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This text investigates the sudden disappearance of a squat movement which, for about thirty years up to the end of the 2000s, dwelled at the heart of Geneva’s urban scene. Drawing in part on an ethnographic survey carried out in the early 2000s, it adopts a sociohistorical approach based on interviews and archives kept by former squatters. The analysis begins with a look back at the internal history of the spaces where the squatters lived together, which was not without its tensions and symptoms of community erosion. It then explores how the movement gravitated around a strategic artistic axis that undermined its counter-culture radicality, fatally amplifying internal dissension. Finally, the article questions the contribution of “squat culture” to a postindustrial urban governance that was able to exploit its creativity but paradoxically contributed to its normalisation.