The atmospheric person

Abstract

The Occupy movement in Spain, locally known as the May 15 movement (15M), singularly developed throughout 2011 into a network of local neighborhood "popular assemblies." Over one hundred assemblies cropped up in Madrid alone. This article explores the conceptual and infrastructural work invested by the assemblies in the production of a particular experience of neighborhood (barrio). The barrio has become the centerpiece of the assemblies' political and geographical imagination. We offer here an ethnographic account of how the work of assembling is constitutive of a new experience of relationality, which assembly-goers refer to as "making neighbors." One makes neighbors through processes of deambulation and through an investment in the rhythmic and atmospheric production of space. The neighbor fares thus as an atmospheric person. Further, in this guise it has become both a model of and a model for political citizenship expressive of a right to the city. People's exploration of the question, "What is a neighbor?" offers an ethnographic case study on the invention of novel forms of social relations and political values in an urban commons-on the rise of the urban persona of the neighbor as a socialcum-political experimenter. Value, then, as an experimental form.

Commoning toward urban resilience: The role of trust, social cohesion, and involvement in a simulated urban commons setting

“…The urban commons potentially support this type of adaptability via informal networks of actors interacting in a bottom-up manner Foster, 2011;Nagendra & Ostrom, 2014), their experimental and sometimes disruptive character (Arora, 2014;Borch & Kornberger, 2015;Chatterton, 2016;Corsín Jiménez & Estalella, 2013;Radywyl & Bigg, 2013) and their openness to newcomers (Arora, 2014;Bruun, 2015;Foster & Iaione, 2019;McShane, 2010). This results in the formation of a network as community of practice with shared practices, shared knowledge, identity building, and tangible products.…”

“…The urban commons ensure the maintenance of collective subjectivities (Hardt & Negri, 2009), a phenomenon which has been earlier described by Simondon (1989) in his theory of transindividuality (Singh, 2017): individuals never stop constituting themselves and this process is reinforced through collective experiences. This offers potentials for adaptability: the interdependence of the commoners generates spaces of care (Corsín Jiménez & Estalella, 2013) where individuals evolve through collective practices, and are concerned with the more-than-human world. This enables reinventing nature-society relations which contribute to solving the ecological crisis (Singh, 2017).…”

On Cynicism: Activist and Artistic Responses to Corruption in Ghana

“…As elsewhere, neoliberal state forms, global financial crises, and the corruption of an entrenched political elite informed the activism in Ghana. These protest movements have demonstrated a trend of nontraditional elites rising to visibility through networked counterpublics (S. Jackson and Welles 2015) and have highlighted how new forms of political agency are tied closely to urban relations (Jiménez and Estalella 2013) and overlapping similarities observed between political movements across geographical locations (Obadare and Willems 2014;Werbner, Webb, and Spellman-Poots 2014;Lazar 2015). Yet the Ghanaian activist response to corruption and dumsor also showed significant differences from these global movements, and their resistance likewise formed part of the everyday practices of grassroots civic mobilization particular to Ghana (Oduro-Frimpong 2018).…”

“…I compare them to Ananse, the human-spider trickster figure of Ghanaian folklore (Shipley 2015;Donkor 2016) and to Sloterdijk's (1995) kynicism, a reference to acts that are deemed cheeky, vulgar, or provocative and therefore reside in the realm of satire. An Ananse-style kynicism resembles the satirical acts of poking fun at authority that artists in Ghana and elsewhere in Africa are involved in when challenging the excesses of power of the continent's postcolonial leaders (Weiss 2004;Obadare 2009;Hammett 2010;J. Jackson 2013;Shipley 2013;Oduro-Frimpong 2014Barber 2018;Limb and Olaniyan 2018).…”