How to create radical democracy in a moment of crisis and austerity? On the one hand, geographies of autonomy, solidarity, and resistance can offer hope, promise, and utopian anticapitalist alternatives for future action. On the other hand, agonistic initiatives that discard consensus in favor of conflictive engagement with institutions of state rule can allow for pluralism and the acceptance of difference. Perhaps, however, actually existing democracy can be achieved through an emphasis on process that bridges both activist ideologies. Looking to competing forms of activism in Madrid’s housing movement, I identify two strands of action—radical autonomy versus agonistic engagement. Despite their profound disjunctures, however, I argue these strands complement each other to ultimately experience convergence, which in turn contributes to the flourishing of new political initiatives. Within this convergence, feminist perspectives attuned to difference have been crucial in forcing transformation through existing democratic structures. The resulting political projects engage with mechanisms of state rule while drawing on practices and procedures from autonomous struggles to elaborate frameworks for institutional change. In the process, I demonstrate the possibility of collaboration between competing modes of activism—often conceived as incommensurate—in the broader quest for emancipation from neoliberal state rule.

Recent debates have once again engaged with the substance and meaning of urban politics within our increasingly complex and startling contemporary landscapes. Yet these debates, while giving nods in the direction of feminist and postcolonial scholarship, largely work through traditional lenses of class, labor and the dynamic workings of neoliberal capitalism. In this article, I focus on spaces of difference and their engagement with the urban to demonstrate how politics ‘happens' in locations often left off the map of both scholarship and popular imaginaries, and, crucially, how those locations can, in fact, illuminate shifting political arrangements elided by other methodologies. By juxtaposing European okupa debates with postcolonial discussions of urban informality, I trace what I argue is a new iteration of squatting within a city both ravaged by edicts of neoliberal austerity and buoyed by the efflorescence of social movements and alternative political projects. I then explicate the role of property in constituting the urban within Spain, using the concept of ‘provincialization'. In doing so, I think relationally between systems of property and emergent forms of insurgency to argue that we are witnessing an anticipatory politics that fundamentally challenges hegemonic relationships between everyday citizens and regimes of property ownership.

No abstract

Following the spontaneous occupation of Madrid's Puerta del Sol in 2011, many academic accounts have found these mobilizations new and noteworthy for their technological savvy and networked capabilities. In this article, I argue that such depictions fail to capture both the influence of Spanish urbanism's material conditions on certain disadvantaged populations, and the broad diversity of these contemporary activisms. Looking to struggles over the proposed demolition of a squatter settlement in Madrid, I demonstrate how Madrid's planning has propagated racial imaginaries to legitimate dispossession and subvert anti-poverty policies. Second, I examine how resistance and contestation emerge out of specific urban experiences of inequality, and transcend traditional modes of activist organizing through the formation of broad coalitions between various civil society actors. In doing so, I argue that Madrid's mobilizations have paradoxically opened new avenues for the inclusion minority voices, against popular understandings that read rising xenophobia during crisis. Resumen: Un gran número de estudios académicos han analizado las movilizaciones recientes en Madrid, entre ellas la de la Puerta del Sol en 2011, considerándolas novedosas y de gran importancia debido a sus capacidades tecnológicas y naturaleza reticular. En este artículo propongo que dichos análisis no logran captar el impacto de las condiciones materiales del urbanismo español en las poblaciones perjudicadas ni la diversidad dentro del activismo contemporáneo. El artículo analiza las movilizaciones en contra del derribo de un asentamiento chabolista en Madrid y muestra la manera en que la planificación madrileña ha propagado imaginarios raciales con el fin de legitimar procesos de desposesión y subvertir políticas anti-pobreza. El análisis hace énfasis en cómo los movimientos contestatarios y de resistencia surgen de experiencias particulares de desigualdad urbana y cómo estos trascienden mecanismos tradicionales de activismo a la vez que forman coaliciones amplias con diversos actores de la sociedad civil. De esta forma, propongo que-de manera paradójica y en contra de la idea común de que la xenofobia aumenta durante épocas de crisis-las movilizaciones de hoy en día han creado nuevas vías para la inclusión de voces minoritarias.

No abstract