MANIFESTO

In pace with the extraordinary rural-urban migration and international immigration, humanity will end the 21st century as an entirely urban species. But urban environments are factories- the site of perpetual reproduction of services, interactions, urban and domestic spaces for capital accumulation, rather than the outcome of social processes. As such, the conditions under which migrants have integrated into the urban environments globally are characterized by the extraordinary struggle for decent housing and work.

Globally, it is the squatting movement that responded by countering exclusionary forms of ownership and radically transforming urban and domestic conditions for migrants through two distinct operations: the illegal appropriation of vacant buildings and domestic interventions centered on the commons. Leveraging collective action, they produced extraordinary domestic and urban spaces for migrants and refugees, utilizing collective labor, spatial activism, and by imagining alternative models of family and ownership.

In the Netherlands, gentrification and decline of the social housing stock since the 2000s, drastically exacerbated the State’s strictly regulated, migrant integration protocol.