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title = "Making Space through a Careful Sidestepping"
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**By Mara Ferreri**

“Figure it out, comrade!” is an exhortation to make space for life where and when that space is not a given. It is about recognizing the symptoms of systemic failure around us and forging a path forward through, under, or sideways. As an interpellation, it often establishes a relationship with another being, an invitation to see what surrounds and decide the next step* *in response to a situation, or the need to make the inhabitable habitable. Any place is a good place to start when sketching out the geographies of FIO practices because virtually any place shows the scars of intersecting oppressive logics of conflict, bureaucracy, enforced scarcity, segregation, and discrimination. Figuring it out means starting from these ruins, making a hideout, and laying claim to space without clamor, by stealth, with – at most - a complicit wink to fellow wayfarers. 

On a planet rendered ever more uninhabitable by the ravages of war, greed, and extraction – dwelling becomes possible only when rules are bent, circumvented, ignored, or broken outright. We can only take space by re-asserting a “right’ to exist despite opposing conditions: a right that is not granted by some external authority, but taken. The old English expression “by hook or by crook” resonates with many other “figuring it out” expressions in other languages and practices denoted by them. Its meaning as “by any means possible” or “one way or another” is mistakenly associated with illicit activities due to a modern association of “crook” with terms such as criminal or underhand, which problematically equates responding to necessity and unlawfulness to criminality. Some dictionaries report a different origin, recorded as early as the 14th Century, related to everyday uses of land and plants. At that time, peasants had many tools to aid the foraging activities as part of their seasonal livelihoods. Among them was the billhook—a cutting tool with a curved tip, useful for pruning—and the shepherd’s crook—a long stick with a hook at the end. Before land enclosures, as argued by Linebaugh in the *Magna Carta Manifesto: Liberties and Commons for All*, dead firewood and low-hanging fruits—fuel and food—were available to those who needed them according to shared local custom and by collective agreement, regardless of the title to land or forest.[^1] They were there for the taking, “one way or another,” with a curved knife or a hooked stick.* *But what kind of fruits are available to what kinds of billhooks today when those customs have been captured by languages of rights, formality, and liberal responsibility? How do we bring a profoundly critical hesitancy to all of this while also recognizing the usefulness of some of the branches we reach out to?

Through the lens of FIO, we can name ways of dwelling and reproducing life that skirt around the edges of the formal and the legal spheres, often exceeding them. Usually, these practices are presumed to be marginal, temporary, and precarious. But such an understanding makes sense only if viewed from the standpoint of a Western, state-centric, and legalistic fantasy of permanence and formality. Even the landing page of the UN-Habitat website admits that across the globe: “one in four people live in harmful conditions to their health, safety, and prosperity.” Starting from clear evidence of the (im)possibility of dignified dwelling, FIO urges us to see the systemic urgency of untenable conditions worldwide and recognize that for many, if not most, the mere fact of existing and occupying space is itself outside the law. Invoking rights in this context by appealing to institutional frameworks and professional knowledges tricks us into what Peter Marcuse and David Madden have called “the myth of the benevolent state.” This is a “right to place” captured by the allegedly progressive ideology of urban planning and state-centric logics of organizing resources fundamentally obscures the project of urbanism (and of statecraft more broadly) as “a vector of colonization of non-capitalist spheres and spaces,” in the words of Álvaro Sevilla Buitrago.[^2] The reordering of space and social activities in the name of capital and state has been justified and framed in terms of granting “rights” as paternalistic obligations and responsibilities towards inferior others. As noted by post-colonial feminist scholar Uma Narayan, the discourse of rights was historically constructed “when Western countries were becoming increasingly interdependent with, unseparated from, and anything but disinterested in their unfree and unequal colonies.”[^3] The fantasy of contractual relationships between equals at the core of this formulation was, in practice, underwritten by an endorsement of colonialism and by a shared understanding of agency that recognized only some subjects as free, in a wider dynamic of subjugation of people and places.

Normative formulations of rights and agency here are ordered and defined in the service of a fundamentally hierarchical approach, and any “care” embedded in this worldview remains ambivalent in significance, if not outright oppressive. It is well known among researchers, community activists, and anyone who has ever had to deal with residual welfare states that implementing rights through any non-universalist welfare mechanisms creates divisions between deserving and undeserving. “Good” citizens are evaluated through mechanisms that discipline, separate, and forge compliant subjectivities, while always excluding others: and this exclusion is also spatial. In the systemic failure that can be witnessed in many welfare regimes worldwide, “rights” to inhabit or simply be somewhere are at best granted to ever-decreasing numbers of “deserving” poor while condemning to planned abandonment a growing number of those who become disposable and displaceable. In this framework, the distribution of a “right to housing” or a “right to the city” relies on making legible, intelligible, and thus conquerable modes of living and people who have long been denied agency, dignity, and freedom. Against this, making life survivable when and where the system is rigged against one’s life means reclaiming the conditions under which one is heard or seen, which can also include lying and hiding, for example, in the course of an interview with a welfare officer, or by faking “broken family relations” as the only way to receive child support in family-centric welfare systems.

Institutions, too, can be tinkered with, from within and from without. If one of the systemically failed spheres is that of the state, FIO practices are also about finding allies or building solidarities within crumbling bureaucracy and rules. It is about finding, within the fold of institutions, possibilities for porosity, intermediation, and redistribution. FIO practices can name forms of reworking bureaucracy, or shifting responsibility, or mitigating conditions through the empathy enacted by people in positions of relative power towards people in positions of powerlessness. These can sustain processes of** **precarious institutionalization where some elements of unlawfulness are tolerated and where special roles—such as so-called “squatters liaison officers”—are created to negotiate, from within institutions, the prefigurative reclaiming of buildings and land, instead of responding with punitive expropriations and evictions. But what are the implications of this tinkering? At times of welfare retrenchment, it is hard not to read these practices as potentially sustaining the same failure they respond to. As discussed by Emma Power and colleagues, the “shadow care infrastructures” that support life in post-welfare cities are also sustaining cities and states in their exacerbation of deep-rooted inequalities and the retrenchment of programs of redistribution.[^4] In some advanced capitalist countries, this logic has gone so unchallenged that it is now a good photo-op for “progressive” politicians to inaugurate neighborhood food banks staffed by volunteers. This is why it is infuriating, during housing justice assemblies, to hear that local housing welfare officers openly tell unhoused people to turn to organized squatting rather than waiting for a solution by the under-resourced and understaffed institutions tasked with upholding their “right to shelter.” And yet, these may also be the result of an open acknowledgement, from within, that to figure things out, we all need to sidestep entirely the fantasy that the current system will provide. 

Finally, the spaces we inhabit are no longer unplugged, these logics are extended and entrenched through digital mechanisms that compound analogue foreclosures, physical displacements, and extractivism. Financialization and the use of Property Technology—digital tools used by the real-estate industry for profit-making—are redrawing transnational geographies of wealth accumulation through property ownership. Digital platforms for short-term leases favor new modes of rent extraction and displacement, while algorithmic profiling further discriminates against already marginalized and disposable communities. These forms of extractivism and sifting, sorting, and filtering, which in many ways mirror similar processes in the world of gig-work, are sketching out the displacement and control of entire sections of cities, and their dwellers. Tinkering with all of this requires addressing digital and non-digital dimensions in new spaces of algorithmic capture, the micro-tailored strictures of residual “caring” social welfare programs, and surveillance, and how they intersect with analogue processes of land enclosures, destruction, hunger, bordering, and physical violence. As conditions of systemic failure change, so do figuring out practices. Responding to the exhortation to carefully sidestep failed and harmful systemic dynamics means both recognizing existing shadow care infrastructures and continuing to hide and amplify practices that expand their capacity to make space for life.


# Notes

[^1]: Linebaugh, Peter. *![The Magna Carta Manifesto: Liberties and Commons for All](59b584e9-c4b0-4b8c-be3d-10d86d7b680c)*. University of California Press, 2009.

[^2]: Sevilla-Buitrago, Álvaro. *![Against the Commons: A Radical History of Urban Planning](bib:88d8c5bf-196d-42a5-baa8-d727d4a670c6)*. University of Minnesota Press, 2022.

[^3]: Narayan, Uma. “![Colonialism and Its Others: Considerations on Rights and Care Discourses](bib:35fe9477-79fe-4559-b6c0-a455e4d4fdab).” *Hypatia* 10, no. 2 (1995): 133–40.

[^4]: Power, Emma R, Ilan Wiesel, Emma Mitchell, and Kathleen J Mee. “![Shadow Care Infrastructures: Sustaining Life in Post-Welfare Cities](bib:5af60867-4c86-4f69-b988-20ad3c57eb97).” *Progress in Human Geography* 46, no. 5 (October 1, 2022): 1165–84.