Mr Francesco Salvini
PhD student
School of Geography
Queen Mary, University of London
Mile End Road
London E1 4NS
f.salvini@qmul.ac.uk
The Right to the City and the Immanence of Citizenship: Urban social movements and the reinvention of politics outside representation in the everyday life of the Raval, Barcelona, 2000–2007
The Raval appears today as an unsolved space, where the conflicts between the procedures of governance and the practices of citizenship are redefining the social contract of urban life. In order to analyse this tension, this research addresses the relationship between political mobilizations for the right to the city and the transformations in the everyday functioning of citizenship in the inner city of Barcelona between 2000 and 2007.
Precarity and migration will be proposed as the starting point to analyze these transformations: in fact, in the last decade precarious and non-citizen population started to claim and practice rights, using urban space as a site for expression; both during Sin Papeles’ mobilizations for regularization (2001–2006) and during the campaigns against the Ordenança civica (2005–2007), municipal law on the uses of urban space.
Relevant to this research will be how, in the permanent conflict on the use and government of urban space, social movements produced collective enunciations addressing the right to the city as a instituent right to appropriation and difference in the face of the contemporary abstraction of urban life. These social movements, it will be argued, not only questioned the meaning of citizenship in the rationale of urban governance in Barcelona, but also concretely redefined citizenship as a practice enacted to live in and use the urban space.
Key words: precarity - migration - citizenship - right to the city - social movements - imperceptible politics - everyday life