David Harvey at Occupy London

Here’s a video of David Harvey speaking on November 12th at the occupation at St. Paul’s. The full transcript can be found here.

The State of Things: Biennale di Venezia

Somehow missed this! Some of the talks with videos are already available here.

Courtesy of the OCA:

The Office for Contemporary Art Norway (OCA), as commissioner of Norway’s representation at the 54th Biennale di Venezia, would like to announce ‘The State of Things’, a series of public lectures that will be held throughout the Biennale period, reflecting upon themes such as diversity, the environment, peace-making, human rights, capital, migration, asylum, Europe, aesthetics and revolution. Each presentation aims to tackle the ‘state of things’ today, drawing from the speakers’ fields of activity and research, and from what they consider the intellectual and political priorities of today.

The programme takes its cue from the Nansen Passport, created by Norwegian diplomat and explorer Fridtjof Nansen at the end of World War I in an attempt to enable refugees to move across borders in search of political and intellectual shelter.

Forthcoming talks:

Wednesday, 7 September / 18:00 
Judith Butler – The Politics of the Street and New Forms of Alliance

Although some have argued that the politics of the street has been replaced by new media politics, it seems that the public sphere within which politics takes place is now defined by a specific mode of bodies interacting with media. Hannah Arendt once argued that there could be no exercise of freedom without the creation of a ‘space of appearance’ and even ‘a right to appear’. How do we understand those new forms of democratic insurgency that form alliances that are not in coalitional forms? Who is the embodied ‘we’ on the street transported through media, and yet in place and at risk?

at Fondazione Querini Stampalia, Campo Santa Maria Formosa, Castello 5252, Venice

Thursday, 8 September / 18:00 
Franco Berardi – The ‘Movimento Studentesco’ and Pier Paolo Pasolini: A Misunderstanding

In 1968 the relation between Pier Paolo Pasolini and the Student Movement in Italy was a troubled one. In the midst of the controversy, Pasolini was accused by the students of being a populist representative of a backward culture, nostalgic of a legendary pre-modern time. This paper will argue that, from today’s perspective, things seem different, and Pasolini can be understood not to have been looking to the past but to the distant future that is now our present: an age characterised by barbarianism and of ignorant aggressiveness. Today, in the age of the televisual and financial dictatorship, reading Pasolini is a way to retrace the genesis of Italy’s present.

at Laboratorio Occupato Morion, Salizada San Francesco della Vigna, Castello 2842,Venice

Thursday, 20 October / 17:30 
Saskia Sassen – When the Acute Challenges of Our Epoch Materialise in Cities

Cities have long been sites for conflicts, including wars, racism, religious hatred and exclusion of the poor. And yet, while national states have historically responded by militarising conflict, cities have tended to triage conflict through commerce and civic activity. Major developments in the current global era signal that cities are losing this capacity, and becoming sites for a whole range of new types of conflicts, such as asymmetric war, urban violence and acute environmental challenges. Further, the dense and conflictive spaces of cities, overwhelmed by inequality and injustice, can become the sites for a variety of secondary, more anomic types of conflicts, from drug wars to the major environmental disasters looming in our immediate futures. All of these challenge the traditional commercial and civic capacity that has allowed cities to avoid war more often than not, when confronted with conflict, and to incorporate diversity of class, culture, religion and ethnicity.

at Aula Tafuri, Palazzo Badoer, Università Iuav di Venezia, Calle della Lacca, San Polo 2468, Venice

Thursday, 17 November / 18:00 
T.J. Clark – The Experience of Defeat

Whether or not the present Restoration is invulnerable, the Left in advanced capitalist countries has lived for the past two decades looking failure square in the face. The disappearance of a Left alternative from the space of politics, or even from the space of political imagination, remains the great fact of our time. Taking its title from Christopher Hill’s great study of radical writing after the English Civil War, this lecture is concerned, as part of that work, with the Left’s sense of progress. It asks what it could mean to a Left politics for it no longer to consider itself ‘on the side of history’ – not to imagine its task, in other words, as the realisation of the baulked potentials of capitalism and/or modernity, not to see its eventual victory written into the DNA of an economic order, not to posit some version of utopia, not, in a word, to ‘have the future in its bones’. Is a Left with no future a contradiction in terms? If not the future, then what? Is it only the Right that can (imaginatively, politically) dispense with the myth of freedom in full possession of technics? What aims and imagery might there be for an ‘un-modernity’ to come?

at Auditorium Santa Margherita, Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia, Campo Santa Margherita, Dorsoduro 3689, Venice

Norway’s representation in Venice in 2011 is commissioned by OCA and organised by its director, Marta Kuzma and its associate curator, Pablo Lafuente, together with Peter Osborne, director of the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy at Kingston University, London. Norway’s representation at the 54th International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia, also includes ‘Beyond Death: Viral Discontents and Contemporary Notions about AIDS’, a graduate programme by Bjarne Melgaard at the Faculty of Design and Arts, Università Iuav di Venezia.

From Housing Crisis to Radical Urbanism: Reflections on Squatting

Over two weeks ago I posted a piece on the Guardian’s Comment is Free site which explored the coalition government’s plans to criminalize squatting subject to a brief consultation period. The main thrust of my argument was twofold:

1)    That plans to criminalize squatting would simply exacerbate a growing housing crisis in the UK. Squatting should be seen as a necessary coping strategy in the face of an highly uneven and exploitative housing market.

2)    That the proposed ban also betrays a more sinister logic that seeks to legislate against various struggles for social justice in our cities. The impact of a ban on the use of ‘occupation’ as a legitimate tactic of protest must therefore be carefully considered.

The piece was greeted by shrill jeremiads about the sanctity of private property. It was never my intention to romanticize squatting nor am I a ‘right-on’ academic hoping to secure some cheap activist points. I am a cultural and historical geographer who is working on a book-length project that explores the history of squatting in Berlin. The book is based on detailed archival and ethnographic research and is driven by a commitment to recovering the complex history behind various attempts to develop more just and equal spaces in our cities. To do so, also demands a fidelity to my source material and it was in such a spirit that I posted on CIF.

In the remainder of this post, I would like to respond in two ways to some of the more negative comments which I received. First, I would like to briefly explore the relationship between the law and squatting. Second, I would like to reflect on the nature of the current housing crisis in the UK and how squatting might prompt us to think differently about urban living. In a follow-up post, I will examine the complex historical geography of squatting in the UK and elsewhere and critically interrogate the relevance of squatting and other occupation-based practices within wider ‘right to the city’ struggles. For the sake of clarity, I have organized the rest of the post as follows:

1) The law and squatting

It is not surprising that the proposed new law has been deliberately constructed to defend the interests of “hard-working homeowners” against squatters. And yet, as Richard George rightly points out in an excellent piece in New Left Project, existing legal provisions already do a good job of protecting home-owners. George is also right to flag up the significance of Section 6 of the 1977 Criminal Law Act which protects occupants of a property from violent forcible entry by non-residents including owners. That a new law would give non-resident owners the same rights as displaced residential occupiers will only make matters worse. As George writes, “instead of bringing both parties before a judge, which gives tenants a chance to prove they’ve the right to be there, often-complex housing issues would be dealt with on the doorstep, further inflaming an already heated situation.”

It is hard, in this context, not to view the planned legislation as ideologically-driven and, as such, dependent on shoring up a commitment to the untouchable rightfulness of private property. I have more to say about this in a moment but I think it is important to insist on the sufficiency of existing legislation. What concerns me here is the potential use of the law as a ‘tool’ or ‘weapon’ that could be used to defend the parlous state of housing in the UK. This kind of legal ‘revanchism’ is a very worrying development and has, in my view, become a defining feature of the neo-liberal city with its increasingly iniquitous set of geographies.

2) From Housing Crisis to Re-thinking Property

There is a pressing housing crisis in the UK. The evidential particulars of the current crisis have recently been set out to great effect by Stuart Hodkinson in a piece in Red Pepper. As Hodkinson points out, the current market has been effectively paralyzed by its own internal contradictions. Rates of repossession and homelessness are on the rise. A concomitant slump in house building completions has put further pressure on the private rental market. For example, rents have already risen by over 7.3% in London over the past year and average rents have topped £1000 for the first time. And all of this is to say nothing of the serious cuts to housing benefits and other frontline services and the impact that this will undoubtedly have on the existing crisis. At the same time, it would be misleading to simply reduce the current UK housing crisis to a catastrophic failure of the global finance system. Housing inequality, so Hodkinson argues, has always been a systemic feature of capitalism and the incessant ‘creative destruction’ of our cities has, in turn, been central to the expansion of capitalist accumulation. In Hodkinson’s own words, “[capitalism] continually condemns significant numbers of people to housing misery, and periodically blows up into a wider crisis.”

My own ongoing research in Berlin has, in this context, shown that there is in fact a direct relationship between economic crisis, housing precarity, and intensified squatting. Similar conclusions have also been drawn with respect to the history of housing crises in London, Paris, and elsewhere. It would seem to me that the criminalization of squatting would only give further support to a failed pro-market model of housing driven by profiteering and speculation. Alternative housing solutions are therefore needed – Hodkinson talks of a “cross-tenure approach”  – and the everyday practices of squatters might offer some possible ways of addressing the housing question. Squatting should perhaps be seen as a both a necessary protest against precarity and a constituent protest for alternative ways of living together in increasingly divided and unequal urban settings. It is time to challenge long-standing pieties about the virtues of private property and to think creatively about notions of collective property. This is not to suggest that squatting offers the only long-term solution to the housing crisis in the UK, but that it does offer an alternative and autonomous set of practices that may help us to rethink how we want to live in our cities and in so doing build a more radical and just urbanism.

Part 2 will look at the everyday histories and geographies of squatting in England and elsewhere and the relevance of occupation as a legitimate protest tactic. 

‘Right to the City’ Presentation in Berlin

I’m off to Berlin next week to give a presentation at the Regenbogenfabrik (former squat, now alternative social centre and housing project in Kreuzberg). It’s the 30th anniversary of the project and I’m very excited to be able to take part in the celebration. The winter and spring of 1981 marked something of a high point in the squatting scene that emerged in West Berlin in the late 1970s/early 1980s and the Regenbogenfabrik was first squatted on March 14, 1981. While the recent clearing of Liebig 14 has been seen by some as yet another body blow to the activist community in Berlin, I believe that it is still possible to forge other different spaces in the city. I will be speaking to the relationship between the history of squatting in West Berlin and a renewed ‘right to the city’. I’ve included the poster for the talk below for anyone who happens to be in Berlin. The poster should really read ‘auf die Stadt’ rather ‘an der Stadt’ though I suppose one could use the latter as well.

Arts Against the Cuts Weekend

Courtesy of Nina Power at Infinite Thought:

ARTS AGAINST CUTS //
DIRECT WEEKEND THIS SATURDAY AND SUNDAY [Jan 15th and 16th]

Camberwell College of Art, Wilson Road Building (off Peckham Rd)
Following on from the fantastic Long Weekend at Goldsmiths in December, the Turner Prize and National Gallery teach-ins, the Book Block and the many occupations and actions that emerged from that weekend, this Saturday 15th and Sunday 16th Arts Against Cuts are organising another weekend of action, planning, imagining, working and thinking together.
The schedule below has been drawn from the great list of proposals sent in. There will be lots of free space for anyone who wished to put forward ideas on the days, organised spontaneity.  Schedule may shift around a bit.

SATURDAY
* Saturday Creche all day
10 – 11         Breakfast (BYO)
11 – 12         Open Meeting
12 – 5         Parallel Spaces and Open Spaces Including…
* The Art of Direct Action, John Jordan talk and Workshop
* Posters and Graffitti in 1968 Atelier populaire oui, Aterlier bougeois non, talk and print making workshop, Warren Carter Jess Baines, Jo Robinson
* Radical Education Workshop with Radical Education Collective
*  What shall we do with our cultural institutions? Precarious Workers Brigade
* Paid Not Played Choir & Political Music Collective music and lyric workshop
* Alter/ate Mobile Slogan Factory/ Counterproductions and CGTV
* Screen printing and Banner Making all day
5.00 CLOSING MEETING
SUNDAY
10 – 11         Breakfast (BYO)
11 – 12         Open Meeting
12 – 5         Parallel Spaces and Open Spaces Including…
* Object Sabotage with Evan Calder Williams, & Mute
* Mapping and Connecting with Trade Unions
* Video Box – 1-minute videos and Communist Gallery
* Book Block workshop
* Debt and Slavery, David Graeber
* Theatre of the Dead/ Dual Power – Planning for the 29th
* Fact Sheet Workshop and Free School
* EMA working group – Planning for 18th and 19th
* International Student Discussion/ Chelsea Project
5.00 CLOSING MEETING
After party gig with Chicago Boys in Camberwell
Arts Against Cuts was initiated across London Art Schools last Autumn. We want to reclaim the public, critical space that universities and art schools should be, transforming those buildings into art schools for the future, bringing together art students, artists, cultural workers and those fighting the cuts from across the UK to share in defiance against the relentless marketization of our education and our lives. We will share knowledge and skills; we will collaborate across disciplines, ages and backgrounds; we will turn our imagination and desires into tools of disobedience. We will make sure that all the knowledge, ideas,tools and projects which emerge from the event will be disseminated and put into action in streets and public spaces across the country and be shared by all those in the anti-cuts movements. The Direct Weekend will be a feast of non stop workshops and presentations, slide shows and films, how-to sessions and skill shares, and a free space for spontaneous creation of events, actions and expressions. Its not important what art is but what it does, and right now it has the potential to turn the crisis of cuts into an opportunity for change.

Further Update: December 23

1. Geographies of the Kettle: Fantastic piece by Rory Rowan on recent student-led protests in the UK and the technique of ‘kettling’ used by the police. While kettling may be seen, in the first instance, as a spatial strategy predicated on containment and restraint (under the auspices of maintaining public order), it is the anticipatory logic of kettling that Rowan rightly draws attention to. Kettling, for Rowan, is spatially performative. It is not only intended to produce violence but also the spectacle of violence for mass media consumption. For Rowan, the attempt to construct an image of violent and unruly protesters is ultimately a deliberate strategy “to delegitimize protests and re-symbolize legitimate protest as unlawful ‘riot’.” Of course, none of this should take away from the fact that kettling (witness the events on Westminster Bridge on December 9th) has increasingly shifted from a strict logic of containment and image management to a temporary and violent form of retributive punishment. That such new forms of enclosure are in fact creating the necessary conditions of possibility for the exercise of violent repression is a very worrying development.

Protest poster courtesy of http://infinitethought.cinestatic.com/

2. Epistemologies of Protest: In the article noted above, Rowan also makes a compelling point about the need to re-think the spatiality of lawful protest. He writes, “it is time to return to Deleuze and Guattari, to Debord and the Situationists, to Lefebvre, even to Tiqqun and Hakim Bey and to take them seriously (perhaps for the first time). A form of protest is needed that places dispersal over concentration, mobility over stasis and perhaps even disruption over symbolism.”

There is much to reflect on here (has Deleuze’s “Society of Control” ever seemed more apposite?). Perhaps it is not surprising, in this respect, that the teach-in at the National Gallery that took place on the same evening as the protests on Parliament Square focused on precisely this issue. Set-against the backdrop of Manet’s Execution of Maximillian, those gathered together in Room 43 of the National Gallery discussed and debated the Nomadic Hive Manifesto (“On Beeing and Nothingness”). All the details can be found here. Some predictably tedious comments below the line. The text, as I understand it, is meant to be open source and a work-in-progress and I have to say that I like how the manifesto reworks the relationship between dispersal and concentration. Not only are we dealing here with an aesthetic form of life but a new set of emancipatory assemblages that resist closure and containment.

Teach-in on December 9th at the National Gallery (Room 43). Manet's Execution of Maximilian in the background ©Kristian Buus

Student Protests and Occupations in the UK

“The reform of consciousness consists entirely in making the world aware of its own consciousness, in arousing it from its dream of itself, in explaining its own actions to it.” (Karl Marx, 1843, letter to Arnold Ruge)

Teaching and writing has left me little time  to pause and reflect on the rapid emergence of a new protest culture here in the UK. What is indeed clear is that recent student protests on the 10th and 24th of November respectively should not only be seen (rightly) as a collective cry of indignation at the social vandalism being waged by the Coalition government. At stake, it seems to me, are the assembling of constituent practices that seek to compose, fashion, and invent qualitatively different institutions for sustaining and enriching common or public goods. The creativity and spontaneity of the protests cannot therefore be reduced to a strict politics of “refusal” to borrow Marcuse’s overworked phrase but should rather be understood as a source of social creativity and as an opportunity for political innovation.

There have been a number of thoughtful posts on the protests over the past couple of days. See Nina Power and Lenin’s Tomb for eyewitness accounts on the protest at Whitehall on November 24th. It is also worth checking out two articles by Laurie Penny, one in the Guardian, the other in the New Statesman. The University for Strategic Optimism have just posted an excellent letter (in solidarity with the SOAS occupation) in which they insist that the collective  ’right’ to education remains a key component of any society based on community and social justice.

As someone who is currently working on the historical and political geographies of squatting, the adoption of site occupation as a tactic by students across the country highlights once again the centrality of geography to any workable politics of constituent power (not to mention the energy and creativity of the students themselves). I’ve tried to compile a list of recent and current occupations:

Birmingham: http://birminghamstudentsagainstcuts.blogspot.com/

Edinburgh: http://edinunianticuts.wordpress.com/

Essex: http://occupiedessex.wordpress.com/

Manchester: http://manunioccupation.blogspot.com/

Newcastle: http://ncluniocc.blogspot.com/

Oxford: http://www.occupiedoxford.org/

Roehampton: http://roeunioccupation.wordpress.com/

Royal Holloway: http://rhacc.wordpress.com/

Sheffield: http://sheffieldoccupation.tumblr.com/

SOAS: http://soasoccupation2010.wordpress.com/

Southbank: http://savesouthbank.wordpress.com

UCL: http://ucloccupation.wordpress.com/

UWE: http://act-at-uwe.blogspot.com/

Warwick: http://warwickagainstthecuts.wordpress.com/

University of Strategic Optimism: Inaugural Lecture (Nov. 24)

University of Strategic Optimism: Inaugural Lecture

Held at Lloyds TSB, London Bridge Branch (Nov. 24, 2010)

Further information about the University and details of the Syllabus for the Autumn Term can be found here.

Gängeviertel Event (Nov. 25): „Wir gestalten die Stadt, in der wir leben wollen – aber wie?“

This looks fantastic. Wish I could be there as I’ve been thinking a lot about ‘self-organization’ and ‘autonomy’ (and perhaps ‘antagonism’ as well) and to what extent they remain key practical tools for articulating an alternative urbanism. What interests me, in particular, is the ability of occupation-based strategies to generate new forms of critique in and of the city. It seems to me that critique of this kind is itself productive, especially in the context of what it means to invent or re-invent the commons…

Blurb from Gängeviertel:

“Mit der Besetzung des Gängeviertels ist ein unverhoffter Möglichkeitsraum mitten in Hamburg entstanden. Die Initiative „Komm in die Gänge“ und tausende HamburgerInnen haben die Stadt zum Rückkauf des historischen Viertels bewogen. Die zwölf Häuser sind ein Versuch, selbstorganisierte künstlerische Praxis mit der Kritik an sozialer Ungleichheit in der Stadt zu verknüpfen. Die derzeitige Stadtregierung hat diesen Versuch zunächst akzeptiert. Seit Monaten verhandelt diese nun mit der Initiative über die zukünftige Entwicklung.

Die Initiative möchte das Gängeviertel als kulturellen und politischen Ort erhalten. Das Gängeviertel muss ein öffentlicher Ort bleiben, an dem soziale und stadtgesellschaftliche Aufgaben verhandelt und angegangen werden. Es ist geplant, dass große Teile des Viertels als soziokulturelle Flächen von vielen HamburgerInnen genutzt werden und sozialverträglicher Wohn- und Arbeitsraum entsteht. Doch diese Zukunft des Gängeviertels ist noch lange nicht gesichert. Das Recht auf Stadt muss hier, wie an vielen anderen Orten, von handlungswilligen Menschen Tag für Tag aktiv gestaltet und gegen Interessen durchgesetzt werden, die einer gerechteren urbanen Zukunft entgegenstehen.

Die Weiterführung der Diskussionsreihe im Gängeviertel fragt nach Handlungsoptionen, Beweggründen und Zielsetzungen dieser Menschen. Wie können Freiräume erhalten und der profitmaximierten Verwertung durch den Immobilienmarkt entzogen werden? Sind die zumeist prekären Arbeitsverhältnisse so genannter „Kreativer“ eine Chance für den gesellschaftlichen Wandel oder Zwang zur Selbstausbeutung im Sinne neoliberaler Wirtschaftspolitik? Welche Möglichkeiten gibt es, erfolgreichen Widerstand zu praktizieren ohne letztendlich vom „Unternehmen Stadt“ instrumentalisiert zu werden? Menschen aus Hamburg und weiteren europäischen Großstädten berichten von Ihren Erfahrungen und Beobachtungen. Und alle sind herzlich eingeladen mit zu diskutieren.

Die Autonomie und ihre Grenzen. Soziale Zentren in Kopenhagen und Hamburg
Donnerstag, 25. November 2010, 20 Uhr, Gängeviertel, Valentinskamp
Nicht weit entfernt vom Gängeviertel ist das wohl älteste soziale Zentrum Hamburgs, die Rote Flora, noch immer besetzt und noch immer bedroht. Vor dem Hintergrund der beiden Projekte wird darüber diskutiert, was „Autonomie“ in der wachsenden Stadt bedeutet? Wie kann sie verteidigt werden und auf welchen Wegen kann sie verloren gehen? Und welche Erfahrungen gibt es mit diesen Fragen in Kopenhagen, wo die Ungdomshus-Bewegung 2006/2007 die Stadtpolitik ebenso herausgefordert hat wie aktuell die Konflikte um ein „Recht auf Stadt“ in Hamburg. Es diskutieren ein Aktivist der Roten Flora, Hannah Kowalski (Gängeviertel) und Ask Katzeff von der Forschungsgruppe openhagen, Kopenhagen.”

Squatting in Europe: Update

1. The new ban on squatting in the Netherlands came into effect on Friday, October 1. Under the new law, the act of squatting is now fully criminalized. Those who keep squatting face fines and even imprisonment for up to two years if violence or intimidation is involved. There have already been a number of protests across the Netherlands and it will be interesting to see how the ban plays out within wider debates in the country about the provision of affordable housing.

2. There has been some positive developments for the Jeudi Noir squatters occupying a ‘hôtel’ at Places des Vosges just off the Rue de Birague. The Paris Court of Appeals has proposed a mediated solution between the squatters and the owner of the property. All the details of the story can be found here, here, and here. I will post more details as the story develops. Also posted on the Jeudi-Noir website are a couple of video clips from a recent action or ‘happening’ by the Jeudi Noir activists at a real estate exhibition. I especially liked the interesting play on the French word ‘plafonne‘  (which means ‘to put a ceiling on’). To speak, for example, of a ‘loyer plafonné‘ – as in the video –  is to refer to ‘protected rent’. In this context, and as I noted in an earlier post on Jeudi-Noir, it is becoming clear that longstanding claims to particular ‘rights to the city’ (and they have a long activist history in France) have found new and increasingly urgent expression in recent struggles over the politics of housing (in Paris and elsewhere).