Seeing so many Occupiers getting evicted made me think of
this short 1988 documentary by Nancy Kalow on homeless squatter punk teens in the Bay Area (
warning:cringe-inducing rapping in the opening scene). From their stories, it seems as if they had free reign of the abandoned Berkeley Polytech building for a while. Readers of
Cometbus who aren't from the Bay Area can see a bit of the scene he made sound so attractive. 1993 sequel,
The Losers Club.
posted by shushufindi
on Dec 2, 2011 -
5 comments
So you'd like to see daily photographs taken in San Francisco and the surrounding Bay Area? You can start with
What I'm Seeing and supplement your viewing with the following sites.
[more inside]
posted by whir
on Jun 12, 2008 -
10 comments
Three days of rioting and protest across Denmark, fueled by an
influx of supporters from outside the country, was the result of the
Danish police's sudden eviction of long-standing squat
Ungdomshuset (
"Youth House"). It was the last such social centre in Denmark, whose self-governed municipality of
Christiana also began as a
squat (though its future remains
in question).
Squatting, the act of taking over abandoned property (sometimes surreptitiously as a way to secure housing for the homeless, sometimes
publically as a way to exert political pressure) has a long history, and often meets with intense repression, though has sometimes been instrumental in city-building. In New York City's early days,
homesteading was how many neighbourhoods began, and the
squat movement which birthed the now-legal
ABC No Rio community centre is linked to the city's
community gardens, as well as its independent arts culture through publications such as
World War 3. (WW3's co-founder Seth Tobocman receives
continued attention for his graphic novel
War In The Neighbourhood.)
Demolition of
Ungdomshuset has already begun.
posted by poweredbybeard
on Mar 5, 2007 -
54 comments
Slab City, CA "is not so sinister as it is a strange, forlorn quarter of America. It is a town that is not really a town, a former training grounds with nothing left but the concrete slabs where the barracks stood. [...]
The land belongs to the state, but the state, like the law, does not bother, and so the Slabs have become a place to park free. More than 3,000 elderly people settle in for the winter, in a pattern that dates back at least 20 years." [NYT Reg Req]
posted by LondonYank
on Dec 17, 2004 -
23 comments
