Squatting Social Centers in a Sicilian City: Liberated Spaces and Urban Protest Actors

The Social Centres in Italy are simultaneously “liberated spaces”, empty and unused large buildings squatted by groups of radical left/antagonist activists to selfmanage social and countercultural activities, and “political contentious places”. They are indeed urban but not only local protest actors, denouncing the scarcity of spaces of sociability outside of commercial circuits, campaigning against market-oriented urban renewal, property speculation, and on other anti-capitalistic issues addressed outside the occupied spaces. The long history of Social Centres in Catania, the second largest city of Sicily, is reconstructed and explained through the choices and actions made by the squatters/activists, depending on their political-ideological orientation, on the one hand; and by the opportunities and constraints of the specific political and socio-spatial structure, which they had to face, on the other. The Social Centres, CPO Experia, CSOA Guernica, CSA Auro, and more recently CSO Liotru, are the main analysed empirical cases.