ABSTRACT The Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ) emerged in June 2020 over six city blocks following the Seattle Police Department's abandonment of the East Precinct. CHAZ became a radical urban hub for mutual aid, civic engagement, food banks, first aid stations, urban farming, artistic expression, and concerts. However, violence broke out as five shootings, two deaths, sexual assaults, and arson led to the zone's dismantling after 24 days. This study analyzes CHAZ as a natural political experiment and compares the zone to other adjacent areas of Seattle. Emergency response patterns are investigated using randomly sampled data from Fire Department reports. Results reveal CHAZ had significantly higher response rates and incident variability. By contextualizing and scrutinizing CHAZ within abolitionist and anarchist geography, this study compares its short‐lived trajectory to the institutional endurance of Copenhagen's Freetown Christiania. Implications from this analysis entail that in highly urbanized areas, anarchist projects must be able to address communal safety through strategic adaptability, which may include negotiated relationships with state authorities in the early portions of a given movement. In absence, such projects risk being undone by the very forces of instability they seek to eliminate.
Alexei Anisin (Thu,) studied this question.