The politics of neighbouring: assembly politics, urban citizenship and regimes of visibility in post-crisis Madrid

ABSTRACT

Social movements in Spain have employed the figure of the neighbour to reimagine the limits of citizenship. In this article, I engage with conflict and tension around the figure of the neighbour to explore some of the complexities of emerging frameworks of urban citizenship. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in Madrid, I explore how social movements intervene on a contested field of visibilities. These interventions occur in a context in which the presence of certain neighbours is continually placed in question, while dynamic neighbourhood initiatives are seen as a potential tool for growth. Government treatment of grassroots neighbourhood initiatives is contradictory and sometimes instrumental. Initiatives are criminalised, made visible and even staged, constructing particular regimes of visibility around the figure of the neighbour.

KEYWORDS:

• Assembly
• neighbour
• visibility
• Spain
• mapping

Acknowledgement

Thank you to the anonymous reviewers for their detailed and generous feedback. Thank you to the participants of the EWIS workshop Aesthetic Cities: Everyday, International, Urban where I began to develop this paper in 2018, and particularly organizers Matt Davies and Delacey Tedesco. Thank you also to Aleks Deejay for feedback on an earlier draft and Miriam Fuentes Guirado for helping with the images.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. With the election of municipal coalitions including Ahora Madrid and Barcelona en Comú in 2015, the emphasis on neighbourly relations gained further influence. Más Madrid (Emerging out of Ahora Madrid) received the most votes at the municipal election on the 26^th of May 2019 but lost government.

2. The greater district of Embajadores, of which Lavapiés is a part, was chosen as the world’s coolest neighbourhood to visit by Time Out magazine in 2018 (Time Out 2018).

3. It is important to note that while slum dwellers played an important role in the neighbourhood movement, the movement was not restricted to these neighbourhoods (See Castells 1984).

4. The Asamblea Popular de Lavapiés is the neighbourhood assembly in Lavapiés emerging out of the 15M movement.

5. For more on the Okupa tradition see Martínez López (2018). On the relationship between the Okupa tradition and the 15M movement see Martínez López and García Bernardos (2015).

6. The Intermediae space in the Matadero Centre for Contemporary Creation was created in 2007. It is focused on projects of social innovation and research into new ways of involving audiences in the production of art and culture (Intermediae 2020a).

7. This approach to mapping builds on the scholar activist tradition of ‘countermapping’ that has been particularly influential in Spain (See Cobarrubias and Pickles 2009; Counter Cartographies Collective 2012).

8. The CIVICS map can be viewed here: https://civics.cc/en/#!/iniciativas?center=40.4379,-3.8196,10&cities=20, last accessed the 6^th of March 2020.

9. Last revised on the 24^th of June 2019.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ari Jerrems

Ari Jerrems teaches International Relations at Monash University. His research focuses on questions of security and political subjectivity related to migration, urbanization, and borders.