Abstract This article explores the concept of the commons as a utopian practice, drawing on Graeber’s ‘living utopianism’ and Harvey’s ‘dialectical utopianism.’ It focuses on the urban commons La Ingobernable ’, a social centre located in a building, under threat of privatisation, occupied in Madrid between 2017 and 2019. The article examines how the project became a symbol of the conflict between neoliberal policies and movements demanding the right to the city. Through the analysis of the assemblage of discursive, semiotic, spatial, and organisational practices, the article shows how the collective delimited, reterritorialised, and governed it as a self-managed space. These practices are performative because they helped bring the commons into being, and prefigurative because they enacted in the present alternative social, political, and economic relations organised around radical democracy, equality, care, and shared responsibility. This approach opens a fruitful path for the analysis of performative and prefigurative politics and practices.
Abstract Adopting an ethnographic approach to the Linguistic Landscape (LL), the current paper sheds light on the imagination and prefigurations ( Graeber, 2013 ) of a utopic future enacted in the protest LL of Exarchia Square in Athens city centre. More specifically, within a context of police suppression, protest LLs have been performed to save the only square of Exarchia neighbourhood against the plans to construct a metro station on the square, construed as part of the ongoing gentrification and touristification of the neighbourhood. Aiming to explore how the right to the city ( Harvey, 2012 ) is asserted in this dystopic setting, we draw on the understanding of the protest LL as a contested process that rearticulates public space. Analyzing an assemblage of commoning practices, semiotic resources, embodied performances, and the soundscape, the protest LL reveals how the square is envisioned and transformed by the protesters to a concrete utopia ( Bloch, 1986 ).
Abstract This paper examines the deployment of linguistic and semiotic resources by housing rights movements to reclaim urban environments and establish counter-spaces ( Lefebvre, 1974 ) — sites governed by non-capitalist logics and dedicated to securing residential stability. The study focuses on two specific sites in Rome, a city characterized by rapid, forced urbanization and deepening socio-economic disparities. In response to these pressures, housing advocacy groups have increasingly appropriated abandoned properties to provide shelter and revitalize neglected structures. Contrasting the city’s prevailing urban dynamics, the utopian vision articulated by these squatting communities seeks to forestall demolition and resist gentrification. This analysis highlights how the linguistic and semiotic landscapes of these buildings underpins the community’s efforts to articulate and project their utopian ideals. Ultimately, the study demonstrates how two distinct semiotic regimes converge toward a shared instrumental and cultural objective: the legitimation and sustained viability of the occupation.
