Books about Squatter from Amazon.com

In the middle of the night they quickly build houses and seize land before the police destroy their fragile homes. They're squatters--families that risk the wrath of governments and property owners by building dwellings on land they don't own--and they represent one out of every ten people on the planet.

Investigative journalist Robert Neuwirth lived among squatter communities from Rio to Bombay to Nairobi to Istanbul to give us an impassioned, inside view of squatter life and a glimpse into the urban future. He met people in Nairobi who built homes with their bare hands, Turkish families who plot land invasions, and children in Rio whose parents justify outfoxing the authorities as the only path to a better life. And he shows us that in cities like Rio, squatter settlements have become decent places to live for formerly landless people. Tracing the notion of private property from the enclosure movement in Europe to the settlement of the U.S., Neuwirth shows how squatting rights may actually be seen as more "natural" than the current laws practiced in the U.S.

In almost every country of the developing world, the most active builders are squatters, creating complex local economies with high rises, shopping strips, banks, and self-government. As they invent new social structures, Neuwirth argues, squatters are at the forefront of the worldwide movement to develop new visions of what constitutes property and community..
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Crimes against Nature reveals the hidden history behind three of the nation's first parklands: the Adirondacks, Yellowstone, and the Grand Canyon. Focusing on conservation's impact on local inhabitants, Karl Jacoby traces the effect of criminalizing such traditional practices as hunting, fishing, foraging, and timber cutting in the newly created parks. Jacoby reassesses the nature of these "crimes" and provides a rich portrait of rural people and their relationship with the natural world in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries..
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This book is a survey of small houses from early settler cabins to the tiny house movement of today. The houses include frontier shelters, squatter houses, Cracker houses, farmhouses, bandboxes, shotguns, bungalows, and tiny houses. The book shows how these houses were built and served the special needs of their owner-builders. Each chapter starts by showing the house in the context of its construction, the kind of resources that were available to its owners, and how their construction was shaped by both their purpose and historical situation. Many of the insights of these home-builders can be used in small house construction today. These insights include the use of decks and outdoor spaces, separation of spaces, and simple framing techniques that are visible in the construction models. These models help readers get a feel for what it might be like to live in a small space and ways traditional builders maximized the efficiency and comfort of their homes. The book s CD includes a model of every house in the book as well as contextual plans and elevations, three-dimensional details of the structure, and the layout of each house. Readers can explore the house s construction, deconstruct its pieces, modify the spaces, and adapt them to test their own ideas. All our books are written as graphic narratives in a comic style. Every book mixes layers of visual information with construction models, short video tours, and tutorials on how the models were built and organized..
Price: $29.95 [Notify me when price goes down.]

The Squatter and the Don, originally published in San Francisco in 1885, is the first fictional narrative written and published in English from the perspective of the conquered Mexican population that, despite being granted the full rights of citizenship under the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo in 1848, was, by 1860, a subordinated and marginalized national minority..
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Contents

Introduction
Chapter One: Homes Not Jails:The Secret Success of a Squatting Movement to House the Homeless
Chapter Two: Battling the Banana Baron: Rural Hondurans Fight Chiquita Brands
Chapter Three: Arguments to Squat By: The Challenge to Property
Chapter Four: Direct Action and the Law
Chapter Five: Repression, Violent Resistance, and Reform
Chapter Six: Tactics and Mobilization: The Primacy of Power
Conclusion: The Future of Land and Housing Movements

An Excerpt from No Trespassing! By Anders Corr

Draft Version: Please do not quote

Chapter 1

Homes Not Jails:

The Secret Success of a Squatting Movement to House the Homeless

Benjamin volunteered to open the vacant building on Shotwell and 22nd, and said I could follow. He had squatted it before the landlord kicked him out, but now lived in a sleazy downtown hotel. We walked up to the alley door, and just as Benjamin produced his crowbar, a very large guy (much smaller than Benjamin and much bigger than me) walked up to his own door just a few feet away. Benjamin thought quick and pretended legitimacy by knocking. "Whatcha knockin for?" the neighbor asked. His eyes narrowed. "Nobody lives there."

Benjamin has broken into hundreds of buildings with Homes Not Jails and knew when to lead a tactical retreat. But undaunted, he circled the building and easily lifted his seven-foot frame over a fence and into the backyard. From my cowardly vantage I could see a weak flashlight flickering at us from a window in the second story of the next-door flat. Was it the neighbor who confronted us? Did he have a gun? Again, Benjamin either failed to notice the flashlight-wielding neighbor or cared little. He climbed the back stairs, jimmied the door, walked out the alley and returned with two homeless people who needed a place to stay. After letting the two into the squat, Benjamin promised to help change the lock if they stayed for a week. Afterwards I skipped to keep pace as, with a crowbar dangling from his pinkie, Benjamin lumbered about the neighborhood in search of more squats.

Homelessness and the Growth of U.S. Squatting

Homes Not Jails began with the wave of other homeless activist gro.
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"A fairly comprehensive monograph, highly suitable for classroom use, that offers a wide range of information fit into traditional anthropological categories . . . an interesting study of cultural integrity and pattern in a setting of what appears to be complex sociopolitical chaos." —American Anthropologist

"Whether or not one accepts Susan Lobo's optimistic analysis, her ability to translate the apparent chaos of shanty-town lives into such neat patterns and to help outsiders view life as the inhabitants do are important contributions." —Inter-American Review of Bibliography

"An extremely competent ethnography, simple and straightforward." —Anthropos

"A pleasure to read, a mine of information which will be useful in teaching students to formulate their own hypotheses." —International Journal of Urban & Regional Research

"Very well written and provides a great wealth of the liveliest sort of ethnographic detail." —Latin American Research Review

"Lobo's study of two squatter settlements in Lima provides a solid, well-written, detailed, traditional ethnography of poor families in a Third World urban setting." —Hispanic American Historical Review

"This well-written account . . . has a lot of heart and feeling for the human face of the urban poor." —International Migration Review.
Price: $18.50 [Notify me when price goes down.]

In India it costs a poor family 50 rupees to hire a midwife to oversee the birth of a child. For an additional 10 rupees, the parents are assured that the birth of a girl will be met with an act of infanticide by the midwife. The alternative for many is an institution like the Delhi orphanage, in which Fazal Sheikh's work on the predicament of the girl-child in India begins--and 99 percent of that orphanage's population are girls. Girl Child follows on the heels of Sheik's 2005 Moksha, which documented the plight of the Indian widow, and for which, in combination with this companion volume, the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson granted Sheikh its 2005 HCB Award. Sheikh's previous books include A Sense of Common Ground, The Victor Weeps, A Camel for the Son and Ramadan Moon. He was born in New York in 1965, and studied at Princeton University; he has received Fulbright and NEA fellowships, and presented his work at the Tate Modern, London, the International Center of Photography in New York and the United Nations. Sheikh is represented by Pace/MacGill Gallery in New York City..
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This book brings together two bodies of research on urban Africa that have tended to be separate, studies of urban land use and housing and studies of work and livelihoods. Africa's future will be increasingly urban, and the inherited legal, institutional and financial arrangements for managing urban development are inadequate. Access to employment, shelter and services is precarious for most urban residents. The result is the phenomenal growth of the informal city. Extra-legal housing and unregistered economic activities proliferate and basic urban services are increasingly provided informally. Recent decades of neo-liberal political and economic reforms have increased social inequality across urban space.

After an introductory chapter by the editors, the contributions are grouped into the following sections:
- LOCALITY, PLACE, AND SPACE
- ECONOMY, WORK, AND LIVELIHOODS
- LAND, HOUSING, AND PLANNING

The case studies are drawn from a diverse set of cities on the African continent. A central theme is how practices that from an official standpoint are illegal or extra-legal do not only work but are considered legitimate by the actors concerned. Another is how the informal city is not exclusively the domain of the poor, but also provides shelter and livelihoods for better-off segments of the urban population..
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