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Squatting Europe Kollective (eds), Squatting in Europe. Radical Spaces, Urban Struggles Wivenhoe: Minor Compositions, 2013; 274pp; ISBN 9781570272578
Squatting in Europe is a collection of sociological analyses of squatting in the Netherlands, Italy, Spain, Germany, France, and England, from a largely autonomist- Marxist perspective. Happily, the majority of the contributors are, or have been, active in squatting movements, so there is a wealth of nuance and great depth of understanding on display throughout the book. Most of the chapters take the form of specific case studies, exploring the various manifestations of squatting in Western Europe (aside from some mentions of East Berlin, the Eastern European squatting experience is largely absent). Hans Pruijt's opening chapter is an exception to the case study format in that it provides an overview of squatting across Europe, and deals more generally with the tensions around different approaches to squatting, problems of repression/legalisation, the dynamics of gentrification etc. This provides a solid grounding for the uninitiated reader to carry into the more specifically focussed chapters that follow. However, Pruijt's is one of six chapters which have been previously published elsewhere - only four are actually newly available here. Some of the reprinted articles are very dated, for example Pierpaolo Mudu's chapter was published in 2004 (nine years before this volume!), and in other instances the data being analysed dates back to the late-1990s (the empirical data collected for both Florence Bouillon's and Miguel A. Martinez López's...