Recipes for Disaster: an anarchist cookbook

Eviction notices come in the mail, so be careful not to sign for any registered or certified mail until you are sure it's not from the city government. If an eviction notice does come, make sure there is at least one person with proof of residence whose name isn't on it?that way the police wiU not be able to seal the building after those of you named on the notice are evicted, and eventually you can move back in. If an eviction or other trouble looms, use a phone tree or email list to invite as many supporters or witnesses as possible. Take the names and badge numbers of police and videotape them. Never admit to having leaders.

There are countless other variants on the squatting theme. You can plant secret or public community gardens; in the latter case, a well-pubhcized day of guerrilla gardening might be the perfect way to get started. You can squat openly as a way to attract attention to the absurdity of homelessness when so many buildings stand empty; prepare a lot of legal support and a media blitz, and be warned that if you do hold the building, the poUce may try to starve you out, so get in there vrith a lot of resources and have a plan for how to smuggle more in. You can covertly squat a building for one night to hold a party, dance, or show (see Cuerrilla Performances, pg. 269}?invitations should direct people to a starting point, from which the crowd will be led to the target building or location. You can squat a rooftop: block the doorway or hatch behind you, drop banners for all the city

Other Applications

Squatting 5''3

Account

to see, have a liaison ready to explain to the owner, police, and media that you are nonviolent but will not be leaving until your week-long occupation is concluded. A squat, secret or public, could provide housing and an additional point of militant confrontation during a mass mobilization for a demonstration. Treehouse squats can go unnoticed on the margins of suburbia for long periods of time; they've also been used militantly as an obstacle to logging in forests. You can establish a residential squat for a short time, just to demonstrate the tactic to a circle of learners without risking any serious costs in the process?see the account following the Festivals recipe (pg. 241).

I'd spent a few months living in wild, crowded squats in Barcelona before I moved on to London and hunted down an old friend at the squatted funeral parlor at which she'd been staying. Tired of constant travel, short on cash and solid plans, we decided to open up our ovm place. Lisa knew a few people living in flats in an empty housing project?in fact, one of the three buildings was already being demolished, and the crash of wrecking ball into brick and mortar became the backdrop to the next few months of our lives.

Lisa had checked out the place a few times before I got into town; she'd kept her eye on a fiat with months-old mail cascading out from under the front door, and after looking around a bit we decided that was our best bet. By that point, the buildings had stood mostly empty for months, and the council wasn't paying a bit of attention to them; a few of the original tenants had hung on past their eviction dates and just stopped paying rent, but the complex had been left to go derelict until the demolition crews got around to it. All the main entry locks were destroyed or missing, so actually cracking the squat was shockingly easy: we borrowed a crowbar and a chair from our new friend Duncan in Squatting ^^ ^^^ building over, popped the transom window above our front door, then crawled 514 through and unlocked the door from the inside.

Over the next few days an experienced neighbor helped us rewire the electricity to bypass the meter, and we dumpstered some furniture and made ourselves at home. This was a particularly?and peculiarly?low-key situation, as far as my experience with squatting goes. In Barcelona, early-morning full-scale police raids were common, and the threat of potentially violent eviction was constant. Here, none of the authorities were likely to bother with any of the two dozen squatters in the neighborhood; all the workers on the demolition site waved hello as we came and went with armloads of trash from the local market. But we were short-termers, in town for a few months at the most; when the viTrecking ball swung over to our building, Lisa and I knew we'd probably pack up our luck and move on to another building in another town?^while the family of East African immigrants living downstairs would quite likely be homeless.

Squatting 5^5

Stenciling

Instructions

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Stenciling is the poor person's printmaking. It is the easiest and cheapest way to print the same image over and over on different surfaces and in different places.