A series of protests, demonstrations, and occupations in Spain against austerity policies, which transformed into ad hoc socio-spatial experiments to create neighborhood initiatives and alternatives while emphasizing provisionality as a key principle of spatial production
Context
How can citizen-led protests help construct spatial alternatives to the status quo? Following the 2008 Global Financial Crisis, a growing wave of social movements used long-term occupations of urban spaces not only as a form of protest, but as sites for reappropriating, reimagining, and rebuilding societies on a tangible scale. Occupied spaces became prototypes and experiments with the social forms and spatial organisations that emergent political programmes were generating. Responding to a political landscape that sought the solution to crisis in more financial instruments that deepened existing inequality, including austerity measures, privatisation, and the increasing commodification of public space, occupy movements transformed urban spaces into “commons”.
Whilst there is no absolute or clear-cut means of grouping the Arab Spring, 15-M, Syntagma Square, and other protests between 2010 and 2012, including the global Occupy movement, it is clear that these diverse movements identified a strong need for alternative spatial and social formations to generate radical political imaginaries.
Practice
On 15 May 2011, amongst a wave of anti-austerity protests in Spain, a demonstration called by two protest groups—Juventud Sin Futuro (“Youth Without a Future”), and Democracia Real Ya (“Real Democracy NOW!”)—ended in the occupation of the Puerta del Sol square in Madrid. Emerging in the context of poverty created by the economic crisis, austerity policies, and youth unemployment, these groups channeled widespread anger through online platforms including social media, and organised in-person mobilisations. Police disbanded the first occupation, but protestors returned, bringing others, and soon an encampment occupied the whole square. Forming a kind of city in miniature, the camp provided spaces for meeting and debate.
After a month, the growing protest camps and assemblies of what was now called the 15-M movement had established other temporary spaces across the city, including children’s playgrounds, libraries, information centres, dining areas, and spaces with solar panels to provide energy.
Feminism permeated the 15-M movement through practices of care and inclusion and a rejection of competitive and hierarchical values. 15-M became a counter-project to the neoliberal city, demonstrating socio-spatial alternatives rooted in participatory space-making, mutual support, and deliberative democracy. Since 2011, 15-M has grown into a series of solidarity-economy initiatives, social centres, community gardens, and campaigns against housing evictions. Forms of organisation and decision-making practiced at 15-M inspired neighbourhood assemblies who established garden initiatives with political agendas that brought local authorities into climate-focused conversations.
15-M’s potential as a spatial prototype for non-hierarchical decision-making and open planning has sparked much political and scholarly attention. 15-M’s intersection of radical action with radical spatialisation demonstrates the possibility of achieving social-spatial projects of political transformation that begin at the grassroots scale of local communities. The movement’s diversity of spatial outcomes reflects its diverse social composition and its collaborative, open-ended approach to occupation and ad-hoc creativity.