Grassroots Collectives Recover Public Space

The third chapter delves into the grassroots activism that re-emerged across Spanish cities and spread around the world after the 15M activists left the plazas and turned to neighborhood work groups. I provide an overview of the modus operandi of these rhizomatic communities of activism that mobilize slow, participatory, and horizontal processes for long-term systemic change. Focusing specifically on groups who advocate for the reclaiming of the publicness of public space, I describe their political approach: how they utilize free prototypes, recycled materials, urban gardens, make-shift architecture, and an online presence to encourage others to re-appropriate and recreate their interventions elsewhere. The second half of the chapter is a case study of one of these cultural collectives, #femPlaça [#wemakethePlaza]. #femPlaça congregates one evening a month in a historical plaza affected by gentrification, mass tourism, and increased police surveillance. The objective is to publicly engage in free, ludic activities that are becoming less frequent in public space—eating, drinking, sitting, playing, chatting, and reading the plaza’s history out loud in company of neighbors and strangers. These public activities have become illegal without prior permission from the city council, and #femPlaça does not ask for permission. As such, I argue that their everyday activities function as a non-confrontational form of resistance that has raised awareness about the sociohistorical losses that have unfolded with the privatization of public space.