Indignant Prefigurative Territories: The Imaginaries and Alternatives of the Indignados Movement

This paper investigates the prefigurative politics of the “indignados” movement in Barcelona. After the first period of square occupations, the movement decentralized into the city’s neighborhoods and focused on the “construction of alternatives”, where appropriation of space was conducive to experimenting and living the movement values, while developing alternatives in the form of self-management of social centres, cooperatives, urban gardens, empty urban plots, ex-factories etc. This paper analyses the development of prefigurative politics since the occupation of the square, and its symbiotic relationship with space, forging the new concept of prefigurative territory. Prefigurative politics produces processual territories that are in tension between the present and the future, and is marked by the spatial production of imaginaries and new types of social relationships grounded in the process of becoming. The radical imaginaries are concretely implemented with a transformational perspective carried through experimentation, demonstration and a vision of proliferation. Drawing from participant observation conducted for three years and more than 80 in-depth interviews and focus groups with movement participants, this paper focuses more particularly on 5 case studies of prefigurative territories, and shows that three main interlinked radical imaginaries are produced by the Indignados movement: autonomy, commons and ecologism/sufficiency. While the indignados movement is not strictly an environmental movement, this paper argues that (and scrutinizes why) the ecologism/sufficiency imaginary, connected to political consumerism, is at the core of the Indignados’ transformational vision and practices.