Introduction

These diary notes concern the response of militants and neighbourhood residents to the eviction of Communia, a squatting initiative that emerged in the San Lorenzo neighbourhood in Rome in April 2013, by the police in mid-August, a time when most Italian cities get very quiet, people go away for summer holidays and political activism is usually on pause. Summer is often the preferred time for police to carry out evictions in order to avoid clashes. However, in recent years, several Italian squatting initiatives evicted during summer months have seen a strong response from activists and residents. The most dramatic occurred in central Rome in August 2017, when hundreds of squatters – mostly refugees – were violently evicted without a clear or coherent plan for their rehousing (Annunziata, 2020). Squatting is just one example of the alternative social projects over vacant spaces in post-crisis cities. In a previous article (O’Callaghan et al, 2018), we have drawn on the work of Povinelli (2011) to frame alternative social projects as all those experimenting with alternative human and post-human relations. In that article, and here, we emphasise the important role that urban vacant spaces have played in the experimental formation of alternative social projects. Urban vacant spaces can stand in contradistinction to the normative vision of neoliberal capitalist space (Doron, 2000; O’Callaghan, 2018), and are characterised by radical openness to prefigurative experiments producing alternative urban futures (Bresnihan and Byrne, 2015).