Medialab Prado

Abstract:

"There is a city ‘within’ the right to the city: an assamblage of practices, meetings, infrastructures and spatio-temporal urban rhythms through which ‘rights’ are mobilized as material and political artefacts. There is therefore an interior design to the right to the city. In this brief research note we want to present ethnographic material of our work with some of the ‘popular assemblies’ that have incarnated the Spanish version of the global #Ocuppy movement. These assemblies sprung up in the wake of the ‘Indignados’ movement in May 2011. In an innovative political gesture, the movement decentralized out to Madrid’s neighbourhoods, with over one hundred assemblies being called in hoods all over the city. The assemblies met weekly or fortnightly in local plazas or streets. Their permanence as durable sociological objects over the past year has required the development of novel methodologies, the deployment of a variety of do-it-yourself infrastructures and social media, and the careful manufacturing of local political atmospheres. We thus describe the sociological materiality of the assembly-form as an object of interior design: a complex negotiation over the wiring of atmosphere, rhythm and infrastructure into the urban landscape." By Alberto Corsín Jiménez & Adolfo Estalella