Abstract
Introduction
The existential core of urbanism is the desire for radical change. (Edgar Pieterse, 2008: 6) Europe, Asie, Amérique, disparaissez. Notre marche vengeresse Cités et campagnes! [Europe, Asia, America – vanish! Our march of vengeance Cities and countrysides!]
On the morning of 28 February 2012, a camp of protesters that had come to occupy the space in front of St Paul’s Cathedral in London was forcibly cleared by police officers and bailiffs. The camp – consisting of over two hundred tents and other structures – was set up in the aftermath of a solidarity protest on 15 October 2011 for the Occupy Wall Street movement (Ball and Quinn, 2012). Protesters attempted to occupy Paternoster Square in front of the London Stock Exchange but were prevented from doing so by the police. In response, a camp was set up in front of St Paul’s with the initial support of the cathedral. While the protest quickly became a source of controversy for the cathedral, the occupation also grew in size. It expanded to a second square (Finsbury Square) and a third major site was soon opened in a disused office complex owned by the Swiss firm UBS. A fourth site was also established in late December at unused premises of the Old Street Magistrates Court in east London. After the clearing of the St Paul’s encampment, occupiers at the other sites were, in the following months, either forcibly evicted or chose to leave peacefully (Townsend and McVeigh, 2011; Walker and Owen, 2011).
The ‘Occupy’ movement is one of many responses to the wave of austerity measures rolled out by western governments as part of an ongoing global financial crisis (Lunghi and Wheeler, 2012; Bauer et al., 2012; Taylor et al., 2011). As a transnational protest movement, it has focused on economic and social inequality, corporate power and the dismantling of the welfare state in favour of new forms of housing and labour precarity. If the movement builds on the experiences and practices of anti-globalization activists, it draws particular inspiration from the protests that characterized the Arab Spring and that were central to the emergence of the Indignados movement in Spain and elsewhere in southern Europe. From Tahrir Square in Cairo to Zuccotti Park in New York, from Gezi Park in Istanbul to Puerta del Sol in Madrid, the impulse to occupy and reclaim space as a tool for social transformation has been a defining feature of a new and alternative urbanism (see Butler, 2011). This is not to suggest that the ‘will to occupy’ is somehow generalizable. Each context and occupation is different. And yet, the call for non-representational forms of politics, the assembling of improvised protest camps and the creative re-appropriation of space and time have been central to a new transnational geography of dissent (Mitchell, 2012). 2
The occupation at St Paul’s was, in this respect, highly symbolic. Located in the City of London, it sought to draw direct attention to the ‘violence of financial capitalism’ (Marrazi, 2010) and to call time on the predations of contemporary modes of accumulation. It should come perhaps as no surprise then that the Corporation of the City of London quickly withdrew from negotiations with the protesters and began legal proceedings while Government ministers lined up, in turn, to denounce the protesters as mere ‘squatters’ (Shapps, 2011; see Vasudevan, 2011c). For the Corporation, the claim for repossession was made on the grounds of ‘trespass’ on a ‘public highway’ and that it had a ‘duty to assert and protect the rights of the public to the use and enjoyment of the highway’. According to the Corporation, the ‘semi-permanent’ nature of the protest restricted the rights and freedoms of ‘those visiting, walking through and working in the area’ (Corporation of the City of London, 2011). After a lengthy legal case, the Corporation of the City of London was granted orders for possession and the occupation in front of St Paul’s was cleared in the early morning of 28 February 2012.
How are we to make sense of Occupy St Paul’s? What conceptual frame can be brought to bear? It would, of course, be tempting to view the protest through the lens of recent work on urban public space governance (see Blomley, 2007a, 2007b, 2010). According to this work, a ‘public highway’ is best understood as a ‘finite public resource that is always threatened by multiple, competing interests and uses’ (Blomley, 2010: 3). There is much to recommend in this view, especially as it draws attention to the specific legal practices and knowledges that have come to regulate how particular kinds of public space are used. My own aim in this paper is to use the example of the occupation at St Paul’s in order to open up a wider geographical argument about the city: the city as an enduring site of political contestation. If the occupation offers us one pressing example of the different ways in which urban public space is regulated, conceived and argued over, it also prompts us to reflect on the
In order to respond to these framing questions, this paper sets out to show how occupation-based practices have come to re-imagine the city as a space of refuge and gathering, protest and subversion. This is, I realize, an ambitious project, and one of my main aims here is to extract a
In what follows, I develop a critical and
Such a process depends, in turn, on the development of specific infrastructures through which an act of occupation is transformed into a set of alternative spatial practices. As W.J.T. Mitchell reminds us, ‘occupation is, in addition to its spatial connotations, an art of duration and endurance’ (2012: 13). The recent occupations and encampments of Tahrir Square, Wall Street and St Paul’s were not temporary or transitory gatherings. They were complex socio-material orderings that connected people to ideas, practices, resources and things. These were spaces that were assembled to endure and were, as such, constituted through ‘protest architectures’ that sought to generate new forms of assembly and attachment, debate and dwelling. Occupation as a
In the remainder of this paper, I develop these arguments in three main stages. I begin by briefly reviewing the now burgeoning literature on the right to the city and its potential as a theoretical frame for developing a geographical approach to the practice of occupation. I then move on to examine a range of ‘occupations’ from urban squatting to workplace and university occupations to protest camps, focusing on the production of what I would like to call the ‘autonomous city’. In so doing I zoom in on the relationship between alternative infrastructures, the constitution of urban commons and a revivified right to the city. The paper concludes by offering three orientations towards a
Re-assembling a right to the city
As recent geographical scholarship has shown, Henri Lefebvre’s (1996 [1967]) idea of ‘the right to the city’ has increasingly become a central theoretical tool for the conceptualization of more just and equal urbanisms. From discussions on gentrification and the politics of housing to work on public space and social exclusion, the right to the city has been embraced by scholars who have sought to rethink various urban struggles along new lines (Attoh, 2011: 675; see Dikeç, 2005; Harvey, 2008; Mitchell, 2003; Purcell, 2003). Much of this work has centred on
This is a powerful argument and, if I share Attoh’s critical scepticism, my own aim is to shift some attention back to Lefebvre’s original conception of the right to the city and its potential relationship to the figure of ‘occupation’. Lefebvre’s
Lefebvre’s positive re-affirmation of a right to habitation engages the problem of necessity and precarity head-on. It also, in my view, allows us to retain a right to the city that is Living labour can produce something that is no longer a thing … needs and desires can reappear as such, informing both the act of producing and its products. There still exist – and there may exist in the future – spaces for play, spaces for enjoyment, architectures of wisdom or pleasure. In and by means of [differential] space, the work may shine through the product, use value may gain the upper hand over exchange value: appropriation … may (virtually) achieve domination over domination, as the imaginary and the utopian incorporate (or are incorporated) into the real. (42)
There is, of course, no doubt that a workable notion of the right to the city must still confront the contradictions, divisions and exclusions implicit in rights claims. At the same time, it is equally important to recognize the
At stake here, as I hope to show in what follows, is an understanding of the city as it is produced through an ever thickening and indeterminate intersection of bodies, materials, spaces and things (Simone, 2011: 357; see McFarlane, 2011b). The enduring significance of Lefebvre’s right to the city thus remains its potential to prefigure and generate new counter-spaces of adaptation and experimentation, protest and dissent (see Lefebvre, 1991). In the next section, I build on this argument and zoom in on the figure of occupation. More precisely, I show that the connecting thread between different occupation-based practices is the active composition of a space that affords – in both form and content – the necessary conditions for the articulation of a right to a different city.
Occupation and the autonomous city
This paper opened with the words of the 19th-century French poet Arthur Rimbaud, which might seem to offer, on first inspection, an unusual point of departure for rethinking the figure of occupation. At the same time, they have, more recently, come to serve as something of a rallying cry for a resurgence of occupation-based practices that have included the mass gatherings against authoritarian regimes in North Africa and the Middle East, the makeshift protest camps that have challenged the ‘escalating precarization’ of working peoples in southern Europe and the ongoing struggles for public education throughout Europe and the Americas (Butler, 2011). But even more than this, Rimbaud’s words were themselves closely connected to the events of the Paris Commune, the largely leaderless government which transformed Paris in the early spring of 1871 into an autonomous Commune and set about the free organization of its social life (Ross, 1988: 5). For Kristin Ross, Rimbaud’s poetry constituted a ‘creative response to the same objective situation to which the insurrection in Paris was another’ (1988: 32). As Ross argues, the very organization and texture of Rimbaud’s verse offered a complementary poetic space to the autonomous social one activated by the insurgents in the heart of Paris. While the dramatic seizure of the government by Parisian workers was undoubtedly a response to smouldering class antagonisms and the political realities of the Second Empire, it also produced a geography of protest through which deep forms of social regimentation were challenged and dismantled. ‘The workers’ redescent into the centre of Paris’, writes Ross, ‘followed in part from the political significance of the city centre within a tradition of popular insurgency, and in part from their desire to reclaim the public space from which they had been expelled, to reoccupy streets that once were theirs’ (1988: 41).
For workers, to occupy ‘every place’ was to challenge the predetermination of their lives and to transform the very space and time assigned to them. Ross’s account of the Commune is again instructive here: ‘the lesson of the Commune can be found in its recognition that revolution consists not in changing the juridical form that allots space/time but rather in completely transforming the nature of space/time’ (1988: 41; see Raunig, 2010). As an occupation, the Paris Commune thus represented an attempt to produce an autonomous social space. In the words of Marx’s own text on the Commune, ‘this was … a revolution not against this or that, legitimate, constitutional, republican, or imperialist form of State power. It was a revolution against the State itself … a resumption by the people for the people of its own social life’ (Marx, 1871). What this entailed in practical terms was a displacement of political action onto the lived rhythms and material foundations of daily life from work and leisure to housing and family. Autonomy was, in other words, actively assembled as new principles of association and co-operation were extended deep into the structures of everyday life (Ross, 1988: 5, 33; see Lefebvre, 1965). All of this led, in turn, to the development of alternative forms of political encounter and gathering characterized by both a spatial openness and a spontaneous and immersive sense of time. Political clubs and informal women’s groups combined with grassroots general assemblies and quarter committees to produce a new alternative infrastructure in the city while the rapid circulation and dissemination of political posters, notices and announcements meant that the everyday life of the city was now such that ‘citizens were no longer informed of their history after the fact but were actually
It is perhaps not surprising, therefore, that the Paris Commune has been held up by many as the definitive model for a radical urban politics (see Hardt and Negri, 2004). It would be misleading, however, to see the 73-day occupation as ‘the glorious harbinger of a new society’ (Marx, 1871). For the communards, the occupation had already, in effect, constituted a new social space. To occupy, in this context, was actively to challenge the forms by which domination was ‘imprinted on their bodies’ and ‘imposed on their actions’, and to offer in their place a shared
At the same time, the recent historical geography of occupation demands an understanding of is codified nowhere … It is, in fact, the right to have rights, not as natural law or metaphysical stipulation, but as the persistence of the body against those forces that seek to monopolise legitimacy. A persistence that requires the mobilization of space, and that cannot happen without a set of material supports mobilised and mobilising. (Butler, 2011)
What is at stake here is an understanding of ‘occupation’ as a political process that
In the remainder of this paper I explore how the common work of occupation involves different ways of extending bodies, objects and practices into space in order to create new alternative lifeworlds. To do so, I work closely with a range of occupation-based practices and show how, taken together, they offer a model for the composition of an ‘autonomous city’. My main intention here is to show how occupation, as a form of ‘
If ‘autonomy’ describes a concept that is contextually and relationally grounded in social struggles stretching across different times and spaces, it also, according to Pickerill and Chatterton, draws attention to the need for real tangible alternatives that challenge the precarious nature of capitalist existence. This has assumed, as they show, many different geographical forms that include experiments in living autonomously and that have asserted, in turn, a renewed concern with a right to participate in the making and remaking of urban space. In what follows, I begin by examining the recent history of urban squatting in the Global North as an autonomous urban movement. I then shift attention to the workplace and the university campus, focusing on the role that occupations have played – from the factory floor to the lecture hall – as alternative sites of social [re]-production (Ness and Azzellini, 2011). I conclude by returning to the protest camp as a constitutive site for the composition of a radical urban politics. It is not my intention here to provide an exhaustive mapping of recent occupation-based political tactics but rather to offer a set of orientations through which a different city is assembled, lived and contested (McFarlane, 2011b: 1). Occupation, according to this view, is contingent on the articulation of
Squatting and the autonomous city
In a now classic book on the nature of housing and planning,
The work of Turner and others has been instrumental in rethinking the practical dimensions of how people learn to house themselves in settings of extreme inequality. Not only were the shortcomings of state-planned mass housing projects exposed, but a new planning paradigm that prioritized ‘self-help’ and ‘architectural empowerment’ quickly emerged and took hold, especially in certain parts of the Global South (Serageldin, 1997). While Turner eventually shied away from some of the more radical implications of his work, the recent history of urban squatting in Europe, as Miguel Martínez López (2013) has argued, may plausibly be seen as a series of attempts to extend and recast the concept of housing ‘autonomy’. López places particular emphasis on the development of squatting in Europe as a ‘paradigmatic autonomous urban movement’ (López, 2013: 867). The broader significance of López’s argument to a global geography of squatting is admittedly beyond the compass of this essay and is explored in a companion piece (Vasudevan, 2015b). In the remainder of this section, I narrow my sightlines in order to develop a critical and
As a number of scholars have recently shown, the veritable explosion of squatting in Europe in the 1970s and 1980s represents one important example in the production of an alternative and autonomous urbanism (Bieri, 2012; Mikkelsen and Karpantschof, 2001; SqEK, 2013; Vasudevan, 2011a; Waits and Wolmar, 1980). For many scholars, this wave of squatting represented a ‘new urban movement’ characterized by the development of practices around collective forms of self-determination, struggles against housing precarity and a broader commitment to alter-global concerns and extra-parliamentary modes of political engagement (López, 2013: 881; see Pruijt, 2003; SqEK, 2013). From the late 1960s and early 1970s onwards, a major wave of urban squatting grew first in countries like Denmark, the Netherlands, Germany, the UK, France, Switzerland and Italy and, in more recent decades, in places such as Spain, Greece and Poland. While these developments came to depend on the assembling of transnational social and political networks and the sharing of action repertoires and other forms of ‘urban learning’ (McFarlane, 2011b), the degree to which they, on the one hand, cohered as a single urban movement is open to debate. On the other hand, it is possible to identify a series of practices, skills and tactics which, taken together, provide a different lens for linking urban occupation and radical infrastructure.
In most cases, urban squatting cultivated an ethos of self-determination and autonomy – a radical DIY empiricism – that focused on the rehabilitation of buildings and the active assembling of new forms of dwelling. In practical terms, this depended on a modest
Urban squatting was also seen, in this way, as the political
Since the late 1960s, squatters in Europe have duly transformed the urban landscape into a living archive of alternative knowledges, materials and resources. Squatters in the UK,
And yet, if squatters across Europe disseminated and shared informal practices of DIY maintenance and repair and other forms of urban ‘learning’, these were practices that also
Occupation and the commons
The recent history of urban squatting in Europe and elsewhere in the Global North underscores the degree to which a different ‘right to the city’ was shaped by the quest for what Lefebvre (1991: 383) once described as a ‘counter-space’. Squatted spaces promoted, in other words, the assembling of radical urban infrastructures and the development of new practices of shared living that offered ‘not only inventive ways of perceiving and acting in urban space, but new forms of urban learning and possibility’ (McFarlane, 2011b: 182). This was a process that, according to Lefebvre, was contingent on the production of a common field that offered an alternative to the kind of ‘temporal and spatial shell’ solicited by capitalist urbanization (1991: 384). Urban squatting as a form of ‘occupation’ thus not only challenged the dominant image of urban development, it also prefigured a critical ‘pedagogy of space and time’ through which the forms, contours and imaginaries of a radically different city were assembled and shared, conceived and contested (Lefebvre, 1991: 334; see also Schwartz-Weinstein, 2012). Such a pedagogy, as Lefebvre understood it, was never limited to urban squatting and it continues, if anything, to be implicated within a wider urban politics that links the production of autonomous geographies to the practice of occupation. There is, after all, a long history (and geography) of labour activism where workers occupied factories and other workplaces, forming autonomous councils and self-managed collectives (Ness and Azzellini, 2011; see Chatterton, 2005). From revolutionary shop stewards in Germany during the First World War to factory councils in Italy in 1919 and 1920, from the collectivization of private firms during the Spanish Civil War to the occupation of factories in Britain during the early 1970s, there exists a rich history of occupation that draws attention to the wide range of practices that transformed the workplace into an important site of autonomous organization and production (Gorostiza et al., 2013; see collection of essays in Ness and Azzellini, 2011).
Perhaps the most important point of reference for labour activism and radical autonomous movements in the Global North over the past few decades remains, however, Italian autonomism and the broader autonomous Marxist tradition which it came to inspire (Lotringer and Marazzi, 2007; Wright, 2002). Groups such as
For other theorists of
Defeat and political repression should not detract from the historical and geographical significance of Italian
In recent years, a new ‘transnational current of student revolt and youth militancy’ has attempted to revive the practice of occupation as a direct response to the neoliberalization of the university, as well as to broader austerity reforms following the onset of the global financial crisis in 2007 (Schwarz-Weinstein, 2012). Drawing inspiration from a rich and sedimented history of student activism that stretches back to the late 1960s and early 1970s, and also building on new insurgent youth movements in France, Greece and Italy, a wave of student occupations hit the United States in the fall of 2008 on both the east and west coasts. They emerged, as Zach Schwartz-Weinstein (2012) has suggested, ‘from a shared, if contentious, vision of radical refusal and expropriation of the neoliberal university, and initiated a new tactical and ideological phase of struggle within and beyond US campuses’. While the students who had earlier occupied universities and seized public spaces across Italy proclaimed that ‘we won’t pay for your crisis’, their counterparts in California, according to Schwartz-Weinstein, argued that they themselves
The accelerated marketization of higher education prompted a similar wave of protest and occupation in the United Kingdom in the fall of 2010 and in Chile and Colombia in 2011 and 2012 (see Hancox, 2011).
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In Québec, students initiated a successful student strike in 2012 which at its peak in March involved over 300,000 students. Student occupations in the UK and elsewhere also spawned the emergence of radical pedagogical alternatives based on co-production and participatory methods such as the Really Open University in Leeds, the Really Free School in London, the Edu-factory collective across Italy, Fakultæt Null in Berlin, the Slow University of Warsaw, the Universidad Nómada in Madrid and many others (see Neary, 2012; Pusey and Sealey-Huggins, 2013; Roggero, 2011). In each case, occupation represented far more than a simple refusal of neoliberalism’s ‘predatory grasp on university space’ and the concomitant ‘unmaking’ of the university as a public institution. The occupation of lecture halls, outsourced cafeterias and management offices centred on
As ‘emerging spaces of protest, radical pedagogy and collective creativity’, university occupations should be seen as part of a broader practice of
In the past few years, student occupations have thus turned to a more ambitious and expansive repertoire of spatial tactics that were often shared across a transnational landscape of protest and resistance. Boycotts, blockades, flash mobs, spontaneous marches and walkouts have all contributed to the constitution of a spatial politics that connected a
Against a backdrop of uneven development, heightened indebtedness and a future of increasingly precarious work, a growing number of students in London and elsewhere have, in the end, chosen to challenge the very idea of the university as a ‘place of refuge and enlightenment’ (Research and Destroy, 2009). For many, the Invisible Committee’s recent injunction (2009) in For months now, all over Québec, the streets have vibrated to the rhythm of hundreds of thousands of marching feet. What started out as a movement underground, still stiff with winter consensus, gathered new strength in the spring and flowed freely, energizing students, parents, grandparents, children and people with and without jobs … The way we see it, direct democracy should be experienced, every moment of every day … This is the meaning of our vision and the essence of our strike. It is a shared, collective action whose scope lies well beyond student interests. We are daring to call for a different world, one far removed from the blind submission our present commodity-based system requires. (CLASSE, 2012)
If student activists in Québec were ultimately successful in overturning tuition hikes, other movements countered collapse, defeat and repression through the pursuit of even larger goals. Rimbaud’s original imperative to ‘occupy everything’ was seized on by many students for whom everything was now occupiable and each space – from the university campus to the city – ‘a potential laboratory’ for developing new forms of cooperation and revolt (Schwartz-Weinstein, 2012). It is therefore not surprising that occupation-based practices have played a crucial role in reviving the right to the city as a critical way of thinking about, inhabiting and producing alternative urban spaces. As I hope to show in the concluding comments of this paper, the growing convergence between transnational student struggles and a more expansive geography of occupation has been central to the urban protest camps that have characterized the Arab Spring, the Indignados movement in Spain and Greece and the Occupy movement in the US and the UK.
Conclusion: from protest camps to a critical geography of occupation
In this paper, I have set out to re-examine the relationship between the figure of occupation and the affirmation of an alternative ‘right to the city’. As a normative project, the paper builds on and extends recent attempts in this journal to rethink and recast how the ‘city’ is conceived and theorized (Attoh, 2011; Jacobs, 2012; Lees, 2012; Ward, 2010). More specifically, the paper explores the possibilities of an alternative ontology of the city as seen through the lens of different occupation-based practices that speak to both basic rights claims and demands (housing, education and labour) and
If this paper began with the protest camp at St Paul’s in London, it should now be clear that questions of occupation have come to
As a number of scholars have argued, the protest camp, as an emergent and potentially radical political space, has a long history (see Feigenbaum et al., 2013). What this paper suggests is that such a history draws, in part, on a complex genealogy of spatial practices interlinking squatting and other forms of occupation with the seizure and re-appropriation of public space. The common thread connecting the occupations of Tahrir Square in Cairo, Puerta del Sol in Madrid, Zuccotti Park in New York, and now Taksim Square in Istanbul with the tactics of urban squatters, labour activists and student protesters is a shared understanding of ‘occupation’ as a political process that
As I have argued in this paper, the various occupations, demonstrations and camps over the past few years have drawn attention to the possibilities and consequences of the prolonged occupation of urban space and ‘the reorganization of its contents, outside the scope of established institutional codes’ (Sevilla-Buitrago, 2011: 49). In Tahrir Square in Cairo, after all, it was not just that people seized and amassed in the square. ‘They were there’, writes Butler, ‘sleeping and eating in the public square, constructing toilets and various systems for sharing the space, and so not only refusing to be privatised – refusing to go or stay home – and not only claiming the public domain for themselves – acting in concert on conditions of equality – but also maintaining themselves as persisting bodies with needs, desires and requirements’
(Butler, 2011). A similar process took place in the wake of Hurricane Sandy as Occupy Wall Street rapidly refitted the activist infrastructures first formed in Zuccotti Park in 2011 to offer on-the-ground support for devastated communities across the New York area. As one commentator noted: Sandy simply makes visible the work Occupiers do and have done each day: the binding together of people and organizations in emotional networks of care and accountability that extend the prefigurative politics of the encampments into the world at large … Like the Occupy encampment libraries and kitchens, the neighborhood distribution centers are very basic and powerfully effective mobilizations of space to nourish bodies and foster communities. (Jaleel, 2012)
These are not isolated examples. Time and again over the past few years, to ‘occupy’ has been to insist on building the necessary conditions for social justice and new autonomous forms of common life. 5 There is, of course, a danger here in romanticizing the recent global wave of occupations. University occupations, after all, have come and gone. Protest camps have been violently razed to the ground and squatting and other forms of urban protest have been increasingly criminalized. And yet, while individual examples have not survived, the logic of occupation endures and continues to resonate across a new landscape of protest and resistance, autonomy and self-determination. Occupation-based practices may perhaps be best understood, therefore, as important ‘laboratories of the politics of the commons’ (Feigenbaum et al., 2013: 233). These are laboratories where people have come together to assemble alternative lifeworlds and articulate new forms of contentious politics. These are also laboratories that cut across a range of different social movements and raise important questions about the relationship between political activity, the figure of occupation and the translocal geographies through which people and places, ideas and objects are continuously connected and shared (Featherstone, 2010, 2013).
It is in the spirit of these very connections that this paper concludes by offering a set of orientations for the production of a A commitment to a radical imaginary that extends our understanding of how emancipatory urban politics are assembled, contested and made ‘common’. The ‘right to the city’ is thus recast as a process of A detailed empirical focus on the making of radical urban infrastructures. While infrastructures have often splintered contemporary cities into jarring archipelagos of wealth and poverty, this paper places particular emphasis on the relationship between occupation and the making of alternative forms of shared living. An
Taken together, these orientations draw attention to the different ways in which new, provisional, often ephemeral and sometimes durable urban worlds are composed in settings of growing inequity (Simone, 2004: 240). The overarching aim of this paper is to provide, in this context, a broader theoretical basis for re-examining some important dimensions of occupation – the ways in which alternative spheres are pieced together and new orientations toward the city are produced and secured. In the end, this demands perhaps a grounded reconsideration of the potential dispensation of autonomous life in the city. While this depends on a critical perspective that draws attention to the sufferings and injustices of city life, it also recasts the ‘right to the city’ as a ‘right’ to forge other different spaces. To produce a critical geography of occupation is ultimately to recognize and acknowledge the emergent possibilities of this ‘other world’ and ‘other life’ (Foucault, 2011: 340).