[go: up one dir, main page]
IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/wiw/wiwsre/sre-disc-2018_03.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Fertile soil: The production of Prefigurative Territories by the Indignados movement in Barcelona

Author

Listed:
  • Viviana Asara
  • Giorgos Kallis
Abstract
Social movements do not only protest and demand political change – they produce new spaces too. Why and how? If we understand this, we can appreciate better the specificity and potential of the last cycle of mobilizations involving the encampment of cities’ squares. This paper shows how the Indignados movement in Barcelona evolved from symbolizing an alternative future in the square to constructing alternatives in the city after. We find that people in alternative projects re-appropriate and transform urban space because they want to live differently and produce a radically different city, now. We conceptualize these new spaces as ‘prefigurative territories’, integrating the seemingly divergent anarchist theory of prefiguration with Lefebvre’s Marxist theory of space production. Prefigurative projects have strategic horizons and struggle with conflicts when opening up. Against those charging the Indignados with a fetishization of the occupied square and a failure to achieve political goals, we argue for the continuing relevance of the movement as it moved from the production of differential, to the production of counter-spaces. Further research should investigate how these counter-spaces feed into processes of political change.

Suggested Citation

  • Viviana Asara & Giorgos Kallis, 2018. "Fertile soil: The production of Prefigurative Territories by the Indignados movement in Barcelona," SRE-Disc sre-disc-2018_03, Institute for Multilevel Governance and Development, Department of Socioeconomics, Vienna University of Economics and Business.
    • Handle: RePEc:wiw:wiwsre:sre-disc-2018_03
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www-sre.wu.ac.at/sre-disc/sre-disc-2018_03.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Sinan Erensü & Ozan Karaman, 2017. "The Work of a Few Trees: Gezi, Politics and Space," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 41(1), pages 19-36, January.
    2. Lazaros Karaliotas, 2017. "Staging Equality in Greek Squares: Hybrid Spaces of Political Subjectification," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 41(1), pages 54-69, January.
    3. Blair Taylor, 2013. "From alterglobalization to Occupy Wall Street: Neoanarchism and the new spirit of the left," City, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 17(6), pages 729-747, December.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Lazaros Karaliotas, 2021. "Geographies of politics and the police: Post-democratization, SYRIZA, and the politics of the “Greek debt crisisâ€," Environment and Planning C, , vol. 39(3), pages 491-511, May.
    2. Centner, Ryan, 2020. "On not being Dubai: infrastructures of urban cultural policy in Istanbul & Beirut," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 105050, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.
    3. Marit Rosol & Vincent Béal & Samuel Mössner, 2017. "Greenest cities? The (post-)politics of new urban environmental regimes," Environment and Planning A, , vol. 49(8), pages 1710-1718, August.
    4. Mustafa Dikeç & Erik Swyngedouw, 2017. "Theorizing the Politicizing City," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 41(1), pages 1-18, January.
    5. Maria Karagianni, 2024. "The urban political ecology of the commons or commoning as a socio-natural process: The case of the Peri-Urban Gardening group in Thessaloniki," Urban Studies, Urban Studies Journal Limited, vol. 61(6), pages 1147-1167, May.
    6. Veikko Eranti & Taina Meriluoto, 2023. "PLURALITY IN URBAN POLITICS: Conflict and Commonality in Mouffe and Thévenot," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 47(5), pages 693-709, September.
    7. Drainville A. C., 2015. "The Moral Economy of Global Crowds: Egypt 1977, Brazil 2013," New Global Studies, De Gruyter, vol. 9(2), pages 101-124, August.
    8. Cesare Di Feliciantonio & Cian O’Callaghan, 2020. "Struggles over property in the ‘post-political’ era: Notes on the political from Rome and Dublin," Environment and Planning C, , vol. 38(2), pages 195-213, March.
    9. Charalampos Tsavdaroglou, 2019. "Reimagining a Transnational Right to the City: No Border Actions and Commoning Practices in Thessaloniki," Social Inclusion, Cogitatio Press, vol. 7(2), pages 219-229.
    10. Lazaros Karaliotas, 2024. "Infrastructures of dissensus: repartitioning the sensible and articulating the political through the occupation of Greece’s public broadcasting service," Environment and Planning C, , vol. 42(2), pages 268-286, March.
    11. Christian Schmid & Ozan Karaman & Naomi C Hanakata & Pascal Kallenberger & Anne Kockelkorn & Lindsay Sawyer & Monika Streule & Kit Ping Wong, 2018. "Towards a new vocabulary of urbanisation processes: A comparative approach," Urban Studies, Urban Studies Journal Limited, vol. 55(1), pages 19-52, January.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Social movement; movement of the squares; Indignados; prefigurative politics; space production; territory; community garden; Henri Lefebvre; 15-M; social centre;
    All these keywords.

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:wiw:wiwsre:sre-disc-2018_03. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Gunther Maier (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.wu-wien.ac.at/mlgd/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.