2024/01/18 by Asara, Viviana, Kallis, Giorgos
paper · doi:10.57938/906128fe-4d91-49e7-8d11-e276ecbe6a87
Social movements do not only protest and demand political change - they produce new spaces too. Why and <br/>how? If we understand this, we can appreciate better the specificity and potential of the last cycle of <br/>mobilizations involving the encampment of cities' squares. This paper shows how the Indignados movement <br/>in Barcelona evolved from symbolizing an alternative future in the square to constructing alternatives in the <br/>city after. We find that people in alternative projects re-appropriate and transform urban space because they <br/>want to live differently and produce a radically different city, now. We conceptualize these new spaces as <br/>"prefigurative territories", integrating the seemingly divergent anarchist theory of prefiguration with Lefebvre's <br/>Marxist theory of space production. Prefigurative projects have strategic horizons and struggle with conflicts <br/>when opening up. Against those charging the Indignados with a fetishization of the occupied square and a <br/>failure to achieve political goals, we argue for the continuing relevance of the movement as it moved from the <br/>production of differential, to the production of counter-spaces. Further research should investigate how these <br/>counter-spaces feed into processes of political change.