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I have been fascinated by this topic ever since the first newspaper stories exposing American involvement in torture began to appear in the early years of the so-called War on Terror. This fascination has persisted up to the present, as it remains clear – given recent accounts of Ron DeSantis’ time at Guantanamo – that this story refuses to die. Equally fascinating to me have been accounts revealing the extent to which this story can be traced back to the origins of the Cold War, to the birth of the National Security State, and to the alliance between that state and the professions (psychology and behavioral science) that spawned “enhanced interrogation.”
Klein’s first chapter tells the disturbing story of Dr. Ewan Cameron, the eminent psychiatrist who ran the Allan Memorial Institute associated with McGill University, and whose experimental treatment, partly funded by the CIA, incorporated ECT, sensory deprivation, LSD into a research program designed to erase patients’ memories.
Especially intriguing for the way it links this story to a bold account of how efforts to reprogram people at a deep level were linked to the spread of new forms of capitalism in the late 20th century. This is history as told by an activist, in ways that academic historians are not always comfortable with.
'Impassioned, hugely informative, wonderfully controversial, and scary as hell' John le Carre
Around the world in Britain, the United States, Asia and the Middle East, there are people with power who are cashing in on chaos; exploiting bloodshed and catastrophe to brutally remake our world in their image. They are the shock doctors.
Exposing these global profiteers, Naomi Klein discovered information and connections that shocked even her about how comprehensively the shock doctors' beliefs now dominate our world - and how this domination has been achieved. Raking in billions out of the tsunami, plundering Russia, exploiting Iraq - this is…
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…
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.
Migration and squatting are integrally linked. Migrants have always been the ones who have had the most difficulty in finding adequate and affordable housing – and this is even more so for undocumented migrants. Mudu and Chattopadhyay are the first to systematically document and analyze the recent squatter experiences of illegalized migrants in Europe and the US. While some chapters discuss political actions - such as seeking sanctuary in churches and occupying houses and squares - others focus on more covert strategies of migrants for seeking shelter. The contributors ask how migrants are being portrayed in politics and the media, how they can form coalitions with others, and under what conditions they can build power.
This book offers a unique contribution, exploring how the intersections among migrants and radical squatter's movements have evolved over past decades. The complexity and importance of squatting practices are analyzed from a bottom-up perspective, to demonstrate how the spaces of squatting can be transformed by migrants. With contributions from scholars, scholar-activists, and activists, this book provides unique insights into how squatting has offered an alternative to dominant anti-immigrant policies, and the implications of squatting on the social acceptance of migrants. It illustrates the different mechanisms of protest followed in solidarity by migrant squatters and Social Center activists, when discrimination comes…
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,…
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.
There is one current zeitgeist at the moment that everyone needs to know about - degrowth.
Jason Hickel’s book is one of the best accounts of how the whole world got tangled up in a ceaselessly growing economy and what we can do to reverse out of it.
This book has really helped me make the case with students, urban policymakers, and politicians that we need a new kind of economy that doesn’t just value growth or getting bigger, but one that respects the health of people and planet, and undoes some of the big injustices that have emerged from the long history of colonialism.
'A powerfully disruptive book for disrupted times ... If you're looking for transformative ideas, this book is for you.' KATE RAWORTH, economist and author of Doughnut Economics
A Financial Times Book of the Year ______________________________________ Our planet is in trouble. But how can we reverse the current crisis and create a sustainable future? The answer is: DEGROWTH.
Less is More is the wake-up call we need. By shining a light on ecological breakdown and the system that's causing it, Hickel shows how we can bring our economy back into balance with the living world and build a thriving society for…
I’m a sociologist who studies American family life. About 20 years ago, I began to see signs of the weakening of family life (such as more single-parent families) among high-school educated Americans. These are the people we often call the “working class.” It seemed likely that this weakening reflected the decline of factory jobs as globalization and automation have proceeded. So I decided to learn as much as I could about the rise and decline of working-class families. The books I am recommending help us to understand what happened in the past and what’s happening now.
How and when did all this start? Historian Thomas Sugrue shows that the peak of industrial employment in cities such as Detroit, the focus of this book, occurred in the 1940s. Then as hundreds of thousands of industrial jobs were lost in Detroit (and millions elsewhere in the US), the position of the urban working class deteriorated. This decline was an important source of the “urban crisis” that started in the 1960s.
Once America's "arsenal of democracy," Detroit is now the symbol of the American urban crisis. In this reappraisal of America's racial and economic inequalities, Thomas Sugrue asks why Detroit and other industrial cities have become the sites of persistent racialized poverty. He challenges the conventional wisdom that urban decline is the product of the social programs and racial fissures of the 1960s. Weaving together the history of workplaces, unions, civil rights groups, political organizations, and real estate agencies, Sugrue finds the roots of today's urban poverty in a hidden history of racial violence, discrimination, and deindustrialization that reshaped the American…
As I watched abandoned buildings, homes, and factories spread throughout neighborhoods in Detroit while photographers came from everywhere to photograph the ruins, I became fascinated with why we are drawn to ruins, what role such imagery plays in our collective imagination, and how ruins today are different than, say, Greek ruins. I am also interested in the politics behind the ruins and the role of capitalism in creating our declining cities. I have written several books on visual culture and politics, engaging with issues of race, trauma, memory, war, and capitalist globalization.
Although Diego Rivera’s Detroit Industry murals at the Detroit Institute of Arts allude to it, I had no idea until I read Greg Grandin’s book that Henry Ford attempted to extend his auto industry empire into the Amazon by building the company town of Fordlandia in the Brazilian jungle. I am fascinated by the suspenseful narrative Grandin creates around Ford’s ultimately disastrous failure at creating his own rubber-producing teetotaling town.
From Pulitzer Prize-winning author Greg Grandin comes the stunning, never before told story of the quixotic attempt to recreate small-town America in the heart of the Amazon
In 1927, Henry Ford, the richest man in the world, bought a tract of land twice the size of Delaware in the Brazilian Amazon. His intention was to grow rubber, but the project rapidly evolved into a more ambitious bid to export America itself, along with its golf courses, ice-cream shops, bandstands, indoor plumbing, and Model Ts rolling down broad streets.
Fordlandia, as the settlement was called, quickly became the site of an…
As I watched abandoned buildings, homes, and factories spread throughout neighborhoods in Detroit while photographers came from everywhere to photograph the ruins, I became fascinated with why we are drawn to ruins, what role such imagery plays in our collective imagination, and how ruins today are different than, say, Greek ruins. I am also interested in the politics behind the ruins and the role of capitalism in creating our declining cities. I have written several books on visual culture and politics, engaging with issues of race, trauma, memory, war, and capitalist globalization.
Brenner blew my mind by explaining that the idea of the city as a circumscribed and autonomous space is an obsolete nineteenth-century concept. He made me realize that the boundaries between city, suburb, and rural space are superseded by capitalist urbanization and industrialization across the planet—under the oceans, across the land, and even in the atmosphere—and that it is utterly degrading the environment for purposes of commodification.
Urbanization is transforming the planet, within and beyond cities, at all spatial scales. In this book, Neil Brenner mobilizes the tools of critical urban theory to deconstruct some of the dominant urban discourses of our time, which naturalize, and thus depoliticize, the enclosures, exclusions, injustices and irrationalities of neoliberal urbanism. In so doing, Brenner advocates a constant reinvention of the framing categories, methods and assumptions of critical urban theory in relation to the rapidly mutating geographies of capitalist urbanization. Only a theory that is dynamic-which is constantly being transformed in relation to the restlessly evolving social worlds and territorial landscapes…
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.
I read this book after I spent a year living and volunteering with the Zapatista revolutionary movement in Chiapas Mexico.
John based a lot of the ideas in this book on the Zapatistas mainly because they help us rethink what the revolution means – as an open, joyful, and everyday process. What I learned from this book is that If we really want to change society, or indeed crack capitalism, we have to build examples in the here and now that show a different world is possible.
It is a reminder that the state cannot and will not use on its own so we have to build self-managing autonomous structures in our communities that can create hope, dignity, resilience, and joy.
How can we rebel against the capitalist system? John Holloway argues that by creating, cracks, fractures and fissures that forge spaces of rebellion and disrupt the current economic order.
John Holloway, author of the groundbreaking Change the World Without Taking Power, sparked a world-wide debate among activists and scholars about the most effective methods of fighting capitalism from within. From campaigns against water privatisation, to simply not going to work and reading a book instead, Holloway demands we must resist the logic of capitalism in our everyday lives. Drawing on Marx's idea of 'abstract labour', Holloway develops 33 theses that…
