Here are 100 books that Migration, Squatting and Radical Autonomy fans have personally recommended if you like
Migration, Squatting and Radical Autonomy.
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I've been fascinated by city life since I studied Geography at high school. After twenty five years of teaching and researching urban geography, I am Professor of Urban Futures at a UK university. I now have a better sense of the challenges we face and what we can do about them. I spend my time supporting activists, campaigners, students, policymakers, and politicians about the urgency for change and what kind of ideas and examples they can use to tackle what I call the triple emergencies of climate breakdown, social inequality, and nature loss.
David Harvey has been writing about how capitalism shapes city life since the global revolutions back in 1968.
What I learned from his book Rebel Cities is that we need a laser-like focus on how capitalism makes and remakes urban life, normally for the worse. Unless we realise this we don’t know what we are up against and what effective solutions look like.
What I really like about this book is that it encourages us to see that cities and their citizens are rebelling all over the world – and this means building alternatives to corporate capitalism power that is ultimately pushing our climate and natural world beyond safe limits.
Long before Occupy, cities were the subject of much utopian thinking. They are the centers of capital accumulation as well as of revolutionary politics, where deeper currents of social and political change rise to the surface. Do the financiers and developers control access to urban resources or do the people? Who dictates the quality and organization of daily life? Rebel Cities places the city at the heart of both capital and class struggles, looking at locations ranging from Johannesburg to Mumbai, from New York City to S o Paulo. Drawing on the Paris Commune as well as Occupy Wall Street…
The Beatles are widely regarded as the foremost and most influential music band in history and their career has been the subject of many biographies. Yet the band's historical significance has not received sustained academic treatment to date. In The Beatles and the 1960s, Kenneth L. Campbell uses The…
Ever since I was young, I have been fascinated by – and worked with - people protesting injustice and inequality. By standing up, following through, and letting their voice be heard, people have the potential to change the world for the better. As a researcher, I have studied the history of various European protest movements – from labor activists to squatters and direct action groups. I have published on radical philosophers, Dutch Trotskyists, and even a socialist astronomer - but my main focus has always been radical squatters in the Netherlands and Germany.
Vasudevan is one of the first to provide an account of the global history of urban squatting, from the late 19th century to the present. His central claim is that squats are never simply about acquiring housing, but also ‘offer place[s] of collective world-making’. He wants to find out how squatters ‘reimagined the city as a space of necessity and refuge, experimentation and resistance’. As squatters take buildings into use, they recreate the space, filling it with new life and energies, forming new networks and identities as they work towards making abandoned places inhabitable again. Vasudevan’s study allows for global comparisons, and he explicitly includes the actions and experiences of migrants, women, and queer activists in the history of squatting.
The Autonomous City is the first popular history of squatting in Europe and North America. Drawing on extensive archival research, it retraces the struggle for housing in cities such as Amsterdam, Berlin, Copenhagen, Detroit, Hamburg, London, Madrid, Milan, New York, and Vancouver. It looks at the organization of alternative forms of housing-from Copenhagen's Christiana 'Free Town' to the Lower East Side of Manhattan-as well as the official response, including the recent criminalization of squatting, the brutal eviction of squatters and their widespread vilification. As a result, Alexander Vasudevan argues how, through a shared history of political action, community organization and…
Ever since I was young, I have been fascinated by – and worked with - people protesting injustice and inequality. By standing up, following through, and letting their voice be heard, people have the potential to change the world for the better. As a researcher, I have studied the history of various European protest movements – from labor activists to squatters and direct action groups. I have published on radical philosophers, Dutch Trotskyists, and even a socialist astronomer - but my main focus has always been radical squatters in the Netherlands and Germany.
Histories of squatting mainly focus on radical activists in Europe during the 1970s and 1980s, ignoring the fact that squatting has always been a global phenomenon. Anders and Sedlmaier have responded by creating a collection of chapters that highlight the global and historical nature of squatting. Their volume is the first to initiate an in-depth discussion of the similarities between first world and third world squatting, and thus covers cases from Seoul to Bucharest and Bangkok, and from Turkey to Brazil and the UK. In doing so, the book raises fascinating questions on how squatting oscillates between being a self-help and a collective protest strategy, on the relationship between migration and squatting, and on the influence of squatter movements on urban development.
Squatting is currently a global phenomenon. A concomitant of economic development and social conflict, squatting attracts public attention because - implicitly or explicitly - it questions property relations from the perspective of the basic human need for shelter. So far neglected by historical inquiry, squatters have played an important role in the history of urban development and social movements, not least by contributing to change in concepts of property and the distribution and utilization of urban space. An interdisciplinary circle of authors demonstrates how squatters have articulated their demands for participation in the housing market and public space in a…
World-renowned geologist, Dorrik Stow, tells the story of a long-lost ocean, named Tethys Ocean after the Greek goddess of the sea. Tethys lasted for 250 million years of Earth's history, straddling the equatorial world and playing host to the changing life and events that have shaped the planet we inhabit…
Ever since I was young, I have been fascinated by – and worked with - people protesting injustice and inequality. By standing up, following through, and letting their voice be heard, people have the potential to change the world for the better. As a researcher, I have studied the history of various European protest movements – from labor activists to squatters and direct action groups. I have published on radical philosophers, Dutch Trotskyists, and even a socialist astronomer - but my main focus has always been radical squatters in the Netherlands and Germany.
From 2009 to 2021, the Squatting Europe Kollective provided a platform for innovative research on squatting by both academics and activists. The group organized international meetings, created an interactive map of squatter actions in various European cities, and published a number of books. Their 2013 volume provided a state of the art of squatter research. The first chapter distinguishes between different modes (‘configurations’) of squatting; for example squatting as an alternative housing strategy, a strategy for saving monumental dwellings from demolition or squatting as a tactic for confronting neoliberalism. The subsequent chapters zoom into particular issues, such as the ways in which squatters organize the running of occupied places, respond to criminalization and form international travel networks.
Squatting offers a radical but simple solution to the crises of housing, homelessness, and the lack of social space that mark contemporary society: occupying empty buildings and rebuilding lives and communities in the process. Squatting has a long and complex history, interwoven with the changing and contested nature of urban politics over the last forty years.
Squatting can be an individual strategy for shelter or a collective experiment in communal living. Squatted and self-managed social centres have contributed to the renewal of urban struggles across Europe and intersect with larger political projects. However, not all squatters share the same goals,…
At Columbia University (where, incidentally, I became friends with Rob) I took two 19th-century American history undergraduate courses that featured dramatic lectures on Irish emigrants, the group that served as a prototype for subsequent immigrants from other nations. The books I have listed here gave me a deeper, more complicated view of the experiences of people like my Irish Catholic ancestors on both sides of my family. I find today’s harangues on social media and cable news woefully deficient in helping to understand forces like nativism, the influence of religion on public figures, and the harrowing adjustments to American life by emerging ethnic and racial groups.
I grew up with stereotypes about Tammany Hall as a nest of New York political corruption. Golway offers a knowledgeable corrective that shows how the urban machine garnered votes from new immigrant groups and maintained its power by pioneering then-radical social reforms such as child labor laws, workers’ compensation for those maimed on the job, and a minimum wage.
He traces the organization’s decline to changing New York City demographics and a lost ability to respond to the emerging challenges and changes of the post-WWII era—trends that left it vulnerable to a group of college-educated young Democratic Party reformers, both men and women, that Paul O’Dwyer allied with in the late Fifties and Sixties.
History casts Tammany Hall as shorthand for the worst of urban politics: graft and patronage personified by notoriously crooked characters. In his groundbreaking work Machine Made, journalist and historian Terry Golway dismantles these stereotypes, focusing on the many benefits of machine politics for marginalized immigrants. As thousands sought refuge from Ireland's potato famine, the very question of who would be included under the protection of American democracy was at stake. Tammany's transactional politics were at the heart of crucial social reforms-such as child labor laws, workers' compensation, and minimum wages- and Golway demonstrates that American political history cannot be understood…
In 2005 I realised that society was gradually, inexorably, headed off a cliff. So I quit a job I loved – a great decision! – and followed John Michael Greer's advice to “collapse now and avoid the rush”. Through that I’ve written a film, books, and peer-reviewed articles, co-founded organisations and movements, been arrested for direct action, advised governments, and come to live at a money-free pub! And now lead the ‘Surviving the Future: Conversations for Our Time’ online program, through Vermont’s Sterling College. I haven’t learned to change the course of history, but have discovered the ‘dark optimism’ of meaningful – even joyous – paths through such times, with eyes wide open.
I first heard Isabelle and Jay speak in 2021, and found myself literally gripping the arms of my chair with fascination.
They told the 40-year-long story of their home at ‘the ZAD’, 4,000 acres of wild wetlands and forest that the French state intended for an international airport. Community-building and collective resistance in the face of intense and repeated police assault – the footage of which is astonishing to witness – eventually saw off the planned devastation, and has inspired numerous other ZADs around France and the world.
We Are ‘Nature’ Defending Itself weaves together captivating theory and hard-fought practice in telling the kind of true story our world desperately needs more of. Pure distilled inspiration for those pondering their path, as centralised power structures weaken.
In 2008, as the storms of the financial crash blew, Isabelle Fremeaux and Jay Jordan deserted the metropolis and their academic jobs, traveling across Europe in search of post-capitalist utopias. They wanted their art activism to no longer be uprooted.
They arrived at a place French politicians had declared lost to the republic, otherwise know as the zad (the zone to defend): a messy but extraordinary canvas of commoning, illegally occupying 4,000 acres of wetlands where an international airport was planned. In 2018, the 40-year-long struggle snatched an incredible victory, defeating the airport expansion project through a powerful cocktail that…
In This Together explores how we can harness our social networks to make a real impact fighting the climate crisis. Against notions of the lone environmental crusader, Marianne E. Krasny shows us the power of "network climate action"—the idea that our own ordinary acts can influence and inspire those close…
I spent a decade researching my own dramatic family story in Southern Italy – a story of murder and passion – so I took a deep dive to learn about a hidden culture my relatives left behind when they came here to America in steerage. As a fellow at the New York Public Library, I literally read hundreds of books, articles, and papers over those ten years to try and educate myself about the world I was entering for my own search. These are the books that touched me the most deeply – and continue to – not just with their own intense research but with their emotion and gorgeous prose.
I loved the generational sweep of this novel, its gorgeously written history of Calabria, and its character and relationship studies. Though it is fiction and borders on magical realism, Grames spent time in her ancestral village to give the setting and background a wonderful sense of authenticity.
I loved Stella, who overcame bad luck over the decades, and her intense relationship with her sister, Tina. As a woman who wondered about the back story of her own Italian grandmother and old aunts, I was captivated by the descriptions, the attention to language and detail, and this heartbreaking tale of crushing patriarchy.
'You don't read this book, you live it' Erin Kelly
'Holds the reader under a spell from start to finish' O, the Oprah Magazine
'If you're going through Elena Ferrante withdrawals, this is the book for you' Harper's Bazaar
If Stella Fortuna means 'lucky star,' then life must have a funny sense of humour.
Everybody in the Fortuna family knows the story of how the beautiful, fiercely independent Stella, who refused to learn to cook and who swore she would never marry, has escaped death time and time again.
From her childhood in Italy, to her adulthood in America, death…
Growing up in Salt Lake City in the 1950s I was very soon aware that I was living in a world of borders, some permeable and negotiable, and some almost impossible to cross. It was a city of Mormons and a city of those who weren’t; a city of immigrants like my grandparents, and about whom my mother wrote (and wrote well); and a Jim Crow town where Black men and women couldn’t get into the ballroom to hear Duke Ellington play. Finally, it was a city haunted by its Indian past in a state keeping living Indians in its many bleak government reservations. What to make of those borders has been a life-long effort.
Early on David Levinsky, the immigrant Yeshiva boy, the budding intellectual, learns that America is the land of winners and losers, and if he is to be the former, he has to abandon his old self like the ear-locks he left on a barbershop floor in his first days in this new world. To be an alrightnik he must learn to dance the American dance. And dance he does, but his fabulous success as a garment manufacturer has left something unresolved in himself. His search for love at a Jewish resort in the Poconos is a chapter better than anything Philip Roth ever wrote.
Acclaimed by literary critic Carl Van Doren as "the most important of all immigrant novels," The Rise of David Levinsky takes place amid America's biggest and most diverse Yiddish-speaking community during the early 20th century. David Levinsky, a young Hasidic Jew struggling to master the Talmud, seeks his fortune amid the teeming streets of New York's Lower East Side. All the energy formerly focused on his religious studies now turns in the direction of rising to the top of the business world, where he discovers the high price of assimilation. Author Abraham Cahan founded and edited the Jewish Daily Forward,…
I was born in Ghana and migrated to the US, where I have spent most of my adult life. The antipathy in certain circles towards immigrants still surprises me. I have tried to address this in my own way through fiction in the hope that readers can come to see migrants as multi-dimensional people with similar hopes, dreams, and aspirations. As such, I am similarly drawn to books that address the humanity of migrants. It has always been my belief that a better understanding of those we think are different from us will help bridge our various divides. I hope my recommendations help get readers there. One book at a time.
Writing about a Nigerian family’s migration from Nigeria to the US, I appreciated Atta’s ability to masterly cover a wide range of issues without losing focus.
I was totally charmed by the remarkable way in which this novel managed to take me along on a journey that ultimately raises deep appreciation of each character’s point of view in the course of touching on issues such as interracial as well as intra-racial tensions and familial strains exacerbated in a new geographic and cultural environment.
An account of an immigrant family's struggle and the lessons learned about diversity
Writing at the height of her powers, The Bad Immigrant cements Sefi Atta’s place as one of the best storytellers of our time. Through the voice of her first male protagonist, Lukmon, Atta peels away nuanced layers to expose the realities of migration from Nigeria to the USA, such as the strains of adjustment and the stifling pressure to conform without loss of identity.
Covering a wide range of issues, including interracial and intra-racial tensions, and familial strains exacerbated in a new geographic and cultural environment, this…
Forthcoming eclipses coming up in Australia include that of 22 July 2028, which will cross Australia from the Northern Territory to Sydney, home of the internationally famous sights of the Harbour Bridge and the Opera House. Eclipse Chasers will act as a guidebook for both locals and international visitors, giving…
They say that we begin by imitating what we love and find our personal themes in the process, and that’s certainly been true for me. I grew up reading horror and fantasy and now I write realistic fiction with something deeper and darker always throbbing under the surface. My subjects can be contemporary, like Nightmare, with Angel or The Spirit Box, but I’ve had some of my biggest critical successes with historical fiction. I’ve had parallel career paths in books and TV, each often crossing with the other, but it’s in the novels and short stories that you’ll find me uniquely invested.
Sarah Hall is a phenomenal writer and this is the novel that got me hooked. The Electric Michaelangelo of the title is tattoo artist Cy Parks, a man whose heart, art, and the love of his life are all inextricably entangled. The narrative charts his journey from a Morecambe childhood to a tattoo booth on Coney Island and back again, and it’s another take on the kind of Sideshow Gothic that I love. Hall writes accessible award-worthy novels in prose that’s stripped of any pretentiousness. After reading this and then her debut novel HaweswaterI just order whatever she publishes, sight unseen.
On the windswept front of Morecambe Bay, Cy Parks spends his childhood years first in a guest house for consumptives run by his mother and then as apprentice to alcoholic tattoo-artist Eliot Riley. Thirsty for new experiences, he departs for America and finds himself in the riotous world of the Coney Island boardwalk, where he sets up his own business as 'The Electric Michelangelo'. In this carnival environment of roller-coasters and freak-shows, Cy becomes enamoured with Grace, a mysterious immigrant and circus performer who commissions him to cover her entire body in tattooed eyes.
