Squatting

Squatting is an 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. By 2030, he forecasts there will be two billion and by 2050, he predicts three billion squatters. Yet, according to Kesia Reeve, "squatting is largely absent from policy and academic debate and is rarely conceptualised, as a problem, as a symptom, or as a social or housing movement."

Squatting can be related to political movements, such as anarchist, autonomist, or socialist. It can be a means to conserve buildings or to provide housing.

Overview

Worldwide

In many of the world's poorer countries, there are extensive slums or shanty towns, typically built on the edges of major cities and consisting almost entirely of self-constructed housing built without the landowner's permission. While these settlements may, in time, grow to become both legalised and indistinguishable from normal residential neighbourhoods, they start off as squats with minimal basic infrastructure. Thus, there is no sewage system, drinking water must be bought from vendors or carried from a nearby tap, and if there is electricity, it is stolen from a passing cable.

Squatting (pastoral)

In Australian history, a squatter was typically a man, either a free settler or ex-convict, who occupied a large tract of Crown land in order to graze livestock. Initially often having no legal rights to the land, they gained its usage by being the first (and often the only) Europeans in the area. Eventually, the term Squattocracy, a play on "aristocracy", developed to refer to some of these squatters.

Evolution of meaning

The term ‘squatter’ derives from its English usage as a term of contempt for a person who had taken up residence at a place without having legal claim.  The use of ‘squatter’ in the early years of European settlement of Australia had a similar connotation, referring primarily to a person who had ‘squatted’ on unoccupied land for pastoral or other purposes.  In its early derogatory context the term was often applied to the illegitimate occupation of land by ticket-of-leave convicts or ex-convicts (emancipists).

From the mid-1820s, however, the occupation of Crown land without legal title became more widespread, often carried out by those from the upper echelons of colonial society.  As wool began to be exported to England and the colonial population increased the occupation of pastoral land for raising cattle and sheep progressively became a more lucrative enterprise.  ‘Squatting’ had become so widespread by the mid-1830s that Government policy in New South Wales towards the practice shifted from opposition to regulation and control.  By that stage the term ‘squatter’ was applied to those who occupied Crown land under a lease or license, without the negative connotation of earlier times.

Squatter (game)

Squatter is a board game that was launched at the Royal Melbourne Show in 1962, invented by Robert C. Lloyd. With more than 500,000 games sold in Australia alone, it became the most successful board game ever developed in Australia. It is a Monopoly-type game in which players each own a sheep station and compete, by judicious trading, to be the first to acquire sufficient irrigated pasture to increase their stock to 6,000 head of sheep, all the while coping with drought, disease, taxes, impotent stud rams, and luck. In 1999, a version became available on PC CD-ROM.

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