Metropolitan Preoccupations - The Spatial Politicsof Squatting In Berlin

In this, the first book-length study of the cultural and political geography of squatting in Berlin, Alexander Vasudevan links the everyday practices of squatters in the city to wider and enduring questions about the relationship between space, culture, and protest.

• Focuses on the everyday and makeshift practices of squatters in their attempt to exist beyond dominant power relations and redefine what it means to live in the city
• Offers a fresh critical perspective that builds on recent debates about the “right to the city” and the role of grassroots activism in the making of alternative urbanisms
• Examines the implications of urban squatting for how we think, research and inhabit the city as a site of radical social transformation
• Challenges existing scholarship on the New Left in Germany by developing a critical geographical reading of the anti-authoritarian revolt and the complex geographies of connection and solidarity that emerged in its wake
• Draws on extensive field work conducted in Berlin and elsewhere in Germany

Alexander Vasudevan is Assistant Professor of Cultural and Historical Geography at the University of Nottingham, UK. A co-editor ofPracticing the Archive: Reflections on Method and Practice in Historical Geography (with E. Gagen and H. Lorimer, 2007) his work has been published in several prestigious journals, includingAntipode, Cultural Geographies, Environment and Planning A andD, Progress in Human Geography, and Social and Cultural Geography. His current research focuses on radical politics, urban squatting and the wider geographies of contemporary precarity.