Untangling the radical imaginaries of the Indignados' movement: Commons, autonomy and ecologism

The "movements of the squares" involved first and foremost an awakening or re-discovering of the radical imagination both in the square encampments, and in later projects created with the movements' decentralizations. The new alternative projects born after the square have materialized the movements' radical imaginaries in urban environments, extending and deepening concerns of broad political change over everyday life. Based on ethnographic work on the Indignados' movement in the city of Barcelona, this paper delves more particularly into three Indignant urban projects. It untangles three common and interlinked radical imaginaries both embodied and actualized in participants' social practices, and further orienting their future visions: commons, autonomy and ecologism. Scrutinizing their meaning, it also sheds light on connected issues such new ways of interfacing with local state authorities and redefining the boundaries between the public and the common. It shows that the ecologism imaginary cannot be properly grasped if disconnected from the other two imaginaries, and argues that a transformative eco-politics can only be claimed as such if it is able to articulate such an integrated vision typical of "socio-environmental movements".Series: SRE - Discussion Paper

The Redefinition and Co-Production of Public Services by Urban Movements. The Can Batlló Social Innovation in Barcelona

A wealth of social innovations sprang up in recent years in Southern Europe in the bosom of urban movements to cover citizens´ needs from below. Reacting to the commodification of the neoliberal city and the increasing dismantling of the welfare state, they provide public services and interrelate in var-ious forms with state authorities. Drawing on the outstanding social innovation case of Can Batlló (CB) in the city of Barcelona, a 14-ha former factory including more than 30 different projects and involving more than 350 activists, this paper analyses how social movements are redefining "the public" in the articulation between institutionalization, public service co-production, disruptive repertoires of action, and autonomy. It argues that this multiplicity of strategies and the strength of the movement helped not only to avoid turning the CB social innovation into a neoliberal rollout strategy, but even to act as a safety cordon against austerity politics. Affecting the boundaries of the legal-institutional framework, and rejecting the conflation of "public goods" with "state goods", CB organizes public services provision and planning in a more democratic form, pressuring the government to deliver the promised public services, while reclaim-ing them as commons that activists contribute building and designing. CB´s movement dimension and rootedness in the neighbourhood ensure the prioritisation of public and neighbourhood concerns over short-term, particularistic, and organizational survival interests

Untangling the radical imaginaries of the Indignados’ movement: commons, autonomy and ecologism

Under regimes of austerity, social movements' transformative eco-politics may appear endangered. What kinds of environmentalism and radical imaginaries can unfold in social movements in crisis-ridden societies? I focus on the ‘move-ment of the squares’ during its post-encampment phase, with a case study of three urban projects of the Indignados movement in Barcelona. Observation of these projects reveals the importance of three common and intertwined radical imaginaries embodied in participants’ social practices and orienting their future visions: the commons, autonomy, and ecologism. The ecologism imaginary cannot be properly understood if disembedded from the other two: the ‘Indignant’ projects constitute community structures re-embedding (re)produc-tion, jointly covering and generating needs differently, in response to the global capitalist forces that are threatening their social reproduction. Eco-politics can only be plausibly transformative if it is able to articulate a politics of intersec-tionality linking social reproduction with ecological interconnectedness and struggles against dispossessions and social injustice

Fertile soil: The production of Prefigurative Territories by the Indignados movement in Barcelona

Social movements do not only protest and demand political change - they produce new spaces too. Why and how? If we understand this, we can appreciate better the specificity and potential of the last cycle of mobilizations involving the encampment of cities' squares. This paper shows how the Indignados movement in Barcelona evolved from symbolizing an alternative future in the square to constructing alternatives in the city after. We find that people in alternative projects re-appropriate and transform urban space because they want to live differently and produce a radically different city, now. We conceptualize these new spaces as "prefigurative territories", integrating the seemingly divergent anarchist theory of prefiguration with Lefebvre's Marxist theory of space production. Prefigurative projects have strategic horizons and struggle with conflicts when opening up. Against those charging the Indignados with a fetishization of the occupied square and a failure to achieve political goals, we argue for the continuing relevance of the movement as it moved from the production of differential, to the production of counter-spaces. Further research should investigate how these counter-spaces feed into processes of political change.Series: SRE - Discussion Paper

La Razza bovina sarda: 2. le caratteristiche dell'allevamento

The Authors report on the results of a study concerning the Sardinian cattle; they have surveyed the demographic (geographic distribution, lifetime parameters, size and composition of herds), technical (management systems, reproductive techniques, calf raising, cow feeding) and economical (gross saleable production, net product, net income, production cost of calves) characteristics. These results were obtained with 35 herds from 2 Sardinian typical areas (Italy)

The Indignados as a socio-environmental movement. Framing the crisis and democracy

This study analyzes the framing processes of the Indignados movement in Barcelona, as an exemplar of the latest wave of protests, and argues that it expresses a new ecological-economic way out of the crisis. It finds that the movement was not just a reaction to the economic crisis and austerity policies, but that it put forward a metapolitical critique of the social imaginary and (neo)liberal representative democracy. The diagnostic frames of the movement denunciate the subjugation of politics and justice to economics, and reject the logic of economism. The prognostic frames of the movement advance a vision of socio-ecological sustainability and of "real democracy", each articulated differently by a "pragmatist" and an "autonomist" faction within the movement. It argues that frames are overarching outer boundaries that accommodate different ideologies. Ideologies can nevertheless also be put into question by antagonizing frames. Furthermore, through the lens of the Indignados critique, the distinction between materialist and post-materialist values that characterizes the New Social Movement literature is criticised, as "real democracy" is connected to social and environmental justice as well as to a critique of economism and the "imperial mode of living"

Performing Smartness Differently - Strategic Enactments of a Global Imaginary in Three European Cities

In the scholarly literature on smart city, normative and prescriptive approaches dominate. Most publications with analytic goals focus on transnational corporations, the related global imaginary of a smart city, and on associated new technologies. In comparison, actually existing smart cities have seldom been investigated. This is even more the case for public governance arrangements of smart city policies. Our study compares three EU cities in this regard, which are attempting to take a lead in smart city development. In addition, urban agriculture and citizens' participation are specifically investigated in their relation to smart city policy-making. Based on policy document and media discourse analysis, interviews, and participant observation, three governance arrangements of smart city policies are identified: hierarchical governance by the government in Barcelona between 2011 and 2015, closed co-governance by the city executive and non-governmental actors in Vienna and since 2015 in Barcelona, and open co-governance in Berlin. Citizens' participation is in the center in Barcelona since 2015, and is potentially important in Berlin. The Viennese smart city governance arrangement is characterized by non-hierarchical bargaining within the administration and signals innovative meta-governance, without citizens' participation. In all three cities, international dynamics play a crucial role for engaging with smart city, but it is enacted in particular ways according to place-specific history, social forces, and economic and political conditions. The meaning of smart city varies thus considerably: a comprehensive urban sustainability strategy focused upon climate policy goals in Vienna; a comprehensive internationalization strategy in Barcelona between 2011 and 2015; a limited technology- and business-oriented approach in Berlin; and a limited digital city frame geared to participatory democracy and technological sovereignty in Barcelona since 2015. Contrary to the literature, we highlight the agency of city executives, and the place-specific enactments that global smart city imaginaries undergo. Current smart city policies express more continuity than rupture with regard to urban development policies in our case study cities.Series: SRE - Discussion Paper

Client infrastructure design and implementation of a client-server Internet topology mapping system for smartphones

Many studies have already acknowledged the importance and usefulness of an accurate Internet network topology map. Current efforts to build this map could not achieve high coverage and quality levels, though. This is mostly due to the way they handle monitors, the nodes that run scannings, by being in low numbers or at least fixed to a certain location. In this thesis, I propose the mYriadi solution to the Internet mapping problem, focussing on the client side design and implementation. Using cutting-edge traceroute technologies and a crowd-sourcing methodology, we distribute a smartphone monitor appliance. Smartphones are available in high numbers, they are nomadic and always connected to access networks. A server appliance coordinates smartphones and analyzes collected data. After a summary of the traceroute methods “state of the art”, I'll discuss an implementation of a client appliance for iPhone. I'll discuss how to run a high-speed, efficient and battery-friendly parallel traceroute analysis in a restricted and unprivileged environment. I will also present a new technique to contrast the negative effects of a NAPT router, extremely common in almost all IPv4 access networks. We have verified the whole platform by correctly reconstructing a correct map of the GARR network, the italian research network. Finally I'll discuss how to improve mYriadi in future works