Squatting Movements: Reappropriating Democracy From the State

By highlighting the Italian “anomaly” vis-à-vis the Euroatlantic West, our paper argues that Italian squats in general and residential squats in particular, are “good to prefigure” new modes of political agency. We understand housing struggles as practices whose material dynamics imply a reinterpretation of the home as a crucial site of sociability and subjective empowerment through cooperation. This in turn blurs the traditional clear-cut separation between the private and the public spheres, and hence may herald the possibility of a polity beyond the state.