Excerpted from Andrés Jaque:

“In order to understand what happened at Madrid’s Puerta del Sol, it is important to take into account facts that have not been sufficiently considered. From the very first day, the camp has been carefully kept neat and well-ordered. Infrastructure, communication strategies, and victualling committees were created. Within them, protocols to both discuss and decide were openly negotiated. The work was administered through self-organized shifts. Protection from sun and rain were mounted and installed on site. Protesters managed the borrowing of temporary toilets and regulated the use of showers at supporting neighboring apartments. When sanitary inspectors from the municipality visited the camp, they concluded its hygienic conditions were adequate, stating: “it is swept and no waste has been found.”

Soon, the assemblies became redoubts for inclusion. If someone stated that bankers behave like “hijos de puta,” many of the participants would silently cross their arms, reproving the exclusion operated by means of language on a sex workers’ offspring. First day jeers to the banner “THE REVOLUTION WILL BE FEMINIST OR IT WON’T BE,” were responded with the programming of seminars on feminism, detailing the discussion on gender equity at the camp. Sol has not been an action, but more like a re-institutional process of daily life. A collective effort to bring ordinary urban life into politics; in which social capitals, associations, and good manners have extensively benefited from a precedent corpus of experiences and social constructions vital to make the movement possible, and that needs to be taken into account.

In Madrid since the late eighties, speculative and privatizing urbanism have seen responses by a complex network of small and interconnected urban groups and organizations. This text cannot possibly include, for instance, the long list of self-managed social centers that have equipped the city with an intense hidden assembly activity where discussion formats, later adopted in Sol, were developed. In them, architects, artists, and thinkers found opportunities to redefine the way expert knowledge could be introduced and implemented in a rather symmetrical frame with sensitivities, knowledge, practices, and experts external to them. And it was also in these places in which outcast realities found opportunities to become social concerns and benefit from the empowerment association can provide. All these together made what for many has remained as an invisible Madrid. A minority city, fragile and instable, made of architectures of appropriation, and, in many cases, of illegal occupancy.

The Sol protest-camp has exposed worldwide the discussion between an exclusive urbanism and an opposing one of the constituted dispute. A tension between the city of accomplished facts and a city not willing to solve, but to install into the public space the conflict and difference it contains. The first, allied with an architecture of tabula rasa and extensive resource consumption, and a second, operating by reappropriation, network-making, and the reinstitution of the existing.

Taking this under account, one might ask: What is the urban outcome of 15M? Probably the connected parliamentary activity carried out in the neighborhoods, and a consistent social movement in which online activism has learned to gain space in “offline arenas,” but above all, a singular urban form: the city as controversy. Madrid is now the crystallized arena of a socially constructed controversy. Cards are now on the table, and ideologies get explicit in a parliament. Making the possibility to depict the city as a normalized undisputed consensus is no longer available. Those who complained were right; it is “normality” as urban form what has been challenged.”