{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.019199479336153596, 'fraction_numerical': 0.0039049788480312398, 'mean_word_length': 5.364389233954451, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Book Review: Program Earth: Environmental Sensing Technology and the Making of a Computational Planet

assembled as material and emotional spaces through practices of repair, mending and care. Vasudevan draws on key concepts that were immanent to the spatial and political tactics of squatters themselves, such as Instandbesetzen (‘squatting and mending’). Vasudevan examines how squatters re-animated formerly abandoned spaces as sites of autonomy, resistance and self-determination. Squats became spaces to challenge normative identities and to experiment with new forms of collective life. Thus, these spaces articulated not only a critique of capitalism but also a critique of prevalent social norms. Yet, Vasudevan does not present a romanticised notion of squatting. Besides conflicts with the state and confrontations with the police, he also describes uneven power structures and internal struggles over gender roles, the legalisation of squats and the question of how to build solidarities with migrant communities, feminist and queer politics, and most recently refugees. In the latter sections of the book, Vasudevan focuses on the practice of squatting following the political vacuum of the early post-Wende months. He argues that the large-scale occupation of vacant buildings, empty lots and abandoned factories in the districts of the former East Berlin was also an imprint of the underexplored history of illegal occupation and the wider dissident public sphere in the former German Democratic Republic (GDR). The book ends with an analysis of how the idea of the ‘interim use of space’ that characterised alternative practices and underground events of the 1990s has been taken up as a policy strategy in official planning discourse and city marketing over the last two decades. What is at stake, as Vasudevan concludes, is a critical urbanism, which is able to challenge dominant conceptions of the city and experiment with alternative urban imaginaries. This book is published at a key moment in time as Berliners are again faced with an increasingly tense housing market. The material spaces for radical experimentation that have formed part of Berlin’s distinctive metropolitan culture – empty flats, abandoned factories, urban wastelands and other seemingly empty sites – are now rapidly disappearing. Recent events, such as the violent eviction of the 26-year-old squat Rigaer94 in the district of Friedrichshain in 2016, a symbol of one of the few remaining autonomous spaces in the city, show that confrontations between squatters and police are ongoing and that the future of Berlin’s long-standing alternative infrastructure remains uncertain. The scope of Vasudevan’s arguments far exceeds the specific context of Berlin and presents wider reflections on the relationship between the crisis of housing and the crisis of capital and the resulting oppositional spatial practices developed by urban dwellers. Thus, Metropolitan Preoccupations is an essential book for readers interested in urban activism, countergeographies and the city of Berlin.