MASTERS THESIS: UNDER DEVELOPMENT
Advisor: Maria Garcia

In The Right to the City, David Harvey states, “the right to the city is not merely a right to access what already exists, but a right to change it after our heart’s desire. The right to remake ourselves by creating a qualitatively different kind of urban sociality is one of the most precious human rights.” 
Today, the Bay Area's post-industrial landscape is dotted with vacant warehouses and abandoned factories, remnants of a manufacturing economy that has largely disappeared, while housing costs and cultural displacement reach crisis levels. 
Simultaneously, squatting is a phenomenon that has occurred throughout history, and still occurs in every place around the world where the need for space coexists with vacancy. Spatial squatting is the occupation or use of physical space (typically by people who don't have legal ownership or permission to be there).
These autonomous collectives employ counterculture design strategies to transform industrial ruins into sites of cultural production, housing, and community formation that operate outside conventional urban development models.

Looking at various mapping layers of San Francisco and Oakland, it is visible that historical industry was centralized along the bay’s coast, leading to the largest amount of vacancy in these areas today. 



The Bay Area also has a history of countercultural movements. 

The Outlaw Builders (based in Point Reyes and including a Berkeley CED studio) created unpermitted DIY structures and alternative living spaces often as a response to extreme housing costs and restrictive building codes.
The Vats, based in San Francisco, was an artist commune in repurposed wine fermentation tanks in the SoMa during the 1960s-70s, where creatives lived and worked in these unconventional spaces until the city shut them down. Repeated small fires, police pressure and internal conflicts among Vats' residents resulted in evictions and restricted access.
The Hotel Owners Laundry Company squat (HOLC) was an artist collective and living space in a former industrial laundry building in San Francisco's Mission District during the 1990s, where squatters created studios, performance spaces, and unconventional housing until their eventual eviction.
Ghost Ship was an artist collective and live-work warehouse space in Oakland's Fruitvale neighborhood that became the site of a fire in December 2016, killing 36 people during a music event exposing the tensions between the need for affordable artist housing and building safety regulations.