Commons as utopian practices

This article explores the concept of the commons as a utopian practice, drawing on Graeber’s ‘living utopianism’ and Harvey’s ‘dialectical utopianism.’ It focuses on the urban commons La Ingobernable ’, a social centre located in a building, under threat of privatisation, occupied in Madrid between 2017 and 2019. The article examines how the project became a symbol of the conflict between neoliberal policies and movements demanding the right to the city. Through the analysis of the assemblage of discursive, semiotic, spatial, and organisational practices, the article shows how the collective delimited, reterritorialised, and governed it as a self-managed space. These practices are performative because they helped bring the commons into being, and prefigurative because they enacted in the present alternative social, political, and economic relations organised around radical democracy, equality, care, and shared responsibility. This approach opens a fruitful path for the analysis of performative and prefigurative politics and practices.