The Squatting Europe Kollective is a group of activist researchers all working on squatting and social centres.
We as a collective have been making databases of squatted social centres in cities across Western Europe as a means to assess the contexts, cycles, institutionalisation processes and identities of political squatter movement(s). I was making the databases for four cities: London, Amsterdam, Brighton and Rotterdam. All the results are available online.
This was a great excuse to do two of my favourite things, firstly to bury my head in archives and then secondly to engage in long surfing sessions attempting to answer bizarre questions such as what is the correct spelling of Bzigeuleuschmeuldeu … Aaaand the answer to that particular question is there is no correct spelling — as a blogger cheerfully comments “I doubt we actually spelt it the same twice tbh.”
Sometimes it was difficult to find data, especially with places that were mentioned on a flyer but then were impossible to locate in space or time.
Working on Rotterdam was enjoyable since it is an underground scene and always has been, so it was fun hunting down places. I’m chuffed to be at almost 100 projects now on the map.
With London, there was a huge amount of squatting in the 1980s but seemingly very little records kept, so I did what I could, visiting the 56A infoshop and chatting to friends and old squatters. I’m hoping now the map is opened up to a wider audience (anyone can mail in a project or suggest additions) it will become more filled out, if people are interested to participate. The map will never be complete or finished for a city of this size, but that’s OK, it doesn’t have to be.
Amsterdam is the map with probably the most work still to be done, since it feels like there should be a lot more centres than the 158 currently listed. Then again, it is a small city and perhaps the strength of the movement in its heyday makes me think that there should have been more places. Some analysis of what is databased so far is hosted here on medium as a nice long read.
Brighton has an impressive 48 projects, with still more to be listed of course, but I feel quite satisfied to have caught so many centres already, mainly thanks to living in the city and thus having access to old squatters who could tell me about places personally. I’ve written more about Brighton here.
As a general comment, funnily enough the 1970s are quite well documented since old squatters seem to be at the age of reminiscing about their youth, so information can be found in books and on the internet. This will probably happen for the late 1980s and early 1990s in a decade or two as well. For the meantime, it’s a bit of a blackhole. Obviously, the advent of the internet made research for the late 1990s onwards a lot easier (plus I was active from around 1998 so I’ve been fortunate enough to visit some of these projects in the flesh). However, it is worth pointing out that websites do sometimes die. Despite amazing things like the Wayback Machine sites based on private servers often do not stay forever and when they are gone they are gone, which suggests a real problem for research in the digital age. I must admit this is actually true for a project I was involved with, I maintained the website and hosted it on a private server. Then I wiped it when the centre was evicted :{
But why do this mapping? What is it good for? Of course people have asked me this. I think it’s good that people are curious, even suspicious, of someone who is wanting to profile squats in a time when squatting has been criminalised in both the Netherlands and England & Wales (residential buildings only). Perhaps there are two interconnected questions here, one regarding security and one concerning with how it can be useful.
On the former question, this has weighed on my mind. Obviously, the majority of squats are residential and silent, whereas the projects profiled in the maps had a public presence, demonstrated by events which were welcome to all. So no new information is being revealed, rather publicly available information is being collated. You’ll notice then that the term “social centre” is being taken in a very loose sense. I’ve been especially careful with more recent projects and would not add projects I’m aware of but which do not want to be public. For me, this is a historical project which then doesn’t need to represent all current projects, it’s more something to look at, to notice all the amazing projects which have occurred and to hopefully be inspired by them. I was also concerned that the information we generate is more useful to the movement rather than the forces of repression. I hope it will be (and most likely the state has bigger and better databases than us already).
Regarding the latter question, regarding usefulness, well I would hope people find these maps interesting to look at as a part of our radical history and beyond that I see it having an activist function. I remember when we were fighting the criminalisation of squatting before 2012 and idiot politicians like Mike Weatherley used to say things like “show me a squat which has done something useful” — now I could show him 263 projects from London (and indeed 48 from Brighton).
To add a squat or correct the information already on the maps you would be welcome to either email addtomap@riseup.net or use the comment system.
Note that for a new project the MINIMUM required information to get onto to the map is: Address / Date begun / Date ended (if ended)
The more information on top of that the better, including links, fotos etc.
