Reflecting on the summer is tricky, as with any piece of reflection, emotion is bound up with experience: this makes it hard to be objective. Particularly when I am back in the UK, grey skies all round and news from Charlottesville filling my social media. Spain feels like a lifetime ago, and one with…
Interview with El Patio
This week I had the opportunity to record an interview with Mikel Oleaga, a core member of El Patio Maravillas since 2008. Mikel has been one of my key contacts during the summer and I have discussed El Patio with him on a number of occasions. The interview was an opportunity to record some…
Touristification and Community Resistance in Madrid
Map making: what to include, what to leave out, and how to represent in 2D, places, pieces of information or feelings related to space? I found the task of bringing together aspects of my research this summer to make a map of Madrid more difficult than I expected. On reflection, I think the quantity…
Yoga, DIY & Participant – Observation
Source: twitter.com/yogapatio When I met people from El Patio Maravillas initially and explained to them that I wanted to better understand the impact of El Patio in Madrid, their main advice to me was to go to La Ingobernable and join a collective. I thought it was a bit tangential but would be a good…
‘Right to the City’ in Action
Photo: El Patio Maravillas, Calle del Divino Pastor [1] What makes them think they can take democracy into their own hands? (My Dad, earlier this summer) I was slightly taken aback by this question due to its directness, and as it was asked during an otherwise casual phone call in the first few weeks of…
The Death of El Patio
Para vivir… morimos (In order to live … we die) Last Saturday, 8th July, El Patio died. The organisation was ‘killed’ with a two day party in Malasaña. In the style which befits the organisation, the party was spread, slightly shambolically over two nights and filled with friends made over the last 10 years. The…
‘Okupados’ in Madrid
In her book Bargaining for Brooklyn: Community Organizations in the Entrepreneurial City, sociologist Nicole Marwell explains: “Sociologists who study organizations sometimes use the term ‘field’ to describe a set of organizations linked together as competitors and collaborators within a social space devoted to a particular type of action — such as a market for certain…
Squatting in Europe: Radical Spaces, Urban Struggle
Squatting is a unique form of protest activity that holds a potential of unfurling energies; it focuses action in a way that is prefigurative of another mode of organizing society and challenging a paramount institution of capitalist society: private property.[1] It is easy to be blinded by the 15-M movement when discussing contemporary social movements…
El Barrio De Maravillas
Since 2007 the collective El Patio Maravillas has been a central part of the Universidad area of northern central Madrid, better known today as Malasaña. Locals affectionately refer to it as El Barrio de Maravillas (‘the neighborhood of wonders’). El Patio’s decision to take for itself the name Maravillas is a representation of its aspirations…
Reflections on my position as a researcher
Reflecting on my own positionality as a researcher in Spain is dominated by recent events in European politics. When I meet people and explain that although I am working for NYU, I am in fact English, the subject almost always turns to Brexit. This is understandable given Spain’s position in the E.U. and the impact…
