Squatting in Sweden has a paradoxical history. Although instances of squatting were rare, they nevertheless significantly influenced Swedish protest movements. Peterson, Thörn, and Wahlström have argued that short-lived squatter actions ignited protest waves such as the 1960s student movement (formed in the wake of the occupation of the offices of the Student Union in 1968), the 1970s alternative youth movement (occupation of Hagahuset building in Gothenburg in 1972) and protests against demolition of working class neighbourhoods in the 1970s and 1980s (various squatter actions in, among other, the Gothenburg Haga district).1

Looking at activism and its reverberations, Polanska has set out to map squatter actions in Sweden and assess how they were discussed in Swedish media and politics. Her aim is to “investigate how the discourse on squatting has been constituted in the media, in politics and by the squatters themselves” (p. 19). In doing so, she in part builds on the work of the Squatting Europe Kollective (SqEk, 2009–2021) and their project to map the history of squatting in various cities.2 Like the collective, Polanska places squatting squarely in the corner of contentious action, stating that “squatting is fundamentally political as it is confrontational in nature and questions the authority of the state and property relations inherent in capitalism” (p. 3). However, although squatting can be political and confrontational, it does not necessarily have to be. Informal housing studies have highlighted actions by marginalized people who silently occupy places as an informal housing strategy. When challenged, they choose to find a new accommodation, avoiding at all cost political claim making and confrontations with authorities or property owners.3 By choosing to focus on a specific “configuration” of (political) squatting, Polanska’s study disregards such more covert and fleeting squatter actions. Although this is a legitimate research decision, it could have been discussed in more detail.

The analysis of discourses on squatting stands at the core of Polanska’s study. Her book is effectively structured. It discusses previous research on squatting in Sweden, before moving to the media representations of squatting and squatters, discussions on the topic in Swedish parliament, and finally the self-representations and legitimizations brought forward by the squatters themselves. In the chapters on the media and parliament, Polanska efficiently combines concepts and methods from Critical Discourse Analysis with digital text mining methods, enabling her to compile and analyze large datasets of newspaper articles and parliamentary records.

Polanska’s analysis of media discourses on squatting draws particular attention, especially because this has a long tradition in social movement studies in general and squatter research in particular. Gamson and Wolfsfeld have researched how movement activists try to influence news reporting, while Lehne has investigated how local newspapers reported differently on the Hamburg Hafenstraße squatter conflict.4 In Sweden, too, the newspaper landscape comprised a large diversity of formats, ranging from tabloid to broadsheet, and from conservative to progressive. Polanska is not so much interested in how newspaper reports came to be, or who was able to influence such reporting and how. Instead, she focuses on the results of such interactions: the newspaper reports themselves and the framing that they reveal. And although she acknowledges that “there are national and local differences in the way that squatting is portrayed” (p. 69), her analysis tends to focus on ‘the’ mainstream media singular, accruing quite a bit of agency to what in reality must have been a broad variety of news outlets. At one point, she even wonders “if it was intentional” that the majority of newspaper articles focused on “the actors behind squatting and particular perceptions of their character” (p. 71). The chosen method leaves little space for analyzing the differences in media reporting by different newspapers, or if/how historical actors and journalists interacted.

In a similar way, the two chapters on Swedish squatters and their discourses tend to approach the squatters as one group. Although there is brief mention of “problematic encounters” with “individuals who did not share the ideas and values of squatters” (p. 113, and p. 166), these individuals are not considered to be squatters, neither by activists nor by the author. Scholars such as Pruijt and Kadir have distinguished between different groups of squatters, and highlighted that these groups harbored different attitudes towards the media.5 While politically driven squatters developed media strategies, this was less the case for subcultural, ‘anti-social’, or deprivation-driven squatters. Distinguishing between different groups of squatters could have led to a more detailed analysis of the range of discourses that they employed, and the various strategies that they used (or did not use) to spread them.

How influential can a marginal social phenomenon be? This question is one of the driving forces behind Polanska’s analysis. She acknowledges that squatting developed differently in Sweden; the number of squatter actions has remained low in comparison to other (Western) European countries, none of them lasted longer than three years, and the media and political reverberations seem to have been relatively minor. Her research method is particularly well-suited to substantiate these claims with hard numbers. She counts 158 squatter actions in Sweden between 1968 and 2018 – a number that is easily surpassed by individual cities such as Berlin (537), London (264), and Amsterdam (172). Furthermore, the search term ‘husockupation’ (squatting) resulted in 400 news articles published in digitized historical newspaper databases (p. 53).

Polanska’s study yields significant empirical information on squatting in Sweden and provides an illustration of how Critical Discourse Analysis can effectively be combined with digital text mining. The concluding remarks of the study, however, seem to amplify the significance of the squatters’ actions in Sweden. The claim that is suddenly made on the penultimate page, namely that “urban squatting has served to decolonize Swedish civil society from the conditioned cooperation with the state and its institutions” (p. 174), is not substantiated by the research results presented in this study.

Squatting in Sweden was a relatively marginal phenomenon, but Polanska convincingly argues that it is deserving of scholarly interest, for even the study of a marginal phenomenon can shed light on larger social developments. Like Jämte and Sörbom, Polanska points out that squatting in Sweden took a leap with the decline of its Keynesian welfare state model at the end of the 1990s.6 It is especially interesting to investigate how media, politicians and squatters (re)presented squatting in Sweden, since this is also being researched for other countries. In doing so, Polanska’s study will help to enable and strengthen international comparisons.

Notes:
1 Abby Peterson / Håkan Thörn / Mattias Wahlström, Sweden 1950–2015: Contentious politics and social movements between confrontation and conditioned cooperation, in: Flemming Mikkelsen / Knut Kjeldstadli / Stefan Nyzell (eds.), Popular Struggle and Democracy in Scandinavia: 1700-present, London 2017, pp. 377–432.
2 Information on SqEk can be found here: <https://sqek.squat.net>. The map can be found on: <https://maps.squat.net/en/cities> (19.11.2021).
3 Udo Grashoff (ed.), Comparative Approaches to Informal Housing Around the Globe, London 2020.
4 William A. Gamson / Gadi Wolfsfeld, Movements and media as interacting systems, in: The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 528 (1993), pp. 114–125; Werner Lehne, Der Konflikt um die Hafenstrasse: Kriminalitätsdiskurse im Kontext symbolischer Politik, Pfaffenweiler 1994.
5 Hans Pruijt, The Logic of Urban Squatting, in: International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 37:1 (2013), pp. 19–45; Nazima Kadir, Myth and reality in the Amsterdam squatters’ movement, 1975–2012, in: Bart van der Steen / Ask Katzeff / Leendert van Hoogenhuijze (eds.), The City Is Ours: Squatting and Autonomous Movements in Europe from the 1970s to the Present, Oakland 2014, pp. 21–61.
6 Jan Jämte / Adrienne Sörbom, Why did it not happen here? The gradual radicalization of the anarchist movement in Sweden, 1980–90, in: Knud Andresen / Bart van der Steen (eds.), A European Youth Revolt. European Perspectives on Youth Protest and Social Movements in the 1980s, Basingstoke 2016, pp. 97–111.