Geoforum 144 (2023) 103807


                                                                      Contents lists available at ScienceDirect


                                                                                     Geoforum
                                                          journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/geoforum




From the squat to the neighbourhood: Popular infrastructures as
reproductive urban commons
Sergio Ruiz Cayuela a, *, Melissa García-Lamarca b, c
a
  Centre for Agroecology, Water and Resilience, Coventry University, UK
b
  Polytechnic of Turin, Italy
c
  Institut de Ciència i Tecnologia Ambientals (ICTA), Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain




A R T I C L E I N F O                                       A B S T R A C T

Keywords:                                                   We are currently experiencing a manifold crisis of social reproduction which has seriously affected the capacity
Urban commons                                               of popular access to basic goods such as housing, particularly in urban environments. This article seeks to
Popular infrastructures                                     contribute to and expand debates around the urban housing commons by looking at decommodified and
Social reproduction
                                                            collectively managed housing alternatives through the lens of the reproductive commons. Through the case of
Housing
Squatting
                                                            the Bloc La Bordeta squat and the broader commons ecologies in Barcelona’s Sants district, we explore how
Barcelona                                                   complex networks of emancipatory reproductive commons subsist and expand in urban environments, and
                                                            investigate the role of popular infrastructures in this process. We highlight the reproductive dimension of
                                                            housing squats in sustaining radical movements in the city. However, popular support is also crucial in defending
                                                            the housing commons from enclosure and state repression, which creates a mutual interdependence among
                                                            reproductive commons and urban commons ecologies. In looking at the particular difficulties of reproductive
                                                            urban commoning, we explore material and subjective challenges of the reproductive urban commons, and we
                                                            illustrate the importance of looking into and beyond housing and of grounding housing commons’ connections
                                                            and (dis)continuities within the wider territorial and socio-political context. These challenges create differential
                                                            forms of commoning in which participation and engagement are unequal but that, nevertheless, are able to
                                                            support thriving popular infrastructures that become the pillars of the resistance against capitalist urbanisation
                                                            processes.




1. Introduction                                                                                    centers where the rural dispossessed seek opportunities (Dawson 2017).
                                                                                                   Housing is one of the dimensions of social reproduction where this
    The capitalist accumulation process generates a permanent crisis of                            contradiction plays out more evidently, as the ambitions of speculative
reproduction that, in the neoliberal era, has extended to marginalised                             real estate developers clash with the needs of impoverished populations
populations all over the world (Federici 2013). This crisis has very                               in search of a home. However, this tension has been widely contested
tangible effects on the livelihoods of communities, who see their well-                            globally (Gray (ed.) 2018; Vilenica et al. 2019).
being and even their capacity to survive severely affected. In times of                                In the case of Barcelona, which we will use throughout the paper, a
economic crisis, or in the context of socioecological emergency that we                            lively and diverse housing movement has been articulated from below,
are currently witnessing, the crisis of reproduction escalates in reach and                        becoming one of the strongholds of the social movements in the city.
intensity, affecting increasing numbers of people. We have several                                 Neighbourhood unions, local networks, renter’s unions, and housing
recent examples that range from the retreat of the state from its support                          cooperatives are now at the forefront in the struggle against the effects of
for social reproduction in the post-2008 austerity context (Strong 2020)                           a housing market that, despite mitigating attempts from local govern­
to the failure of the healthcare system during the Covid-19 pandemic                               ment, reaps significant profits for the financial real-estate complex and
(Sparke and Williams 2022). Cities not only exacerbate these dynamics,                             increasingly displaces and evicts working class residents (Madden and
but also play a key role in their constitution. Urban environments are                             Marcuse 2016). Within this complex picture, building along the lines of
simultaneously capital sinks where surplus is reinvested, and migration                            work by Gutierrez Sánchez (2022) who brings together questions around



    * Corresponding author at: Flos i Calcat, 6 3-1, 08320 El Masnou, Spain.
      E-mail address: ruiz.cayuela@gmail.com (S. Ruiz Cayuela).

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2023.103807
Received 15 December 2022; Received in revised form 23 May 2023; Accepted 13 June 2023
Available online 20 June 2023
0016-7185/© 2023 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
S. Ruiz Cayuela and M. García-Lamarca                                                                                             Geoforum 144 (2023) 103807


care commons and infrastructure, we focus on the rich network of social          qualitative approach in which the first-hand involvement of the
cooperation and popular infrastructures —the latter being a term we              researcher in struggle is emphasised (Juris 2007). The authors of this
borrow from Catalan grassroots movements that designates community               paper have been active for years in different movement spaces in Bar­
controlled and politically loaded infrastructures that support autono­           celona’s Sants neighbourhood, the city of Barcelona and the metropol­
mous projects and social movements— that contribute to the housing               itan area: the Platform for Mortgage-Affected People (PAH), Obra Social
movement through diverse strategies and from different positionalities.          Barcelona, neighbourhood housing unions and the Popular Self-
Social centres and reclaimed spaces, cooperatives of different kinds,            Managed University (UPA). One of the authors has been directly
popular schools and a wide range of organisations interact and create            involved with the Bloc La Bordeta, located in Sants, Barcelona, since the
mutual interdependencies, becoming commons ecologies (De Angelis                 squatting of the block in 2015, and continues to be during negotiations
2017). Many of the above are not directly connected to housing strug­            with the city to convert the building into public housing. This paper
gles, but they all offer crucial contributions in reproducing the lives of       draws from her militant experience of countless assemblies, meetings,
the people involved, and thus the housing movement. Conversely, self-            gatherings and physical and emotional labour, especially between 2014
organised housing structures are also critical in the articulation of            and 2018 and again in 2022–2023. Moreover, the experience of the
other struggles, and the anti-capitalist movement in general (Dadusc             other author in the housing movement and in the Sants district has
2019; Vasudevan 2014). What we want to emphasise is the centrality of            complemented the autoethnographic approach by adding nuance to the
commoning networks of social reproduction in the challenging of                  context with an external but very close understanding of the commoning
neoliberal urbanisation processes and the articulation of post-capitalist        processes at play. The insights developed in this paper will be informally
alternatives.                                                                    shared with the block inhabitants, and we hope that they can be helpful
    The study of social reproduction originally emerged as an extension,         in the critical next steps that the Bloc La Bordeta is facing.
even a transformation, of Marxist theory that rejected the separation                The paper is structured as follows. Our theoretical framework ex­
between productive and reproductive labour, and highlighted the far              plores the reproductive commons and housing as well as the core chal­
reaching consequences that these dualism has historically had in anti-           lenges and strategies of the urban commons. We introduce our case in
capitalist politics (Vogel 2013; Bhattacharya 2017). Social reproduc­            the subsequent section, providing the socio-historical context for the
tion has been especially helpful to understand the role of patriarchal           emergence of the Bloc La Bordeta in Barcelona’s Sants neighbourhood.
domination of the body in the colonial expansion of capitalism and               The discussion then focuses on the subsistence, expansion and chal­
subsequent imperial projects (Federici 2004), as well as in developing a         lenges of urban reproductive commons, delving into detail specifically
critical conceptualisation of the globalisation of capitalist production         on material dimensions of the legal and political repression; the housing,
that digs into the flows of migrant labour to highlight the material             community and territorial elements; and finally the competing sub­
consequences of neoliberalism across different scales (Katz 2001). These         jectivities in conflict amidst processes of differential commoning. Our
are very relevant insights, as they frame social reproduction as a central       conclusion summarises the main points and arguments and underlines
subject of class struggle, and thus redefine the composition of the rev­         our contribution to the literature.
olutionary subject (De Angelis 2007). Therefore, social reproduction
points towards the invisibilised and devalued labour that is needed to           2. Theoretical framework
keep the capitalist society running, but also to sustain and expand sub­
versive movements (Federici 2018). We delve deeper into the latter               2.1. Reproductive commons and housing
notion of social reproduction as a set of processes, and relations that
form the material basis for the emergence of transformative alternatives.            The concept of social reproduction has been at the centre of mate­
In particular, we bring the social reproduction lens into debates around         rialist feminist debates and has helped to uncover the invisibilised tasks
the urban housing commons, specifically in dialogue with literature that         needed to maintain life, both daily and across generations, which are
has focused on the need for and challenges of decommodifying housing             mostly performed by women and racial minorities (Federici 2020;
from various angles including squatting, non-profit independent hous­            Mitchell, Marston and Katz 2004). Social reproduction scholarship has
ing associations and public-cooperative policy mechanisms (García-               complemented Marxist theory by highlighting the crucial role of
Lamarca, 2015; Huron 2018; Vidal 2019; Ferreri and Vidal 2021). We               reproductive work in producing the most fundamental element in
build on work arguing that housing is a critical dimension of social             capitalist production, labour power, and disentangling the gendered
reproduction that needs to be addressed.                                         division of labour (Dalla Costa and James 1975). The relation between
    In this paper, we seek to contribute to and expand debates around the        capital and social reproduction, though, is far from being linear.
urban housing commons by looking at decommodified and collectively               Whereas the process of capital accumulation is sustained by the appro­
managed housing alternatives through the lens of the reproductive                priation of reproductive work, capitalism also erodes the conditions of
commons. We want to understand the role of housing in the difficult task         social reproduction, incurring in a contradiction that is at the root of
of collectivising reproduction and building commons autonomy in the              periodical crises of care (Fraser 2017). Federici (2020) has framed this
city. By reflecting on the case of the housing squat Bloc La Bordeta and         contradiction as a ‘double character’ of reproductive work, which in
its development over the years, we ask the question: how can complex             capitalism, simultaneously reproduces life and labour power. This
networks of emancipatory reproductive commons subsist and expand in              reformulation has an important political connotation, since placed in a
urban environments, and what challenges do they face? Beyond the fate            different context, social reproduction could potentially contribute to
of a single commons, we are interested in understanding and strategising         “reconstruct the world as a space of nurturing, creativity, and care”
commons expansion as a shift in the balance of forces between commons            (Federici 2020: xvii). Therefore, the struggle over reproductive work is
and capital in a given time and place. Therefore, we will focus on the           crucial in creating the conditions for emancipatory forms of social
internal practices of everyday commoning that sustain the squat, but             organisation and advancing a post-capitalist transition.
also on the interactions and interdependencies that the Bloc has formed              In this context, several authors have recently started speaking of
with other surrounding projects over the years.                                  reproductive (or reproduction) commons, which refer to the collectiv­
    In this article we have used a militant research approach. Militant          isation of social reproduction, taking it away from the market and/or
research designates situated research that seeks to be a form of political       private spaces (Federici 2018). In the current situation, reproductive
intervention (CCC et al. 2012). It is conducted from militant position­          commons are easily co opted by capital and the state. Since the retreat of
alities, and seeks to produce knowledge from particular struggles that           the welfare state in Western countries that brought about the neoliberal
can be useful in advancing social movements (Halvorsen 2015). More               era (a process that has intensified after every economic crisis) many of
specifically, we have based our research on militant ethnography, a              the reproductive functions that the state covered have been transferred

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S. Ruiz Cayuela and M. García-Lamarca                                                                                               Geoforum 144 (2023) 103807


back to the private sphere, in what Ezquerra has characterised as a new           (Chatterton 2016). The city is seen as a site of constant struggle where
enclosure of reproductive commons (2015). This housewifization process,           commons coexist with other forms of social organisation. Urban com­
as Mies (2014) has called it, is not the only possible outcome though.            mons, then, can compensate and even potentially revert uneven urban
Occasionally, communities have come together and have been able to                development processes (Eizenberg 2012). For this transformation to
share the load of these reproductive tasks, reclaiming their own repro­           happen, urban commons need to transcend the niche of private spaces
duction as a commons. In this way, reproductive commons have been                 and progressive circles. (Ruiz Cayuela, 2021) has conceptualised the
able to undo three of the main impacts of enclosure: “the loss of com­            expansion of emancipatory commons as happening simultaneously
munity bonds, the separation of production and reproduction, and the              along two lines that reinforce each other: materiality and subjectivity.
invisibilisation … of reproductive work” (di Masso Tarditti et al. 2022:          The former is mostly concerned with building a material basis that al­
12, own translation). However, reproductive commons do not aim to                 lows social reproduction outside the market logic, and thus leads com­
revert enclosure in order to recover a romanticised pre-capitalist past. As       mons to greater autonomy vis a vis capital. The latter dimension refers to
De Angelis (2017) has demonstrated, reproductive commons form the                 the challenging of capitalist common senses and the development of
material basis that can make commoning a viable alternative to the                commoning subjectivities through prefiguration and radical openness.
market and the state. Therefore, reproductive commons play a key role             An exclusive concern for materiality can lead to the reproduction of
in building commons autonomy and are central in igniting and sus­                 unwanted hierarchies within commons which threaten their viability
taining a social revolution towards emancipatory post-capitalist futures.         from within. Moreover, it can also give way to isolated commons which
    Whereas there is a growing interest in reproductive commons, the              are devoid of their emancipatory potential or, in the words of Stavrides
existing literature addresses them mostly from an abstract conceptual             (2016), collectively privatised spaces. An excessive focus on subjectivity
perspective. Among the scarce empirically based publications that we              will fail to come up with concrete strategies to disentangle our liveli­
have been able to find, the topics of care work and food prevail (see for         hoods from the rule of capital and/or the state (Ruiz Cayuela, 2023). It is
example the collection edited by Ezquerra et al. 2022). While these are           precisely this dual vision that shapes our understanding of successful
certainly important, we situate our intervention as one connecting                commons expansion as the simultaneous building of material autonomy
scholarship on social reproduction and housing commons to deepen                  and commoning subjectivities.
understandings of reproductive commons. The role housing plays as a                   The urban condition, though, poses distinct obstacles to both di­
critical dimension of social reproduction has been explored from femi­            mensions of commons expansion that are particularly relevant for
nist perspectives underlining how mortgage debt under neoliberalism               reproductive commons. Huron (2015) has succinctly delineated what
(re)privatises relations of social reproduction (Roberts 2013), or how            she argues are the two main challenges faced by urban commons: social
debt more broadly intertwines the very infrastructure for life, labour,           alienation and space saturation. The former has to do with the lack of
care and housing (Cavallero and Gago 2021). Marxist approaches                    cohesion typical of urban environments, where inhabitants often do not
emphasise tensions between housing as accumulation and housing as a               share a past and do not necessarily expect to share a future. Therefore,
form of social reproduction (Byrne 2020; Madden and Marcuse 2016).                they are less inclined to collectively reclaim and manage commons than
The role of social reproduction in housing struggles has more recently            existing communities with strong social bonds. The latter challenge re­
taken front and centre stage through analyses of rent strikes (Hughes and         fers to the densely commodified nature of cities, where property lines
Wright 2018; González-Guzmán and Ill-Raga 2023). Considering how                have been thoroughly defined and space is a cherished financial asset.
housing arrangements affect our common senses and subjectivities, as              Thus, there is a fierce competition for urban space among developers,
evidenced by the close connection between the private household model             investors and even institutions, which leaves little possibilities for
and the hegemony of the nuclear family (Aramburu 2015; Lewis 2022),               commons to be reclaimed. These two challenges, though, are not inde­
a growing literature on housing commons has generated very insightful             pendent from each other. As Egerer and Fairbairn (2018) have argued,
debates. These include the role that squatting has played as a way to (re)        the capitalist urbanisation process infiltrates and complicates the in­
appropriate urban space for decommodified social relations rather than            ternal dynamics of urban commons. Whereas space saturation and social
speculation, a process embedded in practices of commoning (Di Felic­              alienation appear as distinct processes that take place at different scales,
iantonio 2017; García-Lamarca, 2015), and the contestation of migra­              both challenges pivot around the formation of unequal cityscapes and
tion governance and border policies (Montagna & Grazioli 2019). A                 cannot then be considered separately. In the following lines, we look
range of publications have considered the production, management,                 within the urban commons literature in search of proposals that can help
financial and political mechanisms to remove and maintain housing                 us to overcome the aforementioned challenges.
outside market dynamics, as well as the challenges these non-                         In order to address the issue of social alienation, it is productive to
commodified housing processes face (Huron 2015, 2018; Joubert and                 understand the forging of subjectivities. Material practices, social re­
Hodkinson 2018; Larsen and Lund Hansen 2015; Miralles Buil 2020).                 lations and spatial arrangements that take place in the constant recon­
Housing commons owned and operated by non-profit, independent                     figuration of cities produce individual and collective subjectivities that
housing associations in Denmark, for example, endure due to their                 can either maintain the prevailing order or support the emergence of
engagement with, against and beyond the state (Vidal 2019). Ferreri and           alternative social orders (Pudup 2008). In exploring the subversive po­
Vidal (2021) detail how public-cooperative policy mechanisms for                  tential of this subjectivation process, Stavrides (2016, 2019) has char­
housing commons have unfolded through collaboration and conflict and              acterised urban common space as a threshold that can potentially ignite
continuous political and social struggles. What role do critical ap­              a process of comparability, translation and power sharing between
proaches to reproduction play here? In the next section we turn our               existing and future commoners. He argues that emancipatory commons
attention to the particularities that reproductive commons located in             are always-in-the-making precarious arrangements, and that their main
urban environments are facing.                                                    potential lies in producing commoning subjectivities. (García-Lamarca,
                                                                                  2017) challenges Stavrides’ Rancierian approach and draws on the anti-
2.2. Challenges and strategies of the urban commons                               eviction movement in Spain to show that the political subjectivation that
                                                                                  takes place through grassroots participation can be sustained over time.
    Urban commons have received a lot of interest in recent years.                She recognises that this process is “neither simple nor stable” (Stavrides
However, the urban has far too often been used as a label that designates         2016, 2019: 433), but can nonetheless transform the way that people see
location, rather than a process that delineates particular challenges and         the world and act within it on a regular basis. (Ruiz Cayuela and
potentialities. In this paper, we draw from politicised views of the urban        Armiero, 2022) bring the reproductive dimension to the fore in high­
commons that highlight their crucial role in forging socio-spatial re­            lighting the potential of material practices of care and solidarity in
lations that can potentially advance a post-capitalist transition                 creating commoning subjectivities. In their opinion, “the labour, the

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S. Ruiz Cayuela and M. García-Lamarca                                                                                             Geoforum 144 (2023) 103807


interaction, and the multiple relations forged” (Stavrides 2016, 2019:           cooperative, the author acknowledges that while all co-op members can
101) during the collectivisation of social reproduction have the potential       access and govern their shared material commons, “competing personal
to challenge hegemonic common senses. It is through commoning, they              and familial obligations, and health and childcare concerns complicate
assert, that commoners are created. As Arbell et al. (2020) have                 how individual members understand and engage with these resources”
demonstrated, similar patterns can be observed in the dynamics of                (Noterman 2016: 439). There is no concise answer to the question of
cooperative houses in the UK. However, they stress that competing                how “moments and threads of differential commoning weave together to
subjectivities can coexist within the community, generating a tension            form an ongoing, flexible means of managing the commons” (Noterman
between minimalist (pragmatic) and maximalist (transformational) vi­             2016: 446), but opening up considerations of urban commons in this
sions of the housing cooperatives. Commoners’ subjectivities and aspi­           way helps us grasp with the research question driving this paper: how
rations, they argue, vary over time; partially in response to change in          can complex networks of emancipatory reproductive commons subsist
state regulations and developments in the private market. In fact,               and expand in urban environments, and what challenges do they face?
regardless of the internal logics of any specific commons, they are almost
always entangled with the state and the market, since these “influence           3. Bloc La Bordeta: Emergence and socio-historical context
the subjectivities of commoners reproducing commons” (De Angelis
2017: 102).                                                                           In 2007, before the sudden demise of Spain’s decade-long building
    To address the challenge of urban space saturation, Williams has             boom, the private real estate developer Nyala 2006 SL began to erect a
downplayed the importance of property regimes while highlighting the             new residential building in Barcelona’s working-class La Bordeta
relational and performative nature of urban commoning, which “flows              neighbourhood in the Sants district. The bourgeois Riera-Marsà family
throughout the urban and beyond” (2018: 24). We share with her a                 who owned Nyala 2006 SL saw a clear profit-making opportunity in
dynamic conception of the commons and agree that the categories of               building for upper-middle income groups in this strategically located
public and private (and common) are fluid, complex and overlapping               site just a few streets away from Plaça Espanya. But the 2008 financial-
(Blomley 2005). However, we believe it is important to emphasise the             real estate crisis hit before the developer could obtain certificates of
material basis of all commons, but particularly those that contribute to         occupancy and sell the building’s 12 flats. Nyala 2006 SL became a shell
social reproduction. For reproductive commons to become a viable                 company as its debt was repossessed by the Mallorcan-based bank that
alternative they need to acquire a certain material autonomy, and not be         held its development loan. While the housing block was squatted in late
entirely subject to market dynamics and the cycles of representative             2011 by activists from the 15M plaza occupations, generating a form of
politics (De Angelis 2017). The ways for achieving this are very diverse         commons to house evicted families, the police evicted them after just a
and context dependent. In examining agroecological food provision in             few weeks. The building lay empty for over three years, during which
urban environments, for example, (Ruiz Cayuela, 2023) has observed               time unemployment, mortgage foreclosure and eviction rose at un­
how consumer cooperatives are able to knit extensive commoning net­              precedented rates. Meanwhile, the Spanish financial system was rescued
works that reterritorialise urban commons beyond city borders. The               with over 62 billion euros in public funds, conditioned by the estab­
particular spatial characteristics of housing, though, make delocalisa­          lishment of a bad bank, the public–private asset management company
tion impossible and city inhabitants have used a variety of strategies to        known as the SAREB (Byrne 2015), and accompanied by legal trans­
circumvent the scarcity of available land. Squatting is probably the most        formations to stimulate a new cycle of residential investment (Gil García
iconic practice to reclaim and decommodify housing in urban environ­             and Martínez-López 2023). As the housing block’s debt and physical
ments, as use value is seized and exchange value rejected (Holm and              structure was absorbed into the SAREB, it stood as an example of the
Kuhn 2011; Huron, 2018; Martínez 2020; Milligan 2016, Squatting                  ‘new ruins’ of urban vacancy (O’Callaghan & Di Feliciantonio 2021).
Europe Kollective, 2013; Vasudevan 2014). Work theorising squatting              Despite demands from housing movements, the SAREB rejected its po­
and urban commons underlines how the latter is created by reclaiming             litical agency to use this and the hundreds of thousands of other empty
spaces from speculation and how commoning practices emerge from                  buildings it owned for social housing to alleviate the massive housing
collective living and being as both a means and a goal ((García-Lamarca,         crisis plaguing Spain.
2015); Di Feliciantonio 2017; Polanska & Weldon 2020). The develop­                   In 2014, the Barcelona branch of the Platform for Mortgage-Affected
ment of public-common partnerships has recently emerged as another               People (PAH) relocated its assembly to the La Bordeta neighbourhood,
productive approach. Building alliances with the local state has also            just one street away from the building. Responding to an upsurge in PAH
become a central strategy to alleviate the high pressure on urban space.         members needing a home due to rental and squatting evictions, as part
In the case of Barcelona, there has recently been an upsurge in the              of PAH Barcelona’s sixth anniversary festivities the building was tar­
number of housing cooperatives that are accessing land (and even                 geted precisely because, in the eyes of the movement, it was already
existing buildings) through long-term leases with the city council (Fer­         public due to its “rescue” by the public purse and location in the SAREB’s
reri and Vidal 2021). Whereas these commons-public partnerships                  portfolio of “assets”. Thus the building was squatted and baptised Bloc
usually allow commons to assemble material infrastructure, the long-             La Bordeta in February 2015. Nine adults - largely women - and four
term outcomes are difficult to predict, and can range from enhance­              children with no other housing alternatives moved in, reflecting the
ment of their political potential to cooptation (Bianchi et al. 2022).           leadership of women in defending urban commons from enclosure
    In these complex and often precarious arrangements, it is obvious            (Gillespie et al. 2018). With the support of the PAH Barcelona Obra
that commoning is permanently contested not only by enclosure, but               Social commission, whose role is to strategise the approach to squatting
also from within (Bresnihan and Byrne 2015). People have differing               and support current and future squats through the movement, a variety
degrees of dependence and different capacities and motivations to                of actions were taken. These included revising and agreeing upon a
contribute to commons, as well as often deeply rooted subjectivities and         written set of norms about collective living, adapted from other PAHs
ways of understanding the world. A productive articulation of these              with occupied housing blocks; informing neighbours and the broader
intricate and sometimes contradictory practices that unevenly                    public about political and everyday dimensions of the Bloc La Bordeta;
contribute to consolidating commoning alternatives of social repro­              and approaching private and public authorities to turn the building into
duction is what Noterman (2016) has called differential commoning.               public housing, where residents would pay a social rent at the European
Differential commoning recognises that there are diverse sets of                 standard of maximum 30% of their income. While the Riera-Marsà
communally-oriented practices that occur at different times and places           family’s development debt was now managed by the SAREB, each used
in the community, perhaps shaped by extenuating circumstances and                the other as scapegoats to avoid negotiations with PAH Barcelona.
short-lived, but that nonetheless all contribute to its flourishing. In          Similarly, the Catalan government washed their hands of the issue and
exploring the commoning practices that sustain a manufactured housing            sent PAH negotiators to the city government, where in 2016 then again

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S. Ruiz Cayuela and M. García-Lamarca                                                                                               Geoforum 144 (2023) 103807


more intensely in 2021 onwards multiple complex and contradictory                 overexploitation and relentless disciplining that took place in the fac­
meetings took place, challenging largely due to the positionality of              tories through mutual aid and self-organisation (Ealham 2005). At first,
former PAH Barcelona members now in the Barcelona en Comú minority                they developed workers’ societies and consumer cooperatives, and
government (2015–2023) and political disagreements about strategy.                eventually they created complex networks of cooperation that were able
The latter, in 2016, revolved mainly around the PAH’s political demand            to support the livelihoods of tens of thousands of families (Dalmau Torvà
for a free right-of-use lease of the building from the SAREB to the city of       & Miró Acedo 2010). These emerging popular infrastructures granted
Barcelona —following the logic that billions of public funds had already          affordable access to food, education, housing or cultural activities, and
been paid into the SAREB, so “the SAREB is ours” as the movement claim            contributed to building workers’ autonomy until the fascist takeover of
states— and the city of Barcelona responding that the PAH needed to be            1939. Collective organisation of social reproduction through co­
realistic about what could be achieved, since the PAH was not at its peak         operatives and beyond was crucial for shifting the balance of forces that
moment. When negotiations were restarted in 2021, the city continu­               culminated in the revolution of 1936 (Camps-Calvet et al. 2022). These
ously stated that Bloc La Bordeta was being incorporated into an                  historical experiences illustrate very well that commoning and social
agreement with the SAREB and proposed coordinated campaigns to                    reproduction trends are closely connected with particular socio-
make the news public, despite not having a written agreement with the             historical contexts. The anarchist revolution was enabled and sus­
SAREB. Such maneuverings made many Bloc La Bordeta residents                      tained by a network of reproductive commons that the nearly 40-year
clearer in their idea of continuously grounding the building as and               Francoist dictatorship actively sought to destroy.
within popular infrastructures in Sants, which we explain shortly, and                However, the repression was not fully successful, as the radical
reinforced the need for self-management, mutual aid and collective                character of the Sants district re-materialised through new popular in­
struggle.                                                                         frastructures initiated by neighbourhood struggles in the 1970s. In a
    Thanks to continuous collective support and pressure, backed by               period of grassroots action across Barcelona, mobilisations in Sants
Sants’s vibrant radical community, in 2015 a precautionary eviction was           ensured that spaces earmarked for real estate speculation (e.g. Espanya
stopped and in June 2016 a penal court case was dismissed in favour of            Industrial park, Vapor Vell) or to be destroyed in the name of trans­
the accused Bloc La Bordeta residents. These legal processes served to            portation infrastructure (plaça de Sants, Cotxeres) were protected for
unite residents and build collective practices of struggle and care, both         local use (Federació d’Associacions de Veïns i Veïnes de Barcelona
among residents and between residents, other housing movement                     2010). 1973 was also when the decades-long struggle for neighbourhood
members and a broader activist support network in Sants and beyond.               green space, infrastructure and housing started over the site of Can
Bloc La Bordeta’s relation with the housing movement has shifted and              Batlló, a historic textile factory covering over 10,000 m2. Thanks to
complexified, as we will describe in subsequent subsections, when it first        intensified militancy and neighbourhood support in the late 2000s,
left PAH Barcelona in early 2017 then became embedded in the Sants                including a campaign planning to squat the space if the city didn’t take
housing union (Grup d’Habitatge de Sants, GHAS), which reinforced                 action by 11 June 2011, the Can Batlló community-run entity won a
efforts towards transformational forms of/for inhabitation and social             formal land use transfer signed by the city of Barcelona. Since that time,
reproduction more broadly.                                                        Can Batlló has hosted hundreds of initiatives, making possible what Can
    Bloc La Bordeta can be seen as an emblematic and long standing                Batlló comrades term “a popular and transformative urbanism from
example of a broader re-energised squatting movement in the context of            below” (Can Batlló 2023). Another key popular infrastructure in Sants is
a housing crisis exacerbated by the 2008 global financial and mortgage            the self-managed social centre Can Vies squatted in 1997 by neigh­
repossession crises. Within the PAH, squatting properties that had                bourhood youth committed to transform and build a more just society
become empty due to mortgage repossessions and evictions became a                 through cooperation, solidarity, mutual aid and respect (Alcantará
widely adopted strategy to solve an immediate need for housing and to             2014). Can Vies has been recognised to have triggered the development
seize homes from the financial sector for living rather than speculation.         of Barcelona’s rich social and solidarity cooperative movement, with
Growing from deeper roots in Barcelona’s libertarian squatting practices          Sants home to over 50 coops, the most in all of Barcelona’s neighbour­
from the 1990s, this “new wave” of squatting was initiated in Montcada i          hoods (Mumburu and Blanchar 2014). While more sites can be
Reixac, a city in the Barcelona metropolitan region, in 2011 when a               mentioned, these are the main popular infrastructures alongside and
family facing eviction decided to squat their own property with support           through which the Bloc La Bordeta has subsisted and been sustained.
of the PAH (Colau & Alemany 2012). In the decade since, over 60 full
housing blocks and hundreds of individual flats have been squatted by             4. Popular infrastructures as reproductive urban commons
PAH members across Spain, a significant proportion of these located in
Catalonia. Collective mixed methods research carried out by Obra Social               In recent decades urban real estate has become one of the most
Barcelona (2018) has illustrated the extreme precarity of households              precious assets for private developers worldwide, which has severely
who squat in Catalonia, which depicts a picture representative of dy­             affected the capacity of subversive movements to subsist in the city.
namics in the Bloc La Bordeta. Out of 626 households squatting in                 Whereas the cooperatives of a hundred years ago were able to purchase
Catalonia in 2017, 93% earned less than 1000 euros per month and only             properties at market value in central and strategic locations, it is almost
39% held paid employment. Of these 39% who were working, 78% had                  unthinkable that something similar could happen today. In the light of
temporary contracts or worked under the table, while of those that do             these global trends, squatting has emerged as a crucial strategy for
not have paid work, half earn unemployment payments or a pension                  reclaiming vacant buildings and lots that have been used for a variety of
while the other half do not receive any government benefits. A highly             purposes. The Sants urban landscape is thus dotted with autonomous
gendered picture also emerged, with over half of survey respondents               islands that form a network of reclaimed spaces, commonly referred to
being female and children living in 55% of squatted homes. In this                as popular infrastructures. This term, which has recently become a
context of extreme precarity, the lived neighbourhood dimension is a              central theme of praxis within the Catalan grassroots, designates in­
fundamental element to understand the politics of inhabitation and the            frastructures used by social movements that challenge market logic and
process of commoning to move beyond mere survival towards building                offer protection from the threats of cooptation and repression usually
new networks and practices of urban living.                                       associated with the figure of the state.
    Sants has a long tradition of workers’ self-organisation that is                  Popular infrastructures are the foundations on which commons
fundamental to understanding the historic-geographic roots of the Bloc            ecologies thrive, since they provide alternative spaces where social re­
La Bordeta and wider emancipatory networks of reproductive commons.               lations are mediated by value practices such as solidarity and mutual aid
During the intense class struggle of the late 19th and early 20th cen­            instead of market exchange. They are spaces where social reproduction
turies, local workers were able to successfully challenge the                     can be subverted and channeled into the formation of emancipatory

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S. Ruiz Cayuela and M. García-Lamarca                                                                                                 Geoforum 144 (2023) 103807


alternatives (Federici 2020). Popular infrastructures contribute to sus­            expansion process, since the network does not rely exclusively on a
taining and expanding urban commons in two main ways. First, they                   particular popular infrastructure. If, for instance, the Bloc La Bordeta
fulfill critical material needs of local communities such as space for              were to be eventually evicted, it would certainly be a hard blow for the
hosting meetings, assemblies and events, providing food and green                   local anti-capitalist movement, who would see one of the neighbour­
spaces, or developing self-organised popular workshops and related                  hood’s popular infrastructures gone. However, the many autonomous
educational projects. If we acknowledge that commons have a material                projects that are currently based at the Bloc could resort to other local
basis, popular infrastructures are crucial reproductive spaces that allow           popular infrastructures to which they are already connected such as Can
urban commons to subsist and eventually expand in the face of enclo­                Batlló or Can Vies. Moreover, the inhabitants of the block would
sure. Second, popular infrastructures are messy spaces where com­                   certainly have the support of GHAS to find housing alternatives, either
moning practices coexist with capitalist common senses and domination               by putting pressure on the city council or by carrying out a new occu­
structures in a performative process that tends towards the prefiguration           pation. This conceptualisation of commons ecologies helps us to rethink
of emancipatory social relations. Therefore, despite their contested na­            the outcome of urban commoning processes in Sants. The takeover of
ture, popular infrastructures have the potential, under the right condi­            reclaimed spaces, some of which become popular infrastructures, is
tions, to spark commoning subjectivation processes.                                 certainly crucial in reproducing the local commons ecology. From a
    In the case of Sants, a particularly important type of popular infra­           political perspective that aims to shift the balance of forces between
structure have been housing squats, since they have in many cases                   commons and capital and foster the expansion of emancipatory alter­
mitigated gentrification and allowed militants and community members                natives, though, the commons ecology itself is the most important
to remain in the neighourhood. Squatting has not only fulfilled a crucial           outcome. The myriad commoning processes that are part of the daily
role in reproducing the livelihoods of squatters, but also in sustaining            lives of local communities are eventually being entangled in forms of
radical spaces locally and grounding them in the locality. Equally                  mutual interdependence that transcend the importance of any particular
important, though, has been their role in stimulating cross pollination             space. The Sants-La Bordeta commons ecology, thus, is much more than
and coordination among movements that have fostered the emergence                   a bunch of squats, social centres and coops. It is a partially autonomous
of particular identities and subjectivities linked to the neighbourhood as          and self-reproducing network of people, resources, knowledges and af­
a stronghold of the anti-capitalist movement. This constellation of                 fections that prefigure new ways of inhabiting the city.
reclaimed spaces has become a de facto network of reproductive com­
mons that has allowed the expansion and reinforcement of a radical                  5. Challenges of urban reproductive commons
culture that aims towards post-capitalist emancipation.
    The case of the Bloc La Bordeta exemplifies very well this mutual                   As we have underlined, popular reproductive commons attempt to
dependence between wider social movements and particular squats, and                subsist and expand in hostile urban environments. In this section we
the reproductive moments that emerge along their interaction. The Bloc              explore the three main material, territorial and social challenges that the
was formally affiliated first with PAH Barcelona (2015–2017) and later              Bloc La Bordeta has faced as a reproductive urban commons embedded
connected to the Grup d’Habitatge de Sants (GHAS) from 2017 to pre­                 in a wider commons ecology.
sent. Many of the inhabitants of the block have actively participated in
these wider spaces of the housing movement, meaning that they have                  5.1. Facing the state apparatus: legal and police repression
been involved regularly attending meetings, assemblies, providing
mutual aid and putting their bodies on the line to stop evictions. The                  Due to the densely commodified nature of cities, where property
Bloc also currently hosts assemblies and activities of the GHAS, and its            lines have been thoroughly defined and space is a cherished financial
influence extends beyond the housing movement. Aside from GHAS, the                 asset, the main threat to reproductive popular infrastructures is mate­
Bloc’s ground floor is home to a social centre where several self-                  rial. Most urgent is the threat of eviction, which all housing movements
organised projects thrive. These have included a popular educational                across Barcelona, Catalonia and the Spanish state fight daily by putting
space for kids up to twelve years old, a language school for adults, a              dozens of bodies in front of doorways of households facing eviction so
youth group, a food network, a feminist network against sexual violence             that the court order can’t be delivered by the judicial committee and/or
and a labour group (Garcia 2022). The daily commoning processes that                police can’t access the property. While housing occupied through
take place among the squatters, then, are crucial in reproducing the                movements, be they entire blocks like Bloc La Bordeta or individual
social movements of the neighbourhood in two main ways. First, by                   flats, have more negotiating power and are often able to stop the first
offering a household to people who are generally involved in self-                  few attempts at eviction, this tends to be a politics of postponement (Roy
organised spaces, and that would not be able to stay in the Sants dis­              2017) where these commoned spaces are often eventually seized back by
trict if required to access market-priced housing. Second, by reclaiming            financial entities with the support of the state. The fact that over half a
and maintaining a physical infrastructure that would otherwise be very              million evictions have taken place across Spain between 2008 and 2017
difficult to access in such a hostile urban environment.                            (Observatori DESC 2018) illustrate the virulence and impact of this
    The reproductive process, though, also works the other way around.              challenge of staying put and just surviving.
As we will see in the next sections, social movements and community                     The threat of eventual eviction was certainly looming in the horizon
networks have played a key role in defending the block from enclosure.              when members of the Bloc La Bordeta were on trial in 2016. Whereas the
This mutual interdependence is a key aspect of the reproductive urban               legal process can seem to be very isolating, the successful outcome ob­
commons, and gives way to the formation of urban commons ecologies                  tained by the Bloc La Bordeta was grounded in the support of a wider
where people are able to access many aspects of social reproduction                 commons ecology. This is mostly visible in two aspects. First, the
outside market logic. Whereas their scale is still limited and they are still       grassroots legal counseling and advice provided by the PAH. By being
far from becoming an alternative for a majority of the Sants population,            part of a wider housing movement, the inhabitants of the Bloc were able
these networks prefigure a partially post-capitalist society and can                to benefit from the expertise forged by other members that had been
potentially spark the formation of commoning subjectivities (Stavrides              through similar processes and were familiar with the legal codes rele­
2016).                                                                              vant for these cases - ultimately lawyers and the formal judicial system
    The articulation of popular infrastructures, community groups and               provide no help due to the “unlawful” nature of squatting and housing
social movements into a commons ecology is a very important step to­                disobedience more broadly. Second, the public support from a wide
wards consolidating the development of emancipatory alternatives in                 range of collectives within and beyond Barcelona’s housing movement.
the neighbourhood. It is precisely the recurrent connections and in­                These included immigrant rights movements, cultural associations, self-
teractions among the different nodes that adds resilience to the common             organised social centres, indignant firemen, an unemployed persons

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S. Ruiz Cayuela and M. García-Lamarca                                                                                                 Geoforum 144 (2023) 103807


assembly, a cooperative bookstore and a range of “waves” (mareas) that             were not rooted in territorial claims to a neighbourhood.
grew out of the 15M plaza occupations organised around social concerns                  Yet in the subsequent decade, especially post-2015, the nature of
including pensions, health care and education, among others. With                  housing struggles changed dramatically, from vast numbers facing
symbolic actions and viral messages of support they sought to show                 mortgage foreclosure and eviction to a more complex configuration of
support to the Bloc La Bordeta and build a favourable climate before the           rental and squatting evictions amidst rampant gentrification, expulsions
2016 trial took place, trying to influence the final verdict through               from the city and deepened labour precarity. Reflecting a need for ter­
popular pressure. These actions illustrate the implicit understanding of           ritorial rootedness, neighbourhood housing unions and assemblies
mutual dependency of many urban commons and social movements in                    emerged across Barcelona in 2017 to address localized housing and
Barcelona that stood up to defend the Bloc.                                        social reproduction needs rooted in place (Lira and March 2021). This
    A second threat to reproductive infrastructures is the repression of           has also been reflected through the use of language in housing move­
housing movements by the state apparatus, manifested through trials of             ments, where the term “neighbour”, more specifically vecina in its
key figures and enormous fines levied on individuals in housing move­              feminine form, became commonly used by housing unions and assem­
ments through the so-called national Gag Law (Ley Mordaza). The latter             blies across the city, indicating a shift to a focus on local spaces and
was adopted by the conservative Popular Party in 2015 as a law to                  relations of everyday life (Rivera Blanco et al. 2021). Since the prob­
protect “public safety” in order to crackdown on the freedom of speech             lematics at stake include exorbitant rent levels in general, racism in the
and provide police with more power, enabling them to fine people                   rental sector, the impossibility of youth emancipation from family
hundreds of euros for subjectively defined actions deemed to show a lack           homes, increasing street homelessness and so forth, vecinas encapsulates
of respect or disobedience (Larios 2022). Housing movements across                 the diversity of grounded neighbourhood-level experiences and the need
Catalonia launched a campaign to pressure the government to cancel                 for a combative yet unified struggle (Rivera Blanco et al. 2021). And
fines reaching over €206,000 for 351 sanctions and to ban the use of riot          demands from neighbourhood housing unions to regularise squatting
police at evictions (Garcia 2021). Thanks to this pressure, in 2022 laxer          focus precisely on the right to stay put and combating the logics of
criteria were introduced to apply the Law and some fines were being                expulsion that plague the city, and promote other dimensions of social
dismissed, but movements still demand the removal of the entire law                reproduction grounded in place.
(VilaWeb 2022). In late 2015, the inhabitants of the Bloc received the                  These differences in part have to do with the territorial focus of these
visit of the judicial delegation that, backed by the local police, tried to        strategies within the housing movement. They furthermore reflect ten­
enforce the eviction. However, they had to face a crowd formed by PAH              sions between the importance of collectivised social reproduction pro­
members and local supporters from other squats and social movements,               cesses and labour through networks and relations built over time (di
who were able to stop it. Since it was the first eviction attempt, the             Masso Tarditti et al. 2022) and having four walls and a roof to call home
minimal conflict policy of local police forces was crucial in the successful       despite not necessarily being rooted in existing broader social connec­
defense of the block. Patrols deployed in evictions tend not to enforce            tions. As the founding PAH, PAH Barcelona has always played a key role
them when faced with potential contestation, especially when it is the             regionally in Catalonia and in national PAH coordination across the
first or second eviction attempt, and usually riot police forces are               Spanish territory, and in turn this has been reflected in their focus at the
required in the third or fourth eviction attempts to realize expulsions.           city, regional and national scales. This territorial scope of actuation
    The Bloc’s response to evictions and the repression of housing                 partly explains the success of the PAH, which spread like wildfire across
movements has a clear common denominator, which is the importance                  Catalonia and the Spanish state during the 2011 movement of the
of a wider commoning network in defending urban reproductive com­                  squares, with over 250 nodes existing at the end of the decade. On the
mons. When the Bloc La Bordeta was facing critical threats that                    other hand, the neighbourhood housing unions emerging since 2016
compromised its subsistence, many popular infrastructures and social               focus sometimes exclusively at the very local level, which enables a
movements stepped forward in different ways, recognising the mutual                weaving of grounded networks, strongly rooted affective relations and
interdependence at play: whereas the anti-capitalist movements rely on             new forms of social reproduction. Many of these unions, for instance,
reproductive commons such as the Bloc, these rely on wider commoning               have a scope broader than housing and include self-organised educa­
networks to defend them from enclosure. This relation, though, is not              tional projects, women’s groups or mutual aid food networks.
given nor can be taken for granted. Instead, it is always-in-the-making,                Bloc La Bordeta, as well as the PAH Barcelona Obra Social commis­
contested and context-dependent, as we will see subsequently.                      sion, found themselves at the crux of this territorial tension, as vecinas of
                                                                                   the bloc became more and more rooted in local reproductive commons
5.2. Housing, community and territorial considerations                             and generated deeper roots to place. Similarly, the PAH Barcelona Obra
                                                                                   Social commission argued for the importance of not accepting rehousing
    Perhaps the most significant challenge that housing squats as                  elsewhere in the city but rather maintaining occupied spaces to ensure
reproductive commons face are the deep territorial contradictions and              working class occupation of gentrifying neighbourhoods, as exemplified
tensions between the predominant consideration of a home as a                      in the struggle for Bloc La Jahnela in the Gràcia neighbourhood. While
container with four walls versus a home as a node in a wider network of            this argument of staying put and fighting for the Bloc La Bordeta was
community and reproductive relations. During the time that the Bloc La             eventually supported within PAH Barcelona, the vecinas of the Bloc
Bordeta was squatted and officially affiliated with PAH Barcelona,                 wanted to take the further step of opening the ground floor space of the
conflicts emerged around the role that squatting should play within PAH            building, up until that point unused, for autonomous and open neigh­
Barcelona’s broader strategy, in the context of the sharp increase in              borhood use. Despite being discussed in more than one assembly,
rental evictions, squatting evictions and other types of housing emer­             opening up the ground floor space of the Bloc La Bordeta was not sup­
gencies. These conflicts occurred particularly between the Obra Social             ported by PAH Barcelona. The action ultimately (unilaterally) taken by
commission, which oversaw the squatting strategy and process, and a                vecinas to open the space in early 2017 constituted a practical and po­
component of PAH Barcelona’s leadership. One part of the root of this              litical break with PAH Barcelona’s strategy of occupation, and also
conflict came from the original logic behind rehousing people who were             spurred internal conflicts. This brings us to the challenge of working
squatting bank owned housing. As formulated by PAH Barcelona in                    with people from different geographic, cultural and political places,
2011, when foreclosed families who squatted bank owned housing                     what Huron (2015) calls working with strangers.
negotiated a social rent contract, to be set at no more than 30% of a
household’s income, the negotiation was open to rehousing elsewhere                5.3. Competing subjectivities in conflict: differential commoning
and did not involve keeping the home. In other words, ultimately having
a roof over one’s head was deemed to be most important, and demands                   PAH Barcelona’s Obra Social commission, in its active period from

                                                                               7
S. Ruiz Cayuela and M. García-Lamarca                                                                                              Geoforum 144 (2023) 103807


the end of 2014 to 2017, had the task of supporting housing squats of            When material practices of care and solidarity are not so visible and
individual flats and entire empty buildings owned by banks through a             present, as for example during the struggle against eviction, this can
collective and transparent process. Yet due to different political visions       have negative consequences for the collectivised social reproduction
and broader conflicts around the role of squatting in PAH Barcelona              processes as they are placed on the back burner or even abandoned.
these lines of responsibility and power were broken, as a component of
PAH Barcelona’s leadership claimed decision-making power over who                6. Conclusions
could move into the Bloc La Bordeta in particular. This led to several
clashes between the Bloc inhabitants, the PAH Barcelona Obra Social                  The Bloc La Bordeta has engaged in an expansive form of commoning
commission and PAH Barcelona. In late 2016, for example, a person                over the years, which is mostly visible in its connection with the housing
from a city adjacent to Barcelona was relocated to the Bloc La Bordeta, a        movement and the opening of a social centre in the ground floor of the
unilateral decision made by part of PAH Barcelona and approved in an             building. In this way, the Bloc has become a reproductive urban com­
assembly without consulting the Obra Social commission nor Bloc La               mons that has contributed greatly to the sustainability and expansion of
Bordeta residents. This person, who did not know the idiosyncrasy of the         a wider commons ecology in the neighbourhood and beyond. The Bloc
neighbourhood and the block itself, had several conflicts with in­               has thus partially challenged social reproduction under capitalism by
habitants of the Bloc, who saw the situation as an inference of the PAH in       offering collective responses to the problem of housing. Reproduction is
the internal managing of their reproductive commons.                             no longer an individual matter hidden in the private sphere and medi­
    Thus due to these long-running and deep-seated conflicts, shortly            ated through the market. Conversely, social reproduction is based on
after opening the ground floor space of the building, the active Bloc La         mutual interdependence and the constant feeding of community bonds
Bordeta residents decided to disassociate the building from PAH Bar­             in public (or common) spaces. Thus, despite its conflicts and contra­
celona and to become a self-managed housing block. Largely made up of            dictions, the Bloc La Bordeta has become what local grassroots move­
women and children, both immigrant and Spanish, Bloc La Bordeta                  ments term a popular infrastructure that effectively reverts processes of
residents declared themselves to be organised neighbours (vecinas                urban enclosure and hints towards emancipatory forms of social
organizadas) (Gillespie et al. 2018). Yet we pointedly say that “active          reproduction.
residents” decided to disassociate the Bloc from PAH Barcelona because               Housing squats driven by organised housing movements fighting for
a few months earlier, the unwarranted entrance of new residents created          the right to housing for all are thus popular infrastructures that can
tensions, deep disagreements and visible conflicts among them. This was          potentially become reproductive urban commons connected to wider
the root of subsequent unequal participation in the Bloc La Bordeta’s day        commons ecologies and/or social movements. When this happens, re­
to day activities which was also shaped by individual background and             lations of mutuality and interdependence are articulated in which
personal contexts in forming dynamics of differential commoning                  reproductive moments take place in both directions, as in the case of the
(Noterman 2016). Despite the many asymmetries formed and performed               Bloc La Bordeta. On the one hand, the block provides a group of people
in the process of differential commoning, the reproductive character of          who are generally active in the local movements with a dwelling space,
the Bloc was maintained, including the Bloc’s engagement in a broader            and it also allows them to remain in place and keep the longstanding
housing movement undergoing reconfiguration across Barcelona due to              community bonds alive. Moreover, the Bloc offers a partially open
the emergence of neighbourhood unions. In this sense, during this brief          common infrastructure that is used by community groups and social
period between the dissasociation from the PAH and the emergence of              movements. On the other hand, the wider network in which the Bloc is
housing unions in Sants and beyond, the Bloc La Bordeta provides an              embedded is crucial in providing social legitimacy and defending it from
example of a complex urban commons somewhat in limbo between what                processes of enclosure backed by the state. These urban commons
is often characterised as a dichotomy between emancipatory commons               ecologies resemble the cracks described by Holloway (2010). They
and collectively privatised spaces (Stavrides 2016). Such conflicts,             prefigure ways of inhabiting the city partially detached from the logic of
occurring across social relations more broadly, also underline the               capital and, being grounded on reproductive commons, offer viable al­
complexity in practice of commoning at multiple scales.                          ternatives to live outside the hegemonic economic spaces (De Angelis
    This process of becoming a more conflictive commoning housing                2017).
project in contexts of collective struggle against extreme marginalisation           The challenges posed by Huron (2015) are certainly relevant for
and poverty also illustrates the complexity of transformations in                sustaining housing commons as popular reproductive infrastructures,
subjectivity and materiality, and how they operate in interconnected             and they play out in different forms. The vicious competition for urban
and non-linear directions. After disassociating the Bloc La Bordeta from         space, for example, has very material consequences in that commoners
PAH Barcelona, many residents who had spent years engaged in the PAH             end up facing the legal and police forces deployed by the state to defend
and more recently integrated into the vibrant activist community in              the right to private property. The urban alienation typically experienced
Sants clearly saw the need to continue building self-management pro­             by many in modern urban environments is also felt in the conflicts and
cesses to ensure the collective care of the building and of each other           tensions that arise from the interaction of competing subjectivities and
(autogestión). On the other hand, the newer residents unilaterally              diverse vital contexts in a particular space–time. These clashes generate
admitted into the Bloc La Bordeta by PAH Barcelona did not have a long-          a form of differential commoning (Noterman 2016) that, nevertheless, is
term connection to movements nor vision of housing and social trans­             able to sustain the Bloc as a reproductive commons. We want to com­
formation; they just wanted a stable, dignified place to live and didn’t         plement Huron’s work, though, with a third critical challenge that we
feel invested in any broader collective process. Winning the penal court         have observed the Bloc has faced over the years: its connection with the
case in 2016 and stopping future threats of evictions —at least for the          wider territorial and socio-political context. This challenge originates in
immediate future— can be considered in a material sense to have                  wider political trends and aspirations which, grounded in specific socio-
consolidated Bloc La Bordeta as an urban commons by keeping it out of            historical contexts, articulate different understandings of home and
the pathways of capitalist circulation and speculation driven by the             community. Its consequences are very tangible since they directly affect
SAREB. But as this external “threat” was (temporarily) removed, so was           the squatters that populate the Bloc and pose a critical challenge for the
the unity it brought to more collective forms of social reproduction to          sustainability and expansion of reproductive urban commons.
maintain the building and its residents. On the one hand we see                      In this paper, we have stressed the need to look beyond housing
competing forms of subjectivities between transformative mindsets and            when conceptualising housing commons. Instead, we call for consid­
just “getting by” within the status quo, as Arbell et al. (2020) argue. On       ering the articulation of particular commons within neighbourhood (and
the other hand, however, we also see changing and non-linear sub­                beyond) networks of support, in order to understand their emancipatory
jectivities that fluctuate as the Bloc faces different material threats.         potential and their reproductive role in wider commons ecologies.

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S. Ruiz Cayuela and M. García-Lamarca                                                                                                                          Geoforum 144 (2023) 103807


Territorial and socio-historic contexts also play a key role in under­                           Chatterton, P., 2016. Building transitions to post-capitalist urban commons. Trans. Inst.
                                                                                                      Br. Geogr. 41 (4), 403–415.
standing the reproductive dimension of the housing commons and their
                                                                                                 Colau, A., Alemany, A., 2012. Vidas hipotecadas: De la burbuja immobiliaria al derecho a
mutual interdependence with other surrounding commons. These in­                                      la vivienda. Cuadrilátero de Libros, Barcelona.
sights open several paths for future research, like the need for deeper                          Counter Cartographies Collective, Dalton, C., Mason-Deese, L., 2012. Counter (mapping)
ethnographic research that can help us understand the fine grain of the                               actions: Mapping as militant research. ACME 11 (3), 439–466.
                                                                                                 Dadusc, D., 2019. Enclosing autonomy. City 23 (2), 170–188.
reproductive urban commons and delineate the scalar relation among                               Dalla Costa, M., James, S., 1975. The power of women and the subversion of the
simultaneous commoning processes. Another interesting continuation of                                 community. Falling Wall Press.
our work would focus on observing the gendered patterns in reproduc­                             Dalmau Torvà, M., Miró Acedo, I., 2010. Les cooperatives obreres de Sants: autogestió
                                                                                                      proletària en un barri de Barcelona (1870-1939). La Ciutat Invisible.
tive urban commons, and to what extent these are able to revert hege­                            Dawson, A., 2017. Extreme cities: The peril and promise of urban life in the age of
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2020). Last but not least, we believe that geographical scholarship could                        De Angelis, M., 2007. The beginning of history: Value struggles and global capital. Pluto
                                                                                                      Press.
benefit from looking deeper at the concept of popular infrastructures,                           De Angelis, M., 2017. Omnia sunt communia: On the commons and the transformation to
which has recently become very popular in Catalan grassroots move­                                    postcapitalism. Zed Books.
ments. We hope that other authors will take the baton and join us in                             Di Feliciantonio, C., 2017. Spaces of the Expelled as Urban Commons? Analysing the Re-
                                                                                                      emergence of Squatting Initaitives in Rome. Int. J. Urban Reg. Res. 41 (5), 708–725.
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Declaration of Competing Interest                                                                Ezquerra, S., di Masso Tarditti, M., Rivera Ferre, M.G. (Eds.), 2022. Comunes
                                                                                                      Reproductivos: CercamiEntos Y DesCercamiEntos Contemporáneos En Los Cuidados
                                                                                                      Y La Agroecología. Catarata.
    The authors declare that they have no known competing financial                              F. d’Associacions de Veïns i Veïnes de Barcelona, 1970–2010: 40 Anys d’Acció Veïnal
interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence                             2010 Editorial Mediterrània Barcelona.
the work reported in this paper.                                                                 Federici, S., 2004. Caliban and the Witch. Autonomedia.
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                                                                                                 Fraser, N., 2017. Crisis of care? On the social-reproductive contradictions of
                                                                                                      contemporary capitalism. In: Bhattacharya, T. (Ed.), Social Reproduction Theory:
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vecinas in the Bloc La Bordeta, who have continued their struggle for                            Garcia, G., 2021. Més de 206.000 euros en sancions per llei mordassa per intentar aturar
                                                                                                      desnonaments. Directa. https://directa.cat/mes-de-206-000-euros-en-sancions-per-
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acknowledge their/our struggle, supported by broader networks of                                 Garcia, G., 2022. El Bloc La Bordeta reclama a la Sareb la cessió de l’edifici per a una
grassroots collectives, as fundamental for efforts towards emancipatory                               gestió comunitària. Directa. May 18. Available at: https://directa.cat/el-bloc-la-bor
                                                                                                      deta-reclama-a-la-sareb-la-cessio-de-ledifici-per-a-una-gestio-comunitaria/.
reproductive housing commons.
                                                                                                 García-Lamarca, M., 2015. Insurgent acts of being-in-common and housing in Spain:
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