Stefan Canham
Photographer
Hamburg, Germany


Submission: Bauwagen / Mobile Squatters

In the autumn of 2002 police evicted Bambule, one of Hamburg’s alternative trailer parks, which for eight years had been tolerated on a centrally-situated plot of wasteland owned by the city. In the months that followed, the inhabitants and supporters of this experiment in anarchic cheap and free communal living organized weekly protest marches through Hamburg. The city attempted to keep these demonstrations out of the main shopping area, allegedly for fear of vandalism. The shopkeepers’ association pleaded for a ban on inner city demonstrations during the Christmas season in order to safeguard commerce on Saturday afternoons. Media coverage was intense, but disappointing; newspapers carried only the usual pictures of police and demonstrators failing to represent the vibrant cultural and architectural contributions made by the inhabitants of the trailers. Starting out on a three-year photographic project in the aftermath of the Bambule eviction, it was my intention to document that which had been ignored by the mainstream media: the visually unique world of Germany’s mobile squatter settlements.



Bambule was part of a nationwide phenomenon: in the 1980s people began to use circus wagons, lorries, busses and Bauwagen (oblong trailers about two meters wide and between three and ten meters long, with a curved roof originally produced to accommodate workers on building sites) to occupy disused plots of inner city land. The changing practice of local authorities at this time had made squatting empty houses increasingly difficult. Long-term squats were legalized by rent contracts, and new squats were largely prevented by immediate evictions. To bring one’s own house – in the form of a trailer – to squat on urban wasteland was not only an alternative, but offered the possibility for an even more open, self-defined way of living. Today there are around one hundred Bauwagen sites in German towns and cities, from Flensburg up on the Danish border down to Tuebingen and Munich. There may be as many as ten thousand people living in disused wagons, trailers, buses and trucks, recycling and modifying them into highly unique, mobile, low-cost, permanent living spaces (Kropp and Ulferts 1997).





Individual motivations for moving out of a flat and into a trailer are quite diverse. As one Bauwagen owner, Rolf, tells the story of Hamburg’s Wendebecken site, which was evicted in 2004: “People were coming out of the squatter scene, like me, but also out of the ecological movement. There were Punks who were drunk all day every day, students with a taste for the extravagant, and hippies. We were inspired by friends who were already living on sites, by a longing for a collective way of life and the wish to reduce costs in order to have to work less. It’s hard to explain what I liked about it. I liked the communal spaces, the freedom to improvise, to create something. I liked to live in the open. The economic factor was important, too. I simply don’t like selling my labor............”

[The remainder of this text will be published in Onesmallproject].


Bio:

Stefan Canham studied experimental filmmaking at Hamburg Academy of Fine Arts and is currently working on a photographic documentation of “Trebe e.V.”, a low threshold, self-built homeless shelter in Hanover, Germany. The photobook “Bauwagen / Mobile Squatters” was published in 2006 by Peperoni Books, Berlin, Germany.

"Koepi, 60-person Berlin squat, sold to developers in 2007 "
Andreas Tzortzis, “In Berlin, a squatters' utopia collapsing under a city's ambitions,” International Herald Tribune, http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/07/31/arts/hood.php?page=1
(accessed September 5, 2007).