Of squatting amid capitalism on Yangon's industrial periphery

Abstract

Across major cities throughout the world, inflated real-estate markets continue to exacerbate crises of affordable housing. Amid such conditions, squatting has emerged as a means to claim urban residence while bypassing the rule of property, resulting in densely populated informal settlements stretched along urban peripheries, most notably in the Global South. But in what respect might squatting be said to have anti-capitalist content? But does the challenge squatting poses to private property mean the practice is unambiguously anti-capitalist? The case presented here illustrates how squatting – initially a challenge to the rule of private property – becomes imbricated with wider relations of extraction and rule and with the broader capitalist context more generally.