Having reached the halfway point of their first mandate, it seems like a good time to ask whether and how the jump from the streets to the institutions has helped advance the demands of the social movements from which these candidacies derived their legitimacy. Have the possibilities for emancipatory systemic change grown and multiplied in this time? Or has neoliberal institutionality converted and absorbed an entire generation of its opponents into its structure? These are complex questions. To begin to answer them, we might first consider the scale of the challenges facing these cities in the current stage of global capitalism. We’ll focus first on the signature issue on which many of the activists who became politicians built their legitimacy: the right to decent housing.

The Great Wall of Money

Walking around Sants or similar working-class neighborhoods in Barcelona, you’re likely to see several flyers offering to buy apartments. Some are handwritten, others are printed out in Arial or Comic Sans fonts. They contain little information besides a first name and a phone number. Some are simply anonymous. But though their appearances may vary, they tend to lead to the same phone numbers.

An investigative report by the autonomous weekly La Directa revealed that these flyers can be traced back to a handful of companies that have been buying up entire residential blocks, often with renters still living in them. They then persuade tenants to leave their homes, renovate the building and either sell it or rent the flats out at higher prices. How the companies persuade tenants to leave varies. They might offer cash, drastically raise rent or simply refuse to renew a rental contract. When tenants resist, they hire companies like Desokupa (“Unsquat”) to forcefully remove them, providing gainful employment to beefy fascists and often breaking the law in the process.This practice tends to be depicted in the media as a local problem in which a handful of unscrupulous businesses exploit loopholes and legal grey areas to turn a profit. But it goes far beyond Barcelona. Companies like these are the shock troops of a massive rent bubble that is affecting all of Spain’s major cities. According to leading Spanish property website Idealista, rental prices increased across the country by 15.9 percent in 2016 alone, with year-over-year growth rates approaching 20 percent during the first trimester of 2017 in places like Barcelona, San Sebastian and the Canary and Balearic Islands. At the neighborhood level, the numbers are simply staggering. In places like the Sant Martí and Sant Andreu districts of Barcelona, rental prices have increased by over 30 percent relative to the same time last year.

Few can deal with such sharp increases. As a result, longtime residents are being displaced from their neighborhoods by what real estate services firm Cushman & Wakefield has dubbed “The Great Wall of Money,” a massive pot of capital for global real estate investment worth about $435 billion. As former UN Special Rapporteur on adequate housing Raquel Rolnik describes it, the Great Wall of Money is a floating cloud of finance capital seeking to materialize in a way that evokes colonization. “I deliberately use the term ‘colonization’ because it involves territorial occupation and cultural domination,” she explains in a recent lecture at the Center for Contemporary Culture of Barcelona. “This colonization has just one objective: to extract rent by opening up new frontiers that are capable of generating interest for finance capital.”

While the use of colonization as a metaphor is problematic for its erasure of slavery and genocidal violence, what is certain is that governments thirsting for foreign investment are competing to land this capital in their countries despite its distinct lack of interest in the lives of residents. In Spain’s case, the country recently attracted the Wall of Money by becoming an emerging market for real estate investment trusts, or REITs. These are companies owning income-generating real estate that can be either residential or commercial. The vast majority of that income must be derived from rent and paid out to shareholders as dividends.

REITs were introduced as a legal form in Spain in 2009 under a Socialist Party government. Initially, they were unsuccessful due to a corporate tax rate of 19 percent. But in 2012, Mariano Rajoy’s right-wing government exempted REITs from this tax. It was after this reform took effect that rental prices took off across the country. Alongside developments like the rise of rent-extracting platforms such as Airbnb — which blur the line between residential and commercial properties or formal and informal economies — the central government’s measure breathed new life into the very sector that provoked Spain’s economic crisis in the first place. The work of managing its most dire effects was left to the municipal governments.

Cornered by the State and the Market

It is safe to say that, in Spain, the degree of conflict between city governments and the territory- and rent-seeking finance capital of the Great Wall of Money is at its highest in Barcelona. This is unsurprising, since it is here that both the Spanish housing movement and the municipalist wave were born. Barcelona is also where the link between the movements and the electoral platform is most robust, and the line between activists and representatives is haziest. At the local level, this is common knowledge that can be written off as a talking point. For outside observers, however, it is helpful to consider what this looks like on any ordinary day.

Recently, Barcelona En Comú councilwoman Gala Pin went on the agenda-setting Catalan morning show Els matins and confronted the co-founder of MK Premium, the most prominent of the property vultures identified by La Directa’s investigative report. In a heated exchange, she characterized MK Premium’s work as violencia inmobiliaria, or “property violence.” Her choice of words matched the discourse of the housing platform she helped lead before becoming a representative, the Plataforma de Afectados por la Hipoteca, or Mortgage Victims Platform (PAH). As a result of her choice of words, she was accused of demagoguery by the right-wing opposition and sued by MK Premium for slander.

Pin’s nods to the housing movement go beyond mere rhetoric. She often uses her large following on social media to make evictions visible and boost efforts to stop them. “Tomorrow we have five evictions,” reads a typical post. “Despite our efforts, we need collaboration to stop one. Arc del Teatre Street, 9:30am.”

These posts have been criticized in some radical-left circles as either being propagandistic or preemptively deflecting blame for the evictions that do take place under Barcelona En Comú’s watch. Others argue that Pin and other council members using this approach are simply being transparent about the limits of institutional power and calling on people to overcome them when this is unjust. What is clear is that the approach is effective. The resulting mobilizations have stopped numerous evictions, and even more have been stopped by the network of housing offices that the city government revamped to mediate between tenants and landlords.

“Occupy and Resist.” A squat in Barcelona. Photo by Oriol Salvador

This is just one example of how tension between social movements, local representatives and public administration can be used to strengthen resistance against the impositions of higher-level institutions and economic forces. And Barcelona is not the only city where the municipal government has become more porous to pressure from below. Manuela Carmena’s Ahora Madrid, for instance, have opened the city’s participation system up to citizen-initiated proposals and, like other cities, allocated a portion of the city coffers to participatory budgeting. In Valencia, where progressive green coalition Compromís governs with the support of Valencia En Comú and the Spanish Socialist Party, the city is undertaking a massive shift towards a pedestrian and bike-centered model of sustainable urban mobility. And in Zaragoza, grid electricity is now 100 percent renewable and energy spending has been reduced by nearly 15 percent.

All of these cities have disproven the European Union’s “no alternative” dogma about austerity by increasing social spending and expanding the public housing stock while maintaining balanced budgets and, in some cases, even reducing deficits. They are also pressuring the central government to take in more refugees, and some are defying Rajoy’s racist 2012 healthcare reform by providing universal healthcare regardless of one’s documentation status. In Madrid, Barcelona and Valencia, city governments have repeatedly expressed their desire to close immigrant detention centers, citing human rights violations and taking symbolic and legal actions against them as a result.

These are by no means revolutionary measures. Taken together, they amount to a straightforward social-democratic program combined with green urbanism and participatory governance. But in Europe’s current political climate, polarized as it is by neoliberal technocracy and the ultra-nationalist far right, this is nothing to sneeze at. What makes their defense of the most basic social advances of the last several decades all the more noteworthy is that it has been carried out by minority governments in a highly fragmented political system.

But this success is fragile against the power of the state and the whims of the market. To impose austerity on cities with left-wing governments, the central government merely has to enforce the legislation it passed in 2013 to dramatically reduce municipal autonomy. Treasury Minister Cristobal Montoro has already made his intent to do so abundantly clear. Meanwhile, the rent bubble continues to expand, pushing residents out of their homes and further from the urban center. Cornered by these looming threats, cities cannot afford to limit their efforts to holding the fort — they must also push back.

A Dynamic of Conflict and Complicity

In early June 2017, several neighborhood marches converged at the Plaça Universitat in the center of Barcelona. From there, a crowd of three thousand people ambled through Sant Antoni, Poble Sec and the Raval, three of the areas targeted by the Great Wall of Money. At several points, they stopped in front of specific housing blocks where tenants were resisting the efforts of speculators to kick them out. When they reached the end of their route, protesters cracked open a block of ten flats that had been abandoned for eight years and squatted it.

The march was the latest action in a growing cycle of struggles against the new property bubble. Organized by a platform called Barcelona No Està en Venda (“Barcelona Is Not For Sale”), it brought together several neighborhood assemblies that have sprung up in the last two years to fight displacement by illegal tourist flats and rising rent. It also included the Sindicat de Llogaters, a local Renters’ Union that took shape in early 2017, as well as the anarcho-syndicalist CGT union, the Barcelona Federation of Neighborhood Associations, the Neighborhood Assemblies for Sustainable Tourism and the PAH.

Actions like these set the agenda of public debate, forcing governments and political parties to demonstrate their priorities. In this particular case, it wrested the microphone away from the establishment press, which had hoped to frame recent conflicts between the City of Barcelona, Airbnb and the tourism lobby as one of “touristophobia,” to borrow the term introduced by El País. Instead of complying with an anti-tourist framework — which has racist, classist and xenophobic undertones — the social movements have centered conflict on the property bubble and gentrification. For the most part, Barcelona En Comú have adopted this framing, albeit in confrontation with some sectors of the movement regarding how to target speculators.

This dynamic of conflict and complicity between movements and left-wing parties is particularly visible in Barcelona because the city’s long history of bottom-up organizing has produced a thick social fabric. During the institutional turn that gave way to Barcelona En Comú, the biggest risk was that the transfer of notable activists from the streets to the institutions would produce something like a “brain drain,” gutting and weakening the social movements. But a look at the social conflicts that have taken place since that turn reveals a somewhat different scenario.

Barcelona En Comú has been relatively effective in translating the demands of the social movements that its individual members came from into public policy proposals. They have been less effective in dealing with the demands of movements they had little experience with previously, such as the city’s street vendors and public transport workers. As a result, these movements have emerged as protagonists in the city’s current structure of social antagonism. How the tensions they produce are resolved remains to be seen.

In Madrid, however, there is far less complicity between the social movements and the municipal platform, and far more confrontation. Though its system of primaries was more open than Barcelona En Comú’s, the confluence of organizations that gave way to Ahora Madrid is much more fractured. Moreover, their consensus candidate, current mayor and former judge Manuela Carmena, comes from a much more institutional background than those leading municipalist platforms in other cities.

The difference shows. Carmena has bucked the party’s program on several occasions, using the cult of personality around her and Spain’s “presidentialist” model of municipal governance to isolate herself from criticism by the more radical organizations integrated into Ahora Madrid, such as Ganemos and the Anticapitalistas wing of Podemos. The most disturbing symptom of this divide is the fact that El Patio Maravillas, the squat where Ahora Madrid was conceived, is set to become a block of tourist flats. Here, the gap between the movement and the institution broke ground for the Wall of Money.

Municipalism with a Purpose

For Spain’s municipalist platforms, the problem is that municipalism on its own is not an ideology. It is a form of governance. It can just as well be capitalist or communist, totalitarian or libertarian, nationalist or internationalist. Left open, it is just a brand to fill with capital or an excuse to transfer blame to other instantiations of administrative power. Moreover, an overly simplistic understanding of municipalism risks steamrolling over the conflicts between differing types of municipalities and the power imbalances produced by decades of urbanization and globalization. This is particularly relevant when we consider the profound cultural and political cleavage that has emerged in the Global North as a result of urban extractivism, which pits progressive growing cities against nativist depopulating villages.

To break with the narrow limits and toxic relationships of the neoliberal status quo and avoid becoming a mere vehicle for the reproduction of administrative and territorial self-interest, an emancipatory municipalism requires a horizon to walk towards. This is precisely what social movements provide. In every injustice that they denounce lies a way the world should be and a set of values and practices suppressed by the current social order. From a leftist perspective, these are none other than mutual aid and solidarity.

Materializing values as practices is a cultural and ideological task more than it is a technical one. The logic of governance, in contrast, is mostly technical. As such, it is centered on control and predictability. To avoid being subsumed by that logic of control and predictability, it is not enough for the new representatives to take on the demands of the movements that put them in power. They must instead nurture all of the movements growing in the cracks of the institutional architecture they’ve inherited, as it is precisely these cracks that the Wall of Money seeks to fill with concrete.

The beauty of the Spanish municipal platforms’ electoral victories two years ago was that their very existence was not predicted by the technical logic of governance. This is why municipal gatekeepers view them as a democratic error. What they have now is an opportunity to dismantle that architecture and open it up to the people, movements and memories that have been repressed, erased, exploited or ignored until now. Going forward, their challenge will be to create more uncertainty for speculators and less for those who hope to inhabit the city.

Carlos Delclós is a sociologist, researcher and editor for ROAR Magazine. His research interests include international migration, social stratification, fertility, urban sociology, social movements and cultural theory.

Originally published in ROAR Magazine Issue #6, “The City Rises“.

Lead Illustration by Luis Alves

The post Cities Against the Wall appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Carlos Delclós shares his overview of last night’s Spanish general election results for ROARmag.org

Podemos has won an important victory, but what has emerged is a situation that is all but ungovernable. It’s now up to the movements to enforce change.

During campaign season, there are two kinds of political parties in Spain. One has enormous posters that hang from their designated areas, flooding the country’s cities and villages with unavoidable propaganda. The second, due to their lack of representation when the campaign officially begins, tend to paste their posters on walls or find other creative ways of making their presence known. This year has been a good one for the latter.

The post Podemos are winning the institutions — now we must win back democracy appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Continuing our ongoing coverage of the imminent Spanish elections, here’s an interesting video debate juxtaposing the slow vs fast track to social change evidenced in the Spanish political arena.

From the indignados and 15M to housing struggles and municipalismo, Spain has been at the forefront of some of the most creative and effective social movements of recent years. With citizen-led coalitions now governing in Madrid and Barcelona, many see the Spanish context as offering a beacon of hope in an otherwise bleak political climate.

As the country heads to the polls on #20D in one of the most unpredictable elections for many years, the capacity for upstart parties and movements to grow further will be affected by the result. But how exactly is the capacity of Spain’s grassroots politics related to what happens in parliament? And in particular how important is Podemos’s performance in the elections to the future of progressive politics in the country?

In our latest English language episode, filmed in the studios of La Tuerka, the talkshow founded by Pablo Iglesias, we discuss these questions and more with Juan Luis Sánchez (eldiario.es), Carlos Delclos (ROAR), Ana Méndez and Mario Munero (City of Madrid).

Hosts Lorenzo Marsili, director Berardo Carboni.

The post Spanish General Elections: Beyond the Ballot Box appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Though a left-wing media darling, Podemos has steered away from its commons-friendly, post-15M beginnings, morphing into a more traditional, hierarchical leftist party. With scant mention of the Commons in their official program, their economic strategy is decidedly pro-growth and Neo-Keynesian. Despite these shortcomings and the constant media bashing they’ve endured in the last year, they represent an explicitly anti-neoliberal (if not anti-capitalist or truly P2P) option capable of contesting the TTIP and other worrying developments sweeping over Europe.

I urge you to read Carlos Delclós’ excellent book, Hope is a Promise: From the Indignados to the Rise of Podemos in Spain (available as an e-book from Zed), for an overview of the rise of Podemos and its love/hate relationship with the preceding 15M /Indignados movement.

Intensely personal and honest, Delclós takes us through the last five years of political activity in the Spanish territory at the institutional level and, vitally, in the popular conscience and in the squares and streets. Hope is a Promise stands out as an eerily familiar overview and explanation of these radical times for me, having witnessed many of these moments first hand. It clearly dispels the ubiquitous “15M = Podemos” myth prevalent in much of the non-Spanish alternative media while outlining a more nuanced view (ie, “it’s complicated”).

The book is also admirably succinct. At 96 pages, Delclós leaves nothing out while offering his well-reasoned views, without falling prey to theoretical overanalysis. I read it in a couple of hours. If you’re interested in Podemos, the Indignados and the future of Europe, I highly recommend you do the same.

Here are some extracts from the book:

On the Indignados = Podemos misconception:

Over time it has become very common for people to refer to Podemos as the party of the indignados. But this is a misconception, first and foremost because the indignados were hostile to the very idea of representation. Underlying their message was an awareness that they were not a single people demanding a single program, but a multitude demanding more mechanisms and more power to decide how they would organise their lives and livelihoods. Though I make this claim based on the actual discourse of the acampadas, admittedly my view here may also be the result of a key linguistic distinction. In the plazas of Madrid, Seville and other Spanish cities, the rallying cry was the Castilian No nos representan. They do not represent us. In Barcelona, however, we declared that Ningú ens representa. No one represents us.

Another aspect that distinguishes Podemos from the indignados is the party’s support base. Though their message resonated far beyond their class composition, the indignados were largely composed of a relatively young, college-educated precariat. This was mostly due to the differences between what participation in a social movement entails and what participation in a political party entails. For instance, the indignados’ emphasis on direct action and slow, horizontal deliberation introduced something of a selection mechanism into actual participation in the movement. Consequently, people who were less versed in the culture of radical politics, had less time to spend in general assemblies, were not entirely comfortable with public speaking, were not particularly interested in learning new internet tools like Mumble or PiratePad and were not willing to take the risks associated with civil disobedience were gradually filtered out over time.

In contrast, Podemos’s access to national television guaranteed contact with a somewhat older audience, which is extremely important in a country where decades of low fertility have given way to an older population structure. Moreover, the types of participation that Podemos enabled (namely, ballot boxes and smart phone apps) have a low learning curve, require less time and involve fewer risks than those favoured by the indignados. As a result, Podemos was able to complement its young, college-educated base with substantial support from working class, underprivileged and older groups, whose precarity generally comes with substantially greater risks than that of the indignados.

It is also important to note that Podemos was not the first political party to be associated with the indignados. The first organisation to break with the movement’s taboo against entering the electoral arena was the Partido X, a Pirate Party-style network of technopolitical practitioners who proposed a radically horizontal, net-centric approach to electoral politics. Though they never really caught on with the general public, they introduced a number of fascinating ideas, uncovered several major corruption scandals and had a hand in some of the indignados’ major achievements. Perhaps the most notable of these was 15MpaRato, a crowdfunded campaign that brought Rodrigo Rato, a former Managing Director of the IMF and Spain’s Minister of the Economy from 1996 to 2004, to court for fraud, money laundering and concealment of assets.

The other major examples of parties that were associated with the indignados before Podemos are found among the so-called radical left “nationalist” parties in Galicia and Catalonia. The first of these was Alternativa Galega de Esquerda (AGE), a coalition of federalist and left-wing independence parties led by Xose Manuel Beiras, a charismatic politician best known for his involvement in the antiglobalisation movement and for banging his parliamentary seat with his shoe in the style of Nikita Khrushchev as a sign of protest. In October 2012, AGE surprised many by becoming the third party in the Galician parliament, with roughly 14% of the vote. Pablo Iglesias played a key role in advising their campaign, which received considerable support from local 15M assemblies.

The second left-wing independence party to be associated with the indignados was the Candidatura d’Unitat Popular (CUP) in Catalonia. Once a strictly “municipalist” candidacy composed of neighbourhood associations, social movements, radical left independence groups and prominent members of anarcho-syndicalist unions, the massive pro-independence rally on 11 September 2012 pushed them to run at the regional level in that year’s elections. Led by David Fernandez, a highly respected journalist and familiar face in Barcelona’s cooperativist movement, CUP won three seats in the 25 November elections.

So while they weren’t the first to attempt to channel the energy of the indignados into the sphere of representation, Podemos were the first to seriously challenge the establishment parties in a battle for control of the central government. Their spectacular impact on the country’s political situation suggests that they understood the climate in the aftermath of the 2011 protests better than any other institutional political actor. They avoided interpreting the role of the social networks in connecting people and movements as support for a technopolitical, decentralized peer-to-peer ideology. Instead, they treated the social networks as a discursive laboratory through which to test and refine a common narrative that they would then take to the public arena in order to maximise its impact. At the same time, though they initially drew their legitimacy, structure and demands from the social movements, their intention was always to bring these to people who live beyond activists’ comfort zones. To put it bluntly, they wanted to take the discussion they saw on the social networks and in the codified spaces of the social movements to the murkier terrain of Spain’s bars, cafés and unemployment lines.

On the differences between Podemos and the more Commons-oriented Municipalist platforms:

But Pablo Iglesias and Podemos were not the only ones to throw their hat in the electoral ring in 2014. In June of that year, Ada Colau of the PAH also announced that she was willing to lead a candidacy to win back the city of Barcelona in the 2015 municipal elections, if it entailed catalysing a process of radical citizen participation. Her approach was similar to Pablo’s. The first step was to demonstrate popular support for the idea. Colau said she would run only if she received 30,000 signatures in support of the move, with half of those coming from residents of Barcelona and half coming from the rest of the Spanish state. The latter condition was intended to confirm the idea’s resonance in cities beyond Barcelona and the possibility of similar initiatives in the rest of Spain.

There was, however, a key difference between Podemos and Colau’s project. While Podemos was designed as a single party (albeit one with channels for citizen participation that could potentially incorporate voices from outside the organisation), what came to be known as Barcelona En Comú proposed a civic list blending prominent, unaffiliated activists, community organisers and political independents with members of various left-wing parties, including Podemos, through primaries and an assembly based participatory process centred on a code of ethics and a common set of objectives.

The idea caught on and similar candidacies emerged in cities all over Spain. These “citizens’ confluence” candidacies were remarkably successful in the 2015 municipal elections. Today Madrid, Barcelona, Zaragoza, Badalona, Santiago de Compostela, Iruña, A Coruña and the country’s unemployment capital Cádiz are being governed by prominent social activists.

Their first one hundred days in office have been characterised by a promisingly pragmatic approach to implementing a bold policy program, coupled with the occasional flamboyant gesture, like José María ‘Kichi’ González replacing a painting of the King of Spain in the mayor’s office with one of Fermín Salvochea, the nineteenth century anarchist mayor of Cádiz. Meanwhile, in Barcelona, monuments to notable Catalan figures with ties to the slave trade are being taken down and the King of Spain’s likeness is set to be removed from city hall. The salaries of elected Barcelona En Comú officials have been capped at €2,200 per month, just over three times times the minimum wage. Steps are being taken to pressure the regional and central governments to close the city’s immigrant detention center, and a network of refugee cities is being established to confront Spain’s scandalous refusal to let people in. Also, the new city government is challenging the local hotel and tourism lobbies—whose power in the city is difficult to overstate—by introducing a one-year ban on new tourist accommodation as well as applying heavy fines to unlicensed tourist apartments and promoting their conversion into social housing. And for the first time, citizens voted for individual district representatives.”

Hope is a Promise: From the Indignados to the Rise of Podemos in Spain is published by Zed books and can be purchased at Zed’s site or Amazon.com

Lead image by Julien Lagarde

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Cross-posted from CommonsTransition.org, Carlos Delclós explores the gap between people and increasingly unaccountable institutions beholden to financial interests, citizens are rising up to reclaim the commons.

The ubiquity of social unrest and economic conflict in Europe tells us that we are living in times of intense contradictions.

Where streets have not filled up with massive protests calling for a more direct, participatory and meaningful democratic culture, ballot boxes are increasingly filling up with votes for post-fascist parties like the National Front or UKIP, whose voices are in turn amplified and over-represented by consistently high voter abstention rates.

Though many are looking to the rise of new parties like Syriza and Podemos for signs of hope, the gap between the idea of Europe as a common, borderless space of emancipatory potential and the threat of a Europe characterised by nationalist entrenchment remains a daunting reality.

Over the last few years, the Doc Next Network has been researching, documenting and playing in this gap, and building an archive of short, socially conscious documentaries and independent films in the process. During the first phase, called Remapping Europe, we explored the contours of Europe’s borders, whether these were internal between member states, external to the common area or inherent in the very idea of Europe.

We learned that borders are something we carry with us; they continuously shape the structure and texture of our surroundings by imposing and reproducing relationships of exclusion and exploitation. As the political and social theorists Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson point out, they are not mere obstructions of global flows of capital. Rather, they are the essential devices through which these flows are articulated, mediating social relationships and access to the most basic resources required to satisfy human needs, such as land, labor, money and knowledge, often referred to as “the commons”.

This insight led to the project’s next phase, called Radical Democracy: Reclaiming the Commons, which looks at how borders operate at a more local level to enclose the commons and how those enclosures are being confronted and overcome. In this series of posts, we will present some of our results along with content from our Media Collection. By doing so, we will explore the challenges faced by ordinary people who are working together to produce an emancipatory horizon of self-organised and self-managed commons, free from the mediation of both the state and the market.

The challenges faced by these movements are many. The enclosure of the commons is not limited to the privatisation of public resources, though this is certainly one of the forms in which it takes place. Enclosure goes beyond the transfer of resources to produce two major tendencies: closing in and crowding out.

Think of the internet. Ostensibly, it is conceived to allow any user to connect with any other user or set of users anywhere in the world to exchange information in real-time. Many of us still remember how, around the turn of the century, several notable and enthusiastic intellectuals referred to an obliteration of the tension between time and space that would eventually lead to radically horizontal social relations. Of course, the reality of the internet is more complex than that.

In a recent essay, net artist and co-founder of the Geocities Research Institute Olia Lialina describes how the field of User Experience (UX) has changed the way people use the internet over the years. Premised around “scripting the user”, UX directs what information we consume, what users we relate to and how, eliminating clicks by relegating more and more processes to the back-end of websites and applications (where they run automatically) and directing those we do make through a streamlined, visually attractive front-end.

If we think of a company such as Facebook, the tendency towards enclosure becomes even clearer. In addition to information about the people we interact with, Facebook’s algorithms are constantly collecting data on our behavioural patterns, preferences and tastes. The algorithms, in turn, determine what stories we see in our feeds and what is marketed to us.

Each click determines the next several, reproducing and reinforcing our previously existing interests and shielding us from the influence of those whose interests diverge from our own. In this way, we are closed into increasingly specific interest groups and crowded out of a forum for interaction with a much more varied multitude. Meanwhile, people all over the world are coming to believe that Facebook actually is the internet, and more and more companies and institutions are submitting an increasing share of their social activity to the logic of a single company.

Urbanisation has remarkably similar effects, and that is because its goals are not much different than those of Facebook. Ultimately, the goal of urban planning is to direct social relations so that they are predictable enough to guarantee security, maximise profits and minimise conflict for flows of capital. The social ecologist Murray Bookchin realised this, and in The Rise of Urbanization and the Decline of Citizenship, he proposed that urbanisation was ultimately at war against the historical notion of the city:

City space, with its human propinquity, distinctive neighbourhoods and humanly scaled politics—like rural space, with its closeness to nature, its high sense of mutual aid and its strong family relationships—is being absorbed by urbanisation, with its smothering traits of anonymity, homogenisation, and institutional gigantism.

The overwhelming scale of the process can even lead people to enclose themselves, as he went on to point out:

The result is that the ego itself tends to become passive, disembodied, and introverted in the face of a technological and bureaucratic gigantism unprecedented, indeed unimaginable, in earlier human history. Public life, already buffeted by techniques for engineering public consent, tends to dissolve into private life, a form of mere survivalism that can easily take highly sinister forms.

Bookchin also linked the emergence of a market economy, freedom of trade and industrial innovation in Europe to the development of roads, rivers and canals.

The French from ZEMOS98 on Vimeo.

Tellingly, while the latter were systematically homogenised, redirected and, in the case of the rivers, polluted, the former are precisely the elements that were prioritised throughout the development of the European Union, beginning with its roots in the European Coal and Steel Community.

While there is much to be said about his idealisation of rural communities and pre-capitalist society in general, reading The Rise of Urbanization and the Decline of Citizenship today is an illuminating experience. His agenda for community-based, libertarian municipal politics matches the demands of the radical democratic movements that took center stage in post-2011 Europe, while the Troika imposed austerity through the sheer force of its own “institutional gigantism”. And his critique of urbanisation resonates with the pathological geographies of the housing and construction bust of countries like Spain and Ireland.

NONCITY, an independent film by Nuno Pessoa and Andrea Fernández, captures Bookchin’s critique of urbanisation at the expense of the city as it follows two visitors wandering through Arroyo de la Encomienda, a Spanish ghost town on the outskirts of Valladolid left behind by speculative town planning and corruption. Its mayor resigned a year after being charged with bribery and obstruction, once he had been sentenced to three years of prison.

NONCITY from TNGNT on Vimeo.

We are beginning to see the cracks in the pavement. Seemingly small gestures can provoke widespread revolt, whether it is cutting down a tree in Istanbul or evicting a squat in Hamburg or Barcelona. Mainstream publications like The Guardian are beginning to run articles on the commons, heralding “a wave of disruption” that will challenge neoliberalism.

And the politics of urbanisation now generates considerable interest, with prominent blogs and web magazines dedicating considerable space to polemics on Richard Florida’s creative-class oriented approach to “urban renewal” or Neil Smith and David Harvey’s critique of gentrification and city branding. We are also seeing the rise of what I’d argue has become a sub-genre of internet literature, namely, the pseudo-Marxist think-piece on hipsters and gentrification.

Most importantly, we are seeing more and more attempts by ordinary citizens to take back what is rightfully theirs, what is rightfully everyone’s. Over the next several weeks, we will tell some of those stories. It’s true that we are not going to change the world with one or two urban gardens. But when we care for the seeds planted in the gaps of a hollow system, we are choosing to cultivate the living city and leave the dead weight of urbanisation behind. And who knows what may tremble beneath the cobblestones?

Municipal Tremors – Radical Democracy: Reclaiming the Commons teaser (Spain Medialab) from Doc Next Network on Vimeo.

European cities for the commons is an editorial partnership supported by Radical Democracy: Reclaiming the Commons, a Doc Next Network project.

This article was originally published in Open Democracy

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Carlos Delclós, a sociologist and lecturer at Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, and an activist in the 15M Movement, writes about new generation of activist-politicians advancing the municipal agenda in Spain.

What the Spanish media ignore about this new generation of activist-politicians is why they became famous enough to put on a ballot in the first place: their roots in prominent local struggles and their willingness to spearhead radical democratic participation.

On Sunday, May 24th, the two parties that have ruled Spain since the country’s transition to democracy in the late 1970s were dealt yet another substantial blow, this time in regional and municipal elections. Nationwide, the ruling Popular Party saw support fall from the nearly 11 million votes they received in 2011 to just under 6 million this year. But while much has been written about the impact emerging parties like the anti-austerity Podemos or the right-wing Ciudadanos have had on the established parties, what makes Sunday’s results so remarkable is not what those parties did on their own, but what happened between several political actors at the municipal level.

In Barcelona, the prominent anti-evictions activist Ada Colau won the city’s mayoral race. In Madrid, once a stronghold of the Popular Party, the former judge Manuela Carmena also has a chance to govern, depending on whether her platform and the deteriorating Socialist party are willing to strike a deal. In the four largest cities, it is quite possible that the mayor will belong to neither of the two major parties. The same is true in Galicia’s major cities, Santiago and A Corunha. In Cádiz, Spain’s unemployment capital, another new, anti-austerity platform finished a close second.

Much of the right-wing Spanish press is already attributing these spectacular results to a cult of personality around the people leading these platforms, accompanied by the typical references to populism and Venezuela, with an occasional shout-out to North Korea for extra flavour (as if the resort to these arguments weren’t the epitome of populist rhetoric). What they ignore is why those faces became famous enough to put on a ballot in the first place: their roots in prominent local struggles, their independence with respect to the established parties and their willingness to spearhead bottom-up processes seeking a confluence between new or smaller parties, community organisations and political independents around a set of common objectives determined through radical democratic participation.

The Spanish hub of the Doc Next Network’s Radical Democracy: Reclaiming the Commons project has been documenting this process since it began, through video and other media. Below, you can see a helpful infographic that shows just some of the ingredients with which the new municipalist candidacies Ahora Madrid (Now Madrid) and Barcelona En Comù (Barcelona in Common) cooked up their municipal recipes. They include more obvious reference points like the indignados movement, but also feminist struggles, the copyleft movement or the Zapatistas of Chiapas, Mexico, among many others.

Image by Maria Castelló Solbés

Radical municipal politics is not an altogether new concept, especially not in Spain. In Catalonia, the Popular Unity Candidacies of the left-wing independence movement have had a notable presence in smaller towns for several years (they also quadrupled their 2011 results on Sunday, for what it’s worth). At the southern end of the country, the Andalusian village of Marinaleda is a well-documented experiment in utopian communism that has been going on for over three decades now.

In fact, the so-called father of libertarian municipalism, social ecologist Murray Bookchin, was strongly inspired by the Spanish municipal politics of the 19th and early twentieth century, as well as the Swiss Grey Leagues and the New England townships, when he wrote his influential “New Municipal Agenda”. While he hardly intended to prescribe a one-size-fits-all solution—especially not in large urban belts and port cities—in the text, Bookchin outlined four main coordinates: a revival of the citizens’ assembly, the need for confederation with other municipalities, grassroots politics as a school of genuine citizenship and the municipalisation of the economy. Underlying all of these coordinates is “a recovery of a new participatory politics structured around free, self-empowered and active citizens”.

All of these coordinates chime with the program and praxis of the new municipalist candidacies. In the newspaper they handed out as part of their campaign, Barcelona En Comù used almost as much space describing their process (30,000 signatures asking them to run for election, 1,000 campaign volunteers, 200 events organised by self-organised neighbourhood assemblies, 100 meetings with various community organisations in just 10 months of existence) and their vision (“a standard-bearer of social justice and democracy”) as they do outlining their program. The program itself includes 600 measures, ranging from modest but much-needed reforms (e.g., opening up more bike lanes, more social housing), to more radical ones (a guaranteed municipal income, coining a municipal currency).

Several questions remain about the conflict between the ambitions of the new municipalist candidacies and the daunting, path-dependent inertia of an institutional reality that threatens to swallow them whole. Many of those questions are addressed by some of the candidates themselves in the film Municipal Recipes, which you can watch below.

In it, they discuss the thought process that led them to make the jump into the electoral arena, how they hope to care for the city, how to make it liveable, the relationship between citizens, social movements and institutions, and the pitfalls of representative democracy, among other key issues. It’s a fascinating glimpse into a remarkable process. Tellingly, one of the most frequently used words in the film is “tension”. As Pablo Carmona of Ahora Madrid puts it, regardless of whether they achieve something like Bookchin’s New Municipal Agenda, they have opened up “a new model of social conflict” in Spain.

Recetas municipales. Una conversacio?n sobre el cuidado de las ciudades from ZEMOS98 on Vimeo.

(Click CC for English subtitles)

Municipalrecipes.cc is a campaign carried out by Lucas Tello, Nuria Campabadal, Mario Munera and Guillermo Zapata, coordinated by Sofía Coca.

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Carlos Delclós is a sociologist and lecturer at Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, and an activist in the 15M Movement.

Lead Image by Jordi Boixareu

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