The Autonomous City by Alexander Vasudevan

Author:Alexander Vasudevan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books

6

Seizing the City:

Autonomous Urbanisms

and the Social Factory

Let’s take the city! (Prendiamoci la città!)

Slogan of Italian autonomists

Metropolitan revolt is always a refoundation of the city.

Antonio Negri1

The recent history of urban squatting is full of stories that begin with acts of occupation and resistance and end with tales of eviction and loss. This is, however, a story that begins with an eviction. On the morning of 25 May 2015, Davide Cassarini, a fifty-six-year-old religious studies teacher at a local high school in Bologna gathered together his class of twenty students. He took them outside and across the street to an abandoned commercial centre which had been occupied by squatters and was in the process of being evicted by the police, the Carabinieri and special branch officers from the Digos (Divisione Investigazioni Generali e Operazioni Speciali) Unit. By the time Cassarini and his students arrived, the occupants of the building had already been forcibly evicted and were being processed and identified by the authorities. Most of the 150 occupiers were refugees, many with families. They had occupied the former shopping mall, empty since 2012, on 22 May 2015 and were supported by activists from the grassroots union AS.I.A USB (Associazione inquilini e abitanti), members of the Lazzaretto Social Centre as well as representatives of the International Coalition of Migrants and Refugees Without Papers (Coalizione internazionale migranti rifugiati e sans papiers).2

According to Cassarini, the forced eviction was a lesson in ‘reality’ for his students. ‘I don’t see what’s so strange in bringing the kids here’, he added. ‘Exposing them to current events is something we are trying to do more of as a school. There is an academic culture that you learn in books. But we also must teach our students to be attentive to what is happening around them.’3 The ‘reality’ that Cassarini had in mind is the ongoing and protracted economic crisis in Italy that has left a generation of Italians facing a precarious future without jobs or affordable housing. More importantly perhaps, it is a ‘reality’ shaped by an ever-intensifying refugee crisis in Europe as thousands of people continue to make the dangerous journey across the Mediterranean on cramped fishing boats and shabby dinghies. While many who manage to reach the shores of Italy are ultimately granted asylum and permission to stay (permezzo di soggiorno), basic access to housing and other social services is often restricted. Refugees are thus forced to rely on the support of poorly funded, short-term government initiatives characterised by widespread corruption and non-existent services as well as racist intimidation and violence.

It is in this context that refugee groups have linked up with squatters and other housing rights activists in Italy. Together, they have begun to occupy empty buildings across the country, most notably in cities such as Bologna, Milan, Rome and Turin.4 If these actions points to the forging of a radical politics of care and hospitality, local authorities have responded in less sympathetic terms. Evictions – whether driven by spurious security concerns or increasingly corporate forms

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