Society and space

There are two main streams at play in Alexander Vasudevan’s latest book, Metropolitan Preoccupations: The Spatial Politics of Squatting in Berlin. The first is about the cultural and political geographies of squatting in the city, of which this text, as the author reminds us, represents the first book-length study available. The second is about the analytics that Vasudevan employs to narrate those stories and geographies. If the former makes for a very informative read and an invaluable resource for further studies on Berlin, it is within the latter that the true merit of this text resides.

This book is not simply about “squatting” in Berlin. Rather, it is a masterful exercise in geography: the careful tracing and detailed writing of histories, events, bodies, materialities and atmospheres and of their nuanced capacities, debris, and paths. To some extent, this is a textbook. In reading it we can perceive the excruciating dedication of its author in avoiding over-theorisations; in trying to narrate occupation as a universe of heterogeneities rather than only through the voice of its leaders; in laying out a history that is also a geography, and a geography that takes its historical lineages seriously. Maintaining a clear analytical lucidity throughout the dense 242 pages of text in this monograph, as Vasudevan does, is not an easy task, and he deserves praise and attention.

Continue reading here