With thanks to NetGalley and Fitzcarraldo for the arc.

In this non-fiction work, Jacqueline Feldman tells the story of Le Bloc, a renowned squat near the Banlieue region of Paris, and of the many and varied people who inhabit the area.
Feldman’s writing is engaging and provides an accessible glimpse of the histories, lifestyles, thoughts and occupations of this often-overlooked or marginalised section of society. Through a series of vignettes and anecdotes the reader is given a glimpse into a counterculture that is under threat from modernity and late-stage capitalism.
I would have liked to have seen a little more socio-political analysis to add depth to the observations, but overall this was an interesting and important record of a section of French society that is increasingly under-threat.

Fascinating as a snapshot of France’s once-thriving squatter subculture centred on the brief lifespan of art squat Le BLOC - Batiment Libre, Occupation Citoyenne (Free Building – Public-Spirited Occupation). Le BLOC was sited in a former government building erected in the 1970s on the outskirts of Paris. The building was a vast echoing space, several storeys high with basement floors stretching down below it. It was opened up as a squat in November 2012 becoming a home and/or studio space to at least 200 from graffiti artists to more traditional art practitioners. American Writer and researcher Jaqueline Feldman, who moved to Paris to carry out a funded project on squatting, charts Le BLOC’s history through her interactions with numerous inhabitants.

It’s an unorthodox piece, a somewhat fragmented, intricately-structured blend of memoir and sociological study incorporating aspects of Feldmans’s fieldwork and personal experience. Feldman attempts to situate Le BLOC within France’s countercultural past and present, linking it to forms of popular protest dating back to the Paris Commune. She uses the now-legendary Le BLOC to reflect on squatting as a political and practical phenomenon – from its manifestation as a signifier of urban exclusion and the growing numbers of unhoused to the use of takeaway receipts to establish occupation. Although Feldman’s assessment of squatting’s roots in the precarious environments spawned by contemporary capitalism can be overly oblique. This is partly because of Feldman’s tendency to focus on specific characters living in Le BLOC rather than broader political movements and issues.

Feldman references overtly-political campaigning collectives like Jeudi Noir but, disappointingly, doesn’t really delve into their operations or those of the influential Droit Au Logement (DAL – Right to Housing). Feldman’s decision to adopt a more intimate approach to her subject matter can be evocative and moving but it can be dense and meandering too. It’s also in danger of making the Paris squatting scene appear oddly individualistic unlike, for example, its British counterparts typified by the activists and anarcho-punks who founded groups like the Dole House Crew. The Crew took over unused public buildings in Peckham in London in the 1980s and 90s repurposing them as artistic and social spaces. Remnants of the Crew’s actions can be glimpsed in the squatter aesthetic adopted by Peckham’s later influx of gentrifiers who’ve appropriated and commercialised its practices with events like concerts in car parks and bars designed to resemble the Crew’s ad hoc, community-centred spaces. So, for me worthwhile but slippery and slightly frustrating at times.

Feldman's reportage of the life within a Parisian squat feels absolutely modern as she mixes history, journalism and something more essayistic. Drawing on Paris' bohemian history together with an absolutely of-the-moment eye on current concerns about late stage capitalism, precarity, the ideological values cohering around housing, immigration and possession(s), this gives itself the space to think about pressing concerns within a structured narrative.

Like those 'short introduction' books, this delves into the broad history of squatting with unexpected insights. It also looks beneath any kind of convenient stereotypes and dismisses them easily in recounting the lives and artistic endeavours of the community that coheres around an abandoned 8-storey building. Without glamorising precarious lifestyles - and not everyone has the choice that that implies - this does dare to imagine alternative lifestyles and ways of living. A penetrating look at life on the margins of the known city.