Squatting in Basel

Squatting in Basel has been taking place in different ways and for various reasons since the early 1970s. As elsewhere, the main motivation is the preservation of buildings and affordable living space and the creation of open spaces, non-commercial communal facilities and self-determined cultural and neighborhood centers. Occupations are mostly directed against the displacement of living space by luxury apartments and office space and thus often against the urban planning and redevelopment policy of the city of Basel , but in some cases also directly against homeowners who give up the houses to speculation .

“The fact that we spend a large part of our life in our apartments or our houses illustrates the immense importance of these spaces. So we wish, seek and take places where we can live together; that serve as social meeting places; create opportunities to exchange ideas, dreams, joys, worries and to network. And which are available to us as places of retreat where we are caught by each other when the situation requires it. "

List of squatting

The following list of squatting in Basel enumerates publicly known squatting since the 1980s in the city of Basel and in its immediate vicinity in chronological order. These are political actions with different starting points, different objectives, time periods, meanings and effects. Included are both so-called repair occupations of vacant houses to preserve living space, to create public spaces or to prevent urban restructuring measures, as well as tenant battles in the course of which the tenants did not vacate a house against the will of the owners.

Surname	District / street	Date / period	owner	Remarks	Illustration
Ryffstrasse 19-25	Ryffstrasse 19-25	June 27, 1980		August 18: After the squatters cleared the houses on Ryffstrasse on time, street barricades were erected in the area and private and public facilities were devastated. August 20th: Funeral march from Ryffstrasse towards the Lohnhof prison, where an inmate hanged himself. Property damage occurs along the way and the most massive police operation to date. 65 people are arrested.
AJZ Basel (Hochstrasse)	Hochstrasse	February 14 to May 5, 1981		Former post office building / despite the owner's tolerance, the police cleared the AJZ in the morning and arrested 141 people who were brought to the former Schällematteli prison. Attempts to break out were prevented by using tear gas. The evening solidarity demonstration is broken up.
Andlauerklinik	Petersgraben	May 16-18, 1981
		May 25, 1981		Occupation of nine vacant houses
Alte Stadtgärtnerei Basel	St. Johann	1986 to June 21, 1988		Began at the end of April 1986 as legal interim use, which ended on September 1, 1987 and resulted in illegal further use through cultural activism.
Schlotterbeck				An experiment with studios and small businesses / for the first time regulated interim use with a fixed-term lease
Volta
Elsie	Elsässerstrasse 11	until 2004		Residential and cultural center. Was demolished in 2004.
Türki	Türkheimerstrasse
Hagi	Hagentalerstrasse			Residential and cultural center
Villa Rosenau		until 2013		Was evacuated and demolished a few days after a fire.
Hotel Steinengraben		May 1, 2007		Police evacuation was enforced a few days after the occupation. In order to prevent a renewed revitalization of this place outside the municipal control, the windows were walled up and the interior of the house destroyed. More than four years after the eviction, the building was still empty.
Wettsteinvilla	Wettsteinallee 40	3rd and 4th December 2010	Christoph Merian Foundation, endowment	The house was owned by the Christoph Merian Foundation . For decades it was operated as an artist's house and housed a larger shared apartment. Back then, the plan was to sell the house to a private person and have it renovated at great expense. One month after the eviction, the foundation accommodated an interim use for fear of further occupations.
Stone trench	Steinengraben 32/34	June 25, 2011	Nationale Suisse	Occupation was directed against vacancies and the planned new building. Was evacuated the same day. Particularly aggressive police were noticeable.
Shooting range	Mühlemattweg	2013		was demolished
Petersgraben	Petersgraben	2013
Black alder	Schwarzwaldallee 269	Beginning of 2015 to August 23, 2017
Kannenfeld	Kannenfeldstrasse 59	May 17-18, 2015	Kiwi Real Estate Group	Was occupied as part of the Atopy project and inaugurated with an art exhibition. Half a day later it was cleared.
Hardstrasse	Hardstrasse	2016
Türki 2	Türkheimerstrasse	April 1 to April 10, 2017	Yatu Immobilien AG	Was evacuated after only 10 days. The owner's houses on Türkheimerstrasse have been empty for several years.
Schlössli	Schlossgasse 12	2017	Private	After the house had been empty for several years, it was occupied for the second time in spring 2017.

Other occupations

An alternative form of living with political, social and cultural proximity to the squatting movement are the wagon spaces , in which housing developments are mostly created from mobile construction trailers . These often arose on fallow land within the city, so the current location was an empty wasteland until the car park was occupied. A revival was called on the ex-Migrol site and loose groups followed to set up a kitchen and bar with a concert room. The result was «Uferlos», a non-commercial place for culture. This and other projects were demolished during the half-clearance in 2014, as the site was temporarily rented by the city to the temporary user Shift Mode and was intended to serve as a parking lot for Scope, an art fair during Art Basel .

Long-term occupations as a form of political protest went beyond house occupations in Basel. For example, a day-long occupation of the church in St. Matthew's Church was a means by opponents of deportation to draw attention to their protest and also a means of creating public awareness and refuge for migrants threatened with deportation . However, this was cleared after a few days by the police on the instructions of the migration office ; the refugees were arrested and taken to deportation custody. This was followed by an unauthorized demonstration by around 300 people against the control of the migration office, which was broken up by the police with rubber bullets and tear gas.

Occupations of the square were directed against building projects and gentrification processes, for example the occupation of the Voltamatte in 2011, in which a tower was built as a memorial for displacement on the newly paved square.

Individual evidence

1. ^ Valerie Zaslawski: Occupations and interim uses: Ordered chaos . In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung . ( Online [accessed March 11, 2017]).
2. ↑ New mass layoffs at Gundeli - D'Made im Daig. Retrieved March 11, 2017 . 
3. ↑ XX34: No demolition under this number! - D'Made im Daig. Retrieved March 11, 2017 . 
4. ↑ ^{a b c} The Eighties Movement | Chronology Basel. (No longer available online.) Archived from the original ; accessed on March 11, 2017 . 
5. ^ Valerie Zaslawski: Occupations and interim uses: Ordered chaos . In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung . October 14, 2016, ISSN  0376-6829 ( online [accessed March 11, 2017]).
6. ↑ Basel: With concentrated strength . October 1, 2013 ( online [accessed November 11, 2018]).
7. ↑ XX34: No demolition under this number! - D'Made im Daig. Retrieved March 11, 2017 . 
8. ^ Occupation of the villa at Wettsteinallee 40 - D'Made im Daig. Retrieved March 11, 2017 . 
9. ↑ Theater project “foreign” receives temporary use contract for Wettsteinvilla - D'Made im Daig. Retrieved March 11, 2017 . 
10. ↑ Occupation at Steinengraben 32 and 34 ended - D'Made im Daig. Retrieved March 11, 2017 . 
11. ↑ [Atopie 2.0] Flanage, occupation, evacuation - D'Made im Daig. Retrieved October 23, 2018 . 
12. ↑ Unwanted neighborhood oasis | Day of the week . In: TagesWoche . April 7, 2017 ( online [accessed October 23, 2018]).
13. ↑ www.20minuten.ch, 20 minutes, 20 minutes, www.20min.ch: Squatters have quartered in Klybeck . In: 20 minutes . ( 20min.ch [accessed on October 23, 2018]).
14. ↑ Ex-Migrol parcel on Klybeckquai occupied! - D'Made im Daig. Retrieved March 11, 2017 . 
15. ↑ indymedia.org: Basel - clearing of Uferlos / Haafescharte. (No longer available online.) Indymedia.org, June 4, 2014, formerly in the original ; accessed on March 11, 2017 .  ( Page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.    
16. ^ Yen Duong: St. Matthew's Church occupied by asylum seekers . In: day week . ( Online [accessed March 11, 2017]).
17. ↑ shh; Regionaljournal Basel ingm: Asylum seekers arrested in Basel's Matthäuskirche. March 2, 2016, accessed March 11, 2017 . 
18. ↑ Matthäuskirche: Police stop unauthorized demonstration | barfi.ch. Retrieved March 11, 2017 . 
19. ↑ Voltamatte in Basel is animated - D'Made im Daig. Retrieved March 11, 2017 .