Unlocking New York: Squatters, Urban Explorers, and the Right to the City

Across New York City, gentrification and austerity price the working-class out of their homes and drive them from their neighborhoods. The city cannibalizes its people, creating what Victor Hugo once called a “paradise of the rich...made out of the hell of the poor.” Despite this, there are still spaces for everyday acts of resistance in New York. On the Lower East Side, a makeshift cadre of squatters fought a twenty-year battle to win control of their homes. On the Upper West Side, a group of Puerto Rican radicals, led foremost by women, transformed shuttered apartments into a site for communal housing, healthcare, and education. Even in the city’s forbidden zones—the interstitial world of tunnels, construction sites, and abandoned factories—urban explorers venture beyond the locked gate to find creative expression and recapture what Henri Lefebvre terms the “right to the city.” The landscapes these groups inhabit, rich with secret histories and far from the surveilling eye of the state, form the basis for a whole new urban geography. Here in the terrains vagues, squatters and urban explorers alike repurpose the waste products of capital into something beautiful. Just as capitalism creates luxury and order in one place by breeding poverty and pollution in another, so do these individuals engage in the reciprocal process, converting urban ruins into self-organized, autonomous communities. They together develop a model for the post-capitalist city, one in which planning serves human needs and desires rather than the profit motive. It is this New York, the rebellious undercity, which this dissertation seeks to uncover.Doctor of Philosoph