Extitutional Urbanism

Discussion

VIC:

"The PAH Platform is not the only entity working for the self and collective empowerment around the foreclosure process. From May 2006, citizens began to organize local demonstrations across the country with the “V de Vivienda” initiative. Afterwards, in December 2007, the first citizens who were affected created the Ecuadorian migrant organization “Conade”, which was the precursor of the PAH. February of 2009 was the time when the first local PAH appeared in Barcelona. In addition to the PAH, there are multiple initiatives, associations, research platforms, psychologists, lawyers, social caretakers and body-action platforms, such as Stop Deshaucios, that develop a common objective but not by consensus. Each of them develops their own strategies to function as an assemblage of multiple entities that includes images and symbolic representations, huge social networks and communities of mutual support. Alongside these entities, there are also self-support protocols, negotiations, protests and conflicts of material visibilities, such as the locks of the houses or objects of resistance. Those who are affected by eviction use fridges to stop the police from entering violently or various extitutional spatialities as part of the process ranging from a house eviction to demonstrations in the public space. These extitutional procedures allow all kinds of non-economic capital to be shared such as symbolic, relational, knowledge, care, affects, work, health capital etc. This urban extitutional practice is not supported by funds. Thus, it is a platform for diverse initiatives and communities to interchange those other fragile and precarious capital resources.

The city in this process is a multiple assemblage that performs other production/reproduction or visibility/invisibility modes of the traditional public-private spheres. In this mode, extitutional urbanism is an urbanism made as a coincident system. According to Peter Sloterdijk, “The concept of a coincident system shows the simultaneous condition of the neighborhood and the difference: without this fact it is impossible to understand how contemporary societies emerge.” Also, without this concept we cannot understand the emergence of extitutional urbanism. The citizen housing practices in Madrid are all connected as a coincident system through the extitutional process in several ways. (Figure 04) Firstly, when linked with the bank entities eviction executions, one eviction could be part of other family evictions. If your parents support you with the mortgage process, after evicting you, the bank will evict your parents from their house to pay for the rest of the debt. Secondly, as an evicted citizen you will support other citizens in their specific empowerment processes. Thirdly, your evicted domesticity will be part of an assemblage of many other types of evicted domesticities. The invisible urbanism of evictions localizes each eviction as a singular entity. But if you put together all the evictions in Madrid you would have 11 million square meters of space and more than 500,000 rooms. (Figure 05) Also the number of people evicted is higher than the number of evictions ." (http://viveroiniciativasciudadanas.net/2016/08/29/the-urban-citizens-extitutional-processes-in-madrid/)