About a billion people live in homes built without permission
Squatting sounds like a fringe activity, yet a 2003 United Nations estimate put about one billion people in squatter settlements and slums. From Cairo's City of the Dead to Brazil's favelas, occupying land or buildings without the owner's consent is one of the world's most common ways of finding shelter.
In poorer countries, shanty towns usually start as squats on the edges of big cities, made almost entirely of self-built housing with no legal connection to water, sewers or power. Over time many are upgraded. The numbers can dwarf official housing. Between 1955 and 1975 Cairo's authorities built 39,000 public flats while about 2 million people arrived, most ending up in informal homes. In Alexandria, informal housing made up 68% of the stock against half a percent that was public. Around 1995, almost 70% of the people in Lagos lived in slums, and in the mid-1990s about a fifth of South Africans lived in informal settlements.
Every region has its vocabulary. Argentina has villas miseria, Peru pueblos jóvenes, Turkey gecekondu, meaning a house thrown up overnight, which from the 1960s housed migrants arriving in Istanbul and Ankara. Thailand even has commercial squatting: vendors spread their businesses onto pavements or beaches by day and pack up at closing time, avoiding extra rent.
In richer countries, squatting often carries a political edge. One root lies with French anarchist groups who turned the silent move-out, slipping away from a flat without telling the landlord or paying the rent, into a collective act. Movements of the 1960s and 1970s created self-managed spaces in Denmark, the Netherlands and Italy, used as cafés, free shops, music venues and even pirate radio stations. England and Wales had an estimated 50,000 squatters in the late 1970s, and new squats spread in Spain and the US after the 2008 financial crisis.
Opinions split sharply. The anarchist writer Colin Ward argued squatting is the oldest form of tenure and that everyone descends from squatters, while a British police official linked it to nuisance and antisocial behaviour. Some legal systems, including England's and America's, even allow long-term occupiers to gain title through a doctrine called adverse possession.
Source: Squatting
