Communize the city. Towards an insurgent vicinity

This seminar will discuss Kike España’s “Communize the City: Towards an Insurgent Vicinity,” a text that examines the contemporary urban condition through the lens of financial brutalism.

España argues that cities have become logistical infrastructures of extraction, where financialisation, automation, and real-estate speculation converge to displace communities and dissolve social relations. Drawing on thinkers such as Mbembe, Lefebvre, Guattari, and Moten, the essay frames the city-form as a planetary apparatus of expulsion – one that transforms citizenship, civility, and urban renewal into mechanisms of enclosure, discipline, and dispossession.

Against this backdrop, España calls for insurgent forms of inhabiting that arise from the ruins of financial brutalism: practices of neighbourhood, subsistence, and insurgency that refuse recognition by the dominant order while cultivating new forms of common life. By foregrounding the “informality of the commune” and proposing strategies like neighbourhood committees, blocks in struggle, and intercommunalism, the text insists on the possibility of communising the city from within its fractures.

The seminar invites participants to reflect on how these concepts might inform both critical theory and practical organising in the face of today’s planetary urban crisis.