SQUAT, or the Radical Community Builders of Reunified Berlin

Berlin was far from the only city in the late 20th century dealing with drastic economic change. In the series finale of SQUAT, Maya crosses an ocean and a continent to explore how people utilized empty space to resist neoliberalism in a city quite close to home: San Francisco. Beyond rising housing prices, what connected Berlin and the Bay Area, you might ask? Surprisingly, punk music! In this ep...

After several decades of neglect, many buildings in Berlin needed a lot of work to be made livable — but where others saw blight, squatters saw possibility. In this episode, Maya explores the spatial practices of squatting and how squatters used imaginative DIY renovations to claim a right to the city. However, that right was frequently challenged by non-squatters and the state, in violent ways… t...

What exactly was so radical about these squatters’ “radical communities”? In this episode, Maya offers a few frameworks to analyze the way life in Berlin’s squats diverged from the mainstream, in particular looking at the ways squatters thought about queer identity, anti-capitalist ideology, age, and art. She also examines the stories of the Black people that appeared in the margins of this histor...

In this episode, we dive deeper into the fall of the Berlin Wall, examining how a moment of such geopolitical significance was felt at the neighborhood level. Through interviews, Maya explores the frustration and anger that German reunification inspired and how squatting emerged as a tactic to both resist the status quo and imagine new ways of living.  Citations: Fire and Flames: A History of...

In this first episode of SQUAT, Maya introduces herself and the supporting cast of squatters she interviewed. She shares the reasons why a college student from South Carolina grew so fascinated with the fall of the Berlin Wall, and in doing so, illustrates some unexpected parallels between 1989 and 2020. Finally, she sets the scene for the rest of the series by explaining how Berlin came to have s...

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