Notes on an Empty House in Croatia (1): How to Occupy an Empty House
Editor's note: The author is a student in the Department of Environmental Engineering at National Cheng Kung University, yet went to Croatia as an exchange student to study agriculture; both life and study there are quite interesting. The author will share this special learning experience in installments, beginning with the peculiar "Squat life."……
A New Word in Life - Squat
In the first semester of my senior year, I came to Croatia as an exchange student to study agriculture. During the summer before the semester started, I traveled for two months in Germany, Denmark and Sweden, hitchhiking, visiting couchsurfers and doing work exchanges for accommodation.
Because of my own stupidity, I missed the dormitory application deadline, which left me with no dorm to live in in Zagreb, but for me this actually turned out to be a good thing. In that first month in Zagreb I was "nomadic" among various couchsurfers' homes, and I even walked straight out onto the road to hitchhike around aimlessly. Finally, in mid-October, my pen pal Lea, whom I had met through Couchsurfing half a year earlier, returned from her fantastical hitchhiking trip through the Balkans and Turkey. When she learned that I had no dorm to live in, she immediately invited me to go squat with her. The first time I heard the word squat I was still in Sweden, and I had absolutely no idea what this place whose literal meaning is "deep squat" actually was...
When used as a verb, squat refers to "the act of using a space without ownership of that space"; the space in such a situation is called a squat. In plain terms, it means an "empty house," whether it is an empty house "left idle because ownership is unclear" or one "left vacant while waiting to be sold off."
Zagreb nominally has two squats, but the other, more historic one is actually no longer a squat; that place is more like a bar or a community space, and the people living there also have to pay rent. The one I live in is called Klaonica, which in Croatian means slaughterhouse. It is a huge abandoned slaughterhouse in the downtown commercial district, and it is currently the most expensive plot of land awaiting sale in the entire Balkans, but no one dares to buy it, because the land ownership relationships are very complicated, and it is truly enormous, about the size of a university campus.
After two or three weeks of hammering and nailing, it looks only half finished, but these results came from just four or five people independently completing all the work of carrying, cutting and installing the firewood
Seemingly an Infringement of Property Rights, but Actually a Protest Against Society
Occupying empty houses is basically an infringement of property rights, and I agree that squatting is basically an illegal act, but when so many people in this society already cannot afford to buy a house, and construction companies keep rezoning, tearing down old houses and building new high-rises, the areas that were already unaffordable have now become even more expensive and more unaffordable, and many, many of them are simply left idle there, and of the people who can afford those empty houses, how many truly need a living space?
What proportion of people buy houses for investment or as another holiday home? Or are they the ones the builders are actually targeting? Gandhi's theory: if you oppose the government's actions, then even knowing you will be hurt, you must stand up and oppose them. Squat is people's way of opposing this social chaos. If it is illegal, then we go break the law, and find more people to break the law together. When the whole society is willing to break the law, the prisons absolutely cannot hold them all. (Series to be continued)