From Occupation to Recuperation: Property, Politics and Provincialization in Contemporary Madrid

Abstract

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.

Irregular Connections: Everyday Energy Politics in Catalonia

“…Addressing the phenomenon of necessity‐based squatting in Madrid, Gonick () seeks to theorize in this vein. Gonick traces how a severe housing crisis has forced thousands of residents of the Spanish capital into a mode of ‘makeshift urbanism’ (Vasudevan, ) resonant of that described by Simone () and others with respect to Southern cities.…”

“…For the protagonists of this practice, the result is a form of urban life evocative of the provisional and improvised survival strategies described by Simone (; ; ) with reference to Jakarta and Johannesburg. Building on Gonick's () arguments around squatting in Madrid, the cases of Esther and the afectadas of APE illustrate that this is not simply a question of housing. From illegal utilities connections through to Esther's backbreaking trek to the water fountain and the widespread reliance on candlelight—the cause of a number of tragic house‐fire fatalities in recent years (BBC News, )—the precarious forms of ‘makeshift urbanism’ (Vasudevan, ) that we tend to think of as specific to the ‘Southern’ experience are constitutive of daily life within Catalonia—and increasingly so in the midst of financial crisis and austerity.…”

“…For Gonick (), having made this kind of comparison between Madrid and other urban contexts, we can proceed to identify shared processes of counter‐hegemonic urbanism stretching across space. Silver (: 801) suggests that ‘incremental’ extensions to Accra's electricity grid through illegal re‐connections may have the potential to prefigure ‘future possibilities for affordable or even free energy for the poor’.…”

“…Thus, that pinchazos fail as a materially sufficient response to energy poverty and that this practice seems, on the surface, to lack any ostensible counter‐hegemonic orientation, is perhaps insufficient to deny it has any political potential. Yet, while Gonick () reads, in the practice of illegal housing occupation in Madrid, the seeds of alternative emancipatory urbanisms, it is difficult to build a comparable case pertaining to pinchazos . Gonick illustrates that the mainstreaming of illegal occupation is shifting common sense beliefs around homeownership as necessary for full inclusion in urban life.…”

Vacancy at the edges of the precarious city

“…Many have also examined the role of the state in producing an austerity urbanism that facilitates exploitation, profit-making and speculation while marginalising efforts to support and sustain affordable housing in low-income communities who are, in turn, framed as sites of increasing dependency and disposability, stigmatisation and vulnerability (Akers, 2013;Paton and Cooper, 2016;Peck, 2012;Watt, 2009Watt, , 2018. Feliciantonio, 2017;Gonick, 2016). Drawing on Blomley's argument for a 'territorial view' of property (Blomley, 2016) , O'Callaghan et al argue that by making "visible the contradictory nature of private property rights" (2018: 874), vacancy has become a key site of antagonism for post-crisis forms of urbanisation not to mention a target for new modes of governance.…”