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This article aims to broaden and deepen debates on the everyday practices of autonomous activists. To do this we present three main research findings from a recent research project that looked in detail at what we called 'autonomous geographies'. First, in terms of political identity, we highlight how participants in political projects problematise and go beyond the simple idea of the militant subject, set apart from the everyday who opposes the present condition. Second, we highlight how everyday practices are used to build hoped-for futures in the present, but that this process is experimental, messy and contingent, and necessarily so. Finally, we illuminate the contested spatialities embedded within political activism that are neither locally bounded nor easily transferable to the transnational. This exploration of everyday activism has illuminated that the participants we engaged with express identities, practices and spatial forms that are simultaneously anti-, despite-and post-capitalist. We argue that it is through its everyday rhythms that meaning is given to post-capitalism and it is this reconceptualisation that makes post-capitalist practice mundane, but at the same time also accessible, exciting, feasible and powerful. This paper draws upon material collected during a 30-month empirical research project into the everyday lives of grassroots, non-party political activists in the UK between 2005 and 2008. Three case studies were explored in detail -autonomous social centres, Low Impact Developments, and tenants' networks resisting gentrification.key words activism capitalism post-capitalism autonomy space UK

This paper's focus is what we call 'autonomous geographies' -spaces where there is a desire to constitute non-capitalist, collective forms of politics, identity and citizenship. These are created through a combination of resistance and creation, and a questioning and challenging of dominant laws and social norms. The concept of autonomy permits a better understanding of activists' aims, practices and achievements in alter-globalisation movements. We explore how autonomous geographies are multi-scalar strategies that weave together spaces and times, constituting in-between and overlapping spaces, blending resistance and creation, and combining theory and practice. We flesh out two examples of how autonomous geographies are made through collective decision-making and autonomous social centres. Autonomous geographies provide a useful toolkit for understanding how spectacular protest and everyday life are combined to brew workable alternatives to life beyond capitalism.

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This article develops a theoretical understanding of the relationship between young people and city space. More speci cally, our focus concerns what we have termed 'urban playscapes'-young people's activities in bars, pubs, night-clubs and music venues within the night-time entertainment economy. The paper theoretically and empirically explores three interrelated aspects of these playscapes: production and the increasing role of a small number of large-scale corporate leisure and entertainment operators providing sanitised, 'branded' experiences; regulation in which the development of urban playscapes can be understood through a night-time entertainment regime based around a modi ed relationship between state, developers and consumers, including enhanced forms of surveillance and control; and consumption which is characterised by segmentation and differentiation and based around more 'exclusive' and 'up-market' identities. We argue that these three aspects combine to create a dominant mode of 'mainstream' urban nightlife, with 'alternative' and 'residual' nightlife increasingly under threat or squeezed out. In conclusion, we discuss some of the interrelationships between production, regulation and consumption and suggest a number of potential future scenarios for nightlife development.