Protest Cycles and Squatting Practices: Socio-Spatial Structures or Activist Agency?

There are several public myths about squatting houses and social centres. One consists in ignoring the long lasting history of squatting practices and movements over the decades. A second one considers squatting as a simply legal issue which should be either persecuted either legalised. Finally there is a general image that depicts squatters as the unique agents, authors and responsibles of the squatting movements. This paper aims at providing empirical evidence against those three myths. First, I recall on a complete data base of all the squatted social centres publicly visible in the city of Madrid since the decade of 1970. Urban location, duration of the squats and types of ownership of the buildings, shed light over the patterns and socio-spatial conditions. Second, mass media coverage before and after the recent wave of squatting in Madrid (connected to the M15 movement), serve to identify new and external conditions. Additional documents and interviews help to understand the deep political tradition and the experiences that created a favourable scene for squatting. Usually hidden legal tactics and the predominant kind of interaction between squatters and local authorities also shaped the explanatory context of the evolution of the movement. There is a more general consensus about the role of the housing shortage and urban speculation in the legitimation and motivation of squatting, so I won’t develop it here. Instead, I will emphasise the theoretical framework about socio-spatial structures of opportunity and protest cycles as the best way to overcome the shortcomings of the abovementioned myths and also to provide comprehensive explanations of this and similar urban movements. Finally, the overlaps and distinctions of this approach in relation to previous theoretical references (Castells’ The City and the Grassroots and different authors about The Right to the City) will be discussed.