squat

Squatting is the action of occupying an abandoned or unoccupied area of land or a building, usually residential, that the squatter does not own, rent or otherwise have lawful permission to use. Author Robert Neuwirth suggested in 2004 that there were one billion squatters globally.
Squatting occurs worldwide and tends to occur when people who are poor and homeless find empty buildings or land to occupy for housing. It has a long history, broken down by country below. In developing countries and least developed countries, shanty towns often begin as squatted settlements. There are pavement dwellers in India and South Africa, represented by groups such as Slum Dwellers International and Abahlali baseMjondolo. In Hong Kong there are rooftop slums. In Brazil, there are favelas and large social movements of thousands of people such as the Homeless Workers' Movement (MTST) and the Landless Workers' Movement (MST). Squatted settlements are known in Spanish-speaking countries under terms such as villa miseria (Argentina), pueblos jóvenes (Peru), okupas (Chile, Spain) and asentamientos irregulares (Guatemala, Uruguay).
In industrialized countries, there are often squats and also political squatting movements, which can be anarchist, autonomist, or socialist in nature. Oppositional movements from the 1960s and 1970s created freespaces such as Freetown Christiania in Denmark or Ruigoord in the Netherlands. Each local situation determines the context, for example in Italy there are self-managed social centres and in Athens, Greece, there are refugee squats. In England and Wales, there were estimated to be 50,000 squatters in the late 1970s.

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