite.

Book review: Geographical imagination and the authority of images. By Denis Cosgrove. Stuttgart: Steiner Verlag. 2006. 104 pp. 19. ISBN 978—3—515—08892—3

Latinos as immigrants, whether old or new, researchers risk perpetuating the widespread and popular notion that Latinos as a whole are interlopers in a land claimed by others. Despite these conceptual issues, Latinos in the New South provides an excellent introduction to an important social phenomenon. Each chapter may be read independently and all provide valuable data for students of US immigration and students of the South. Most importantly, this collection promises to spark new interest in, and new research questions about the meaning of race, nation, and community in the US.