Counter hegemony, popular education, and resistances: A systematic literature review on the squatters’ movement

Abstract

The squatting movement is a social movement that seeks to use unoccupied land or temporarily or permanently abandoned buildings as farmland, housing, meeting places, or centers for social and cultural purposes. Its main motivation is to denounce and at the same time respond to the economic difficulties that activists believe exist to realize the right to housing. Much of what we know about this movement comes from the informational and journalistic literature generated by actors that are close or even belong to the movement. However, there is also a significant diversity of knowledge and scientific evidence on the squatters’ movement that is being produced by academia and that is worth knowing and grouping together. With the aim of defining and understanding how the squatters’ movement is constituted and organized, and how it acts, this research analyzes what the scientific literature affirms about it. Through qualitative research based on the systematic literature review (SLR) method, information was sought in the Web of Science (WOS) and Scopus databases. The initial universe of 262 articles was finally reduced to a sample of 32 articles. These have been analyzed by means of a categorized classification content analysis. The results obtained allow us to establish the state of the art on the squatting movement, placing special emphasis on its dynamics of resistance, its process of political subjectivation and its mechanisms of action and self-management. The study suggests that the movement is understood based on collective actions with a political role of resistance to neoliberalism and the inequalities it generates, and of response to the basic and social needs of the communities through self-management.Systematic review registration[doi: 10.5281/zenodo.7179670], identifier [7179670].

Okupación urbana, apropiación espacial y producción del hábitat. Dos centros culturales en ciudades argentinas

“…En las últimas décadas, el fenómeno de la okupación urbana ha ganado relevancia en un amplio espectro de investigaciones en ciencias sociales (Ballesteros-Quilez et al, 2022). El término engloba una multiplicidad de experiencias urbanas en las que determinados sujetos ingresan, permanecen y utilizan inmuebles vacíos o abandonados, de manera ilegal o sin el consentimiento de los propietarios (Pruijt, 2012).…”

“…In recent decades, the phenomenon of urban squatting has gained prominence across a broad spectrum of social science research (Ballesteros-Quilez et al, 2022). The term encompasses a variety of urban experiences in which certain subjects enter, stay, and use vacant or abandoned buildings illegally or without the consent of the owners (Pruijt, 2012).…”