Actors networks in critical urban studies - protest against the subprime crisis in Madrid

Abstract

Europe has been in a permanent political and economic crisis for over 10 years now, which has affected above all the southern countries such as Greece and Spain. In Spain, the crisis followed a period of high economic growth based on real estate speculation, labor recruitment (migration), and the expansion of the service sector, for example in tourism. The 15-M Movement of 2011 attracted attention with public protest, occupations of squares, and symbolic appropriations (street art and graffiti) in big cities like Madrid and Barcelona, ensuring that the street activism of citizens was no longer excluded from the political landscape. Their political message was against the commercialization of public spaces, control and surveillance of the public, and expulsion of dwellers from their homes. In this transnational and urban context, in which the different interests, actors and social movements collide, the social and the collective is reconfigured and finds different forms of expression. The ethnographic investigation of crises and protest therefore, requires innovative approaches that can grasp the relativity of the actors' appearing and the situativity of the protest forms against the background context. Material-semiotic perspectives understand objects and things not only as media for the transport of content and messages. Rather, the urban itself becomes an actor by incorporating socio-economic conditions, political-historical processes and spatial interdependencies. How is agency to be conceptualized and what role do urban space, urban forms, architecture and infrastructure play - in short, the material for protest? Using a case study, a protest situation around an eviction within the subprime crisis in Spain, this working paper shows how an ethnographic approach to protest can be rethought and methodically implemented. Spain's specific crisis within the wider European crisis scenario is is particularly suitable for such an examination, because power relations and social orders are more than ever under dispute.