I do not know how to mend a ripped seam, patch a leak in a roof, or replace a burst pipe. I have never hung a door, taken down a door, framed out a wall, or torn down a wall. I do not know what it’s like to sleep more than one night in a row without heat. I do not really know how plumbing works, just that it is good and everyone should have it. If presented with wiring that was faulty or a floor that needed repair, I would stare at it, call the appropriate authority, or, depending on my mood, panic. I have never shit in a garbage bag.

For the squatters and housing activists and “urban homesteaders” who populate Alexander Vasudevan’s new book, The Autonomous City: A History of Urban Squatting, this kind of handiness and resourcefulness—and the connection to space that comes with them—are not options, but necessities. The popular image of a contemporary squatter is that of a white person with dreadlocks, but Vasudevan’s sweeping research on the surprisingly radical history of occupying abandoned buildings and living in them illustrates that the stereotype is hollow.

THE AUTONOMOUS CITY: A HISTORY OF URBAN SQUATTING By Alexander Vasudevan Verso, 304 pp., $27

Charting the squatting movement in several cities in Western Europe and North America, The Autonomous City begins with a violent eviction. On March 1, 2007, Copenhagen police ambushed the Ungdomshuset (“Youth House”), a social center that served as the backbone of the city’s squatting movement. After years of sitting empty, the building had been donated to a group of militant young squatters in 1982, and at the time of the eviction it housed a bookshop, café, printing press, recording studio, weekly vegan soup kitchens, and regular activist meetings; in a past life, it had been known as the Folkets Hus (“People’s House”), the fourth headquarters of the Danish labor movement and the birthplace of International Women’s Day in 1910. But when it was evacuated in 2007, it had been the property of an evangelical Christian organization for seven years, the subject of several legal battles, and a longtime source of ire for right-wing politicians, who knew it as the “pile of rotten stones at Jagtvej 69.”

The initial eviction lasted about an hour. Police surrounded the property; deployed an airport crash tender; sprayed the building’s doors and windows with a special hardening foam to prevent opening from the inside; dropped an “elite anti-terrorist unit” onto the roof from a military helicopter; and fed more officers into the upper stories from containers hoisted by boom cranes. Protests erupted at once and spread across the city over several days; as Vasudevan writes, it was “the worst rioting that Copenhagen had seen since the Second World War.” Police “accidentally” used lethal tear gas canisters against protesters and raided a series of other alternative spaces over the course of six days. By the time it was over, the demolition of the Ungdomshuset had been streamed live on a Danish television website and local prisons had run out of space from housing so many detainees. Ten years later, the former Ungdomshuset site remains an empty lot.

Governments have never liked squatters, but such fierce antagonism between the squatter and the city is a relatively recent development. Many people supported squatters in the middle of the twentieth century; in 1946, the Daily Mail praised the nearly 40,000 squatters who were organized by the Communist Party and Women’s Voluntary Service and scattered throughout England and Wales following World War II: “The ‘invasion’ of empty service camps is a refreshing example of what ordinary people can do when they have a mind to do it … a warning that people will not put up forever with empty promises.” Vasudevan tells of one occupation in which police officers helped squatters carry their suitcases inside. After all, the logic of squatting makes a lot of sense—people need a place to live, and these buildings are empty.