From Occupying Plazas to Recuperating Housing: Insurgent Practices in Spain

Abstract

Urban insurgencies have spread across the globe like wildfire in recent years. The indignado plaza occupations in Spain are often cited as beacons of popular and widespread dissent. This article argues that urban insurgencies with the highest emancipatory potential in Spain today are found in the practices of the housing rights movement—the Plataforma de Afectados por la Hipoteca (PAH, or Platform for Mortgage‐affected People)—that mainly entail blocking evictions and occupying empty bank‐owned housing. I elaborate on the notion of insurgent practice by examining how insurgency has been considered in relationship to citizenship, planning and public space. I propose insurgent practice as a way of articulating how people attempt to enact equality in everyday life and engage explicitly with socio‐spatial and political questions related to an emancipatory democratic politics. Based on a detailed analysis of two of the PAH's insurgent housing practices, I posit that recuperating empty bank‐owned housing with and for evicted families has the highest and most significant emancipatory potential, as it disrupts the core dynamics of urban capital accumulation and enacts equality for evicted households by directly contesting financial rent‐extraction mechanisms at multiple levels. In closing, I outline some conclusions that emerge from the Spanish housing case and from the concept of insurgent practice and urban politicizing practice in general.

Urban struggles with financialization

“…However, this decision also undermined social welfare provision in many countries through the onset of austerity programs (Berry, ; Blyth, ; Karanikolos et al, ). The close relationship between urban space, market‐led political economic restructuring, and financialization means much of the tension between economic growth and social welfare, or between “the privatization of gains and socialization of risk”, plays out at the urban scale (Fainstein, ; García Lamarca, in press, p. 9; Harvey, ; Theodore et al, ).…”

“…The way the crisis troubled the link between real estate and finance allowed activists to draw on “the ‘waste’ of the property bubble to create alternative social projects” with strategies including publicly opening vacant buildings to homeless families (O'Callaghan et al, in press, p. 21). Likewise, the platform of mortgage‐affected people (PAH) in Spain and City Life/Vida Urbana in Boston, among other groups, have undertaken insurgent practices of eviction blockades and occupation of vacant, bank‐owned housing, aiming to prioritize the social value of urban real estate over its financial character (Di Feliciantonio, ; García Lamarca, in press). Such insurgent practices expose the contradictions characterizing the urban landscape in the aftermath of the financial crisis while attempting to make alternatives to financialization a reality.…”

“…Such insurgent practices expose the contradictions characterizing the urban landscape in the aftermath of the financial crisis while attempting to make alternatives to financialization a reality. They demonstrate that although the dominant approach is to treat property as a financial asset, collective action can socially produce new spatial possibilities (Di Feliciantonio, ; García Lamarca, in press).…”

Spatial Analysis of Clustering of Foreclosures in the Poorest-Quality Housing Urban Areas: Evidence from Catalan Cities

“…In the Spanish context, the growing literature on the mortgage crisis and foreclosures has explored various related topics that include the economic, financial, and political dimensions of the problem [39,40]; the political and historical roots that explain the extension of foreclosures and evictions [41]; some diagnoses of the resulting social impacts [13]; the emergence of social movements, activism, and political participation in response to the problem [42][43][44][45][46]; and the impact of these phenomena on public health [14,47]. At present, there is a relatively small, although growing, corpus of academic literature that analyses the Spanish mortgage crisis from a geographic perspective.…”

Theorizing the Politicizing City

“…García Lamarca's article (, this issue) focuses on insurgent urban politics in Spain. Her article, which is conceptually organized around the notion of ‘insurgent practice', provides a detailed account of the practices of the Platform for Mortgage Affected People (PAH), a housing rights movement that helps block evictions and occupies vacant bank‐owned housing.…”