A prologue that introduces Deutsche Wohnen & Co. Enteignen and narrates its story in the context of other radical democratic movements, most prominently the Polish Solidarność, a mass democratic movement that led to overthrowing of authoritarian communism in Poland.

The chapter discusses the history of the Berlin housing system, the Kantian roots of the German Constitution (Grundgesetz) and the events leading to the emergence of Deutsche Wohnen & Co. enteignen (DWE). It explains the origins of the liberal notion of property and how corporate property is premised on ‘blasting the atom of property open’, that is, destroying the links between person and a thing that constitute classical liberal understanding of property.

In the introduction we describe the “wicked” global property problem of homeless squatting on empty land or in empty properties and outline some key themes explored in the book. We reflect on the nature of squatting as a property problem; and introduce the concept of “scale,” which we deploy throughout the book to describe the dynamic nature of state responses to squatting. We outline the importance of seeing “the state” in the analyses of squatting and other property problems, through its interactions with individuals, interactions with other state-bodies, and interactions with its territory, and interactions with its own institutions. Finally, we set out the structure and approach followed in the book, including reference to five primary jurisdictions: the USA, Ireland, Spain, South Africa and England and Wales.

Chapter 19 of Earthopolis: A Biography of Our Urban Planet begins the book’s exploration of the Cold War-era Urban Planet when both the USA and the USSR turned to a rising international “modernist” school of urban planning to contend with housing crises and the advent of the automobile. As the peripheries of cities everywhere expanded due to the global population explosion, city-ward migration, and oil-burning private transport, rapid acts of pre-fabricated urban construction took contrasting forms on the peripheries of American and Soviet cities. In the United States, low-density automobile suburbs sprawled outward from historic cores as the American state and financial and real estate capitalists forced growing populations of color into segregated “ghettos” in older urban neighborhoods deprived of investment. In the Soviet Union, the regime sought, only marginally successfully, to solve its housing crisis with state-built peripheral tower block housing that intensified density on the urban outskirts. Elsewhere in the “First” and “Second” Worlds, mixtures of these two approaches produced still other “modernist” urban forms.

This chapter focuses on the city of Harish, a project that various governments have tried to develop over the last forty years. The first attempts included a kibbutz, a Community Settlement and, later, a Suburban Settlement. All were unsuccessful, mainly due to the site’s peripheral location and proximity to the West Bank and other Arab towns. By 2010, the huge demand for new dwelling units, the construction of the Trans-Israel Highway and the recently erected West Bank Separation Barrier all contributed to turning Harish into an attractive piece of real estate. This enabled the Israeli government to designate it as a city with a target population of 60,000. Focusing on the case of Harish, this chapter illustrates the financialization of the national settlement project, explaining how the state apparatus was used to create a real-estate market in a given area to supply the dwelling units that were needed while expanding the national territorial project. Analyzing the urban layout and the housing units in Harish, as well as the everyday life of the families in it, this chapter explains how this future city embodies the privatization of the national settlement project.

The rise of the sharing economy and destabilization of property are embedded in social, economic and technological developments. This chapter describes the decline of stability in the new millennium. It reviews the processes that inspire or trigger the move to flexibility and mobility in property use. Four developments are analyzed: The Great Recession, technological advances (including online work, intellectual property, and online relationships), generational attitudes, and consumers' distrust of big corporations.

The conclusion underscores the many ways that new town planning illustrated a dynamic social democracy. Yet these responses to the 1970s yielded unintended consequences, as strategic accommodations of individualism, markets, and private finance became ends unto themselves. If market liberalism initially figured as but one response to emergent priorities and constraints after 1973, Thatcherism represented the subordination of those more various possibilities to a market logic. By the 1990s, in order to distance itself from left as well as right, New Labour endorsed a reading of postwar history as having been dominated by the state and then the market on either side of 1979. This erasure of social democracy’s more supple history requires its recovery – the recovery of ambitions and innovations that, however imperfectly enacted, remain visible all around us in new towns housing millions. Today, as cities around the world face dramatic housing crises, the history of new town planning attests to precedents and procedures that states recently deployed in their efforts to confront these recurrent urban challenges.