ABSTRACT
The paucity of comparisons between Northern and Southern squatting is striking and unfortunate. There may be good reasons not to compare. The situations might be incommensurable. Any attempt to compare faces overwhelming obstacles: is this one doomed to fail? We think a NorthSouth squatting comparison is possible, desirable and heuristically fruitful. We engage in a dialogue about how to develop an integrative comparative research agenda. The literature in the North and the South varies by the objects the researchers try to study, the way they are investigated, their theoretical orientations and their results. When we travel between South and North we can immediately see that squats and squatter settlements differ, as do the urban contexts and policies that target them. They are generally larger in the South; they also tend to be more durable. Their social movements for resisting policies are stronger. Public policies towards squatting in the South are often institutionalized, rarely in the North. Northern research focuses on squatting buildings as collective action, sometimes neglecting squats as refuges for the urban poor. Those who study squats tend to not engage with another emergent focus on Roma living in structures illegally erected on vacant lands. The stigmatization process appears in this research as a key explanation of repression and urban segregation.1 Southern research concentrates on irregular occupation of land to construct structures (not exclusively residential but also including agriculture, commerce and industry). They are more likely to integrate investigation of public policies to better understand the dynamics that illegalities take. These streams are occasionally brought together in overviews of housing, but overall there is little dialogue or cross-fertilization. In this chapter, two scholars2 who work in these distinct research streams address the reasons for this separation, examine what might be learned through careful engagement with the other traditions, and compare similarities and differences between the two kinds of squatting and public policies towards them. Discussion of the practical and policy implications have also largely developed in isolation, and we begin to consider how lessons learned in one context might be applied in the other.
