Ezgi Kaşkaval 1655893 ADM5104 STATE AND SOCIETY IN EUROPE TAKE-HOME FINAL EXAM 2.What is the relationship between financialization of housing provision and squatting? Is it possible o claim that squatting is a part of "right to the city" or commons movements? Introduction In today's world the concept of urban and activities with regard to its usage have become more and more attention grabing topic for both academic world and everyday life. As a part of this urbanization process, housing issue is one of the main area of research in academic world. Before academic world, it is actually a focal point for ordinary persons as well.The reason for that is quite simple: every person needs a shelter to continue her daily life properly. It is …show more content…
While doing this, case studies of England and the Netherlands will be used as popular examples of squatting in Europe. Indeed,both of the examples will prove the "sui generis" nature of squatting movements in todays' socio economic order. Squatting can be defined as "living or using dwellers without the consent of their owners"(Kollective). There are a lots of reasons and forms of it: While working class people use it to find a proper shelter for themselves, others as middle class prefer this way for their activist purposes.Dee,2014 argues that squatting movements are crucial social movements and needs to be analyzed with the help of two different time period as 1960s-70s and modern squatting. Actually modern movement began in the 1960s in England. The first aim of this trend was to find a home for homeless people." Right to squat" became controversial topic in these times. People are not sure about the real aim of this movement. Is squatting really helping the homeless people, or is it just a group of "freebooters" who aim at caosin the public? These types of questions are the major concerns in understanding this trend taken place in Europe. In my opinion if there are a lot of non-used houses on the one hand, and also a lot homeless people, it is really sensible to match these two groups. As cited in the article of Dee, Tony Mahony (one of the member of the London Squatters Campaign.) states that the aim of the homeless people is just to obtain their right to decent roof over their heads and ther is no central ideology in this movement. The members of groups are autonomus from each other. (1969). As it can be seen, at first the aim was to find a decent roof over head of homeless people. But when we look at todays' contemporary squatting image, there has been some changes. People started to squat for ceating social centers, libraries, centers