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

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.

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