City Is Ours

Bart van der Steen completed his PhD at the European University Institute in Florence, where he studied the squatter and autonomous movements in Amsterdam and Hamburg during the 1980s. Ask Katzeff is a researcher at the University of Copenhagen, where he focuses on the interaction between urban development and squatting in Europe from the 1970s onward. Leendert van Hoogenhuijze is the coeditor of the Dutch socialist annual Kritiek. George Katsiaficas is a longtime activist for peace and justice who has twice been granted Fulbright fellowships. He is the author or editor of 11 books, including The Imagination of the New Left; Latino Social Movements: Historical and Theoretical Perspectives; Liberation, Imagination, and the Black Panther Party; The Subversion of Politics; and Vietnam Documents: American and Vietnamese Views. He lives in the Boston area. Geronimo is the pen name of an activist for the German autonomous movement. He is the author of Fire and Flames: A History of the German Autonomist Movement.

Squatters and autonomous movements have been in the forefront of radical politics in Europe for nearly a half-century—from struggles against urban renewal and gentrification, to large-scale peace and environmental campaigns, to spearheading the antiausterity protests sweeping the continent.