[Draft Paper]

ASSEMBLING NEIGHBOURS
The City as Archive, Hardware, Method

Alberto Corsn Jimnez and Adolfo Estalella Spanish National Research Council, CSIC

Abstract The article reports on the rise of the popular assemblies movement that swept the streets and plazas of Madrid in the wake of the May 15 2011 occupation of Puerta del Sol. Assemblies have since taken installation in public spaces as infrastructural and methodological projects. Their wireframing into the public landscape has demanded of participants an inventive deployment of archival and hardware tactics, as well as a method for urban hospitality. The fuzz and mess of the assembly the difficulties that participants have at putting together, let alone understanding the very object of the assembly as an urban form offers some valuable insights into present-day discussions on the city as an object of political claims and rights. Moreover, the practice of assembling neighbours of convoking a neighbourhoods assembly, and of bringing and holding a disparity of relations together in the political and social figure of the neighbour addresses wider issues about the possible forms of an urban commons in the neoliberal metropolis. In this light, we develop an argument that sees in the assemblies an emerging political form of neo-municipalism. The political purchase of this assemblage / assembly is its status as urban open hardware. An object invested in the fuzziness of the urban condition.

[it] is necessary to understand why the city has been such a difficult object of study, for the city constitutes a very messy kind of archive 1 Neighbourhood is a word that has come to sound like a valentine.2

On 15 May 2011 a group of people gathered at Puerta del Sol in Madrid, the citys central and most famous square. They had attended a public demonstration some hours previously which took over the city streets in protest over the political management of the economic crisis. Some people then made a decision to spend the night in the open air at the square. Within hours the gathering quickly developed into an established encampment, whose Twitter hashtag (#acampadasol) would in the course of the following months become an emblem for a new form of political and urban innovation: the assembly movement (movimiento asambleario) widely known as 15M and which in time would inspire the global Occupy movement.

Vyjayanthi Rao, Embracing Urbanism: The City as Archive, New Literary History, 40 (2009): 371 <doi:10.1353/nlh.0.0085>. 2 Jane Jacobs, The death and life of great American cities (Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1972), 122.

Upon taking residence in the plaza the campers quickly called-for and organised themselves into three assemblies: an infrastructures taskforce in charge of looking for cardboards to spend the night; a communications group, which anticipated the possible media impact of the encampment and improvised a training course for spokespersons; and a food commission in charge of collecting food from nearby bars and restaurants. The internal organisation of every commission assumed an assemblyform. Over the following weeks the camp and the assembly-form developed in joint fashion. The plaza became a birthplace to a diversity of commissions: on education, gender, communications and IT, legal issues, politics or economics. Perhaps the commission that drew most attention was the Respect Commission, whose task was to assure that discussions and negotiations within the camp were carried out in a spirit of cordiality and consensus. The various commissions parcelled the plazas space, wired it with electricity and Internet connections, even a TV channel, and established working areas with receptions desks, tables, chairs or libraries. There was also a nursery, which provoked candid responses as local residents drew biting comparisons with the lack of public nurseries in their neighbourhoods. People started to refer to the encampment as a city in miniature, whose political landscape was shaped by an unfolding structure of assembly-forms. A week into the original Sol occupation a Neighbourhoods Commission drafted a methodology for assemblies. The document responded to a plan already underway to take the assembly-form to Madrids neighbourhood hinterland. The web domain madrid.tomalosbarrios.net (Madrid takes over the neighbourhoods) was quickly registered and used to coordinate the spread of the assembly movement. The document recommended protocols and procedures for occupying the citys public spaces. These included references to the tools necessary to set-up an assembly infrastructure, but it also included advice on ways to make the encounter between strangers more hospitable and convivial. On May 28 the first of such popular assemblies were called in plazas and open spaces across the city. As we write this there are over one hundred established assemblies in neighbourhoods across Madrid. In this article we want to explore the rise of popular assemblies as a political technology of neighbourly life. We develop an argument that sees in the assemblies an emerging political form of neo-municipalism. The political purchase of this assemblage / assembly is its status as urban open hardware. An object invested in the fuzziness of the urban condition. The voices vecino and barrio (neighbour and neighbourhood) have over the past six months acquired new political and social valence in Spain, and Madrid in particular. The social form of the assembly is inscribing the political landscape of the city with a revitalised practice of neighbourly politics. In this context the assembly prefigures or prototypes a social method and an infrastructure for dealing with, even reinventing classical urban topos, such as negotiations over stranger-relationality, the making of public spaces, or the very apprehension of the urban condition as a de/territorialised form. Assembling mobilizes a method and set of devices that help elicit the kinds of persons and relationships (neighbours) through which [the city], as an artefact and generator of knowledge, comes to be understood.3 In this sense, the fuzz and mess of the assembly the difficulties that participants have at putting together, let alone understanding the very object of the assembly as an urban form offers some valuable insights into present-day discussions on the city as an object of political claims and
Adam Reed, Blog This: surfing the metropolis and the method of London, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 14 (2008): 392 <doi:10.1111/j.1467-9655.2008.00508.x>.
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rights. Moreover, the practice of assembling neighbours of convoking a neighbourhoods assembly, and of bringing and holding a disparity of relations together in the political and social figure of the neighbour addresses wider issues about the possible forms of an urban commons in the neoliberal metropolis. The following account is based on an ethnography of Madrids mobilizations, and in particular on intensive fieldwork across a number of assembly sites and relationships in the districts of Lavapis, Prosperidad and Puerta del Sol. The ethnography is ongoing. Method Early on in #acampadasol the assembly-form was construed by attendants as an urban political object. Thus the draft of the Methodology for assemblies4 document was described as an extension of the assembling method, the recuperation of public space, and critical thought5 to the larger hinterland of neighbourhoods. The method of the assembly was from its very inception conceived as an organon of social, political and critical work. The methodology of the assembly includes a sociology of roles, a praxis for conviviality, and a spatial and cultural layout. The methodology recommends that all assemblies be facilitated by a moderator, a secretary in charge of taking minutes, someone responsible for taking turns for questions, and a group facilitating the production of consensus. There is also a role singled out for interpreters, whose role is to translate speeches or questions to sign-language for the deaf. The method further describes a different kind of sign-language, to be used for promoting conviviality within the assembly. Thus, approval of a proposal or comment ought to be signalled by raising and waiving ones hands; or an indication to a speaker that he or she is talking in circles and not contributing to the discussion is signalled by a motion of circling hands. The document also describes the method for delineating the assembly space. The space ought to distinguish between the moderating space and the assembly proper. A rectangular-perimeter marks out the former with chalk or colour-tape on the floor, simulating a stage. The moderating space is occupied by whoever is speaking at any time. This person is flanked by the interpreters and the rest of the facilitating team. Spokespersons for each of the assemblys various commissions await their turn to one side of the moderating space. The other side of the moderating space is occupied by the team of people in charge of taking questions. The latter ought to be located as far away as possible from the team of secretaries, who are in charge of taking minutes, and who shall be close enough to the moderating space to request a repetition, a synthesis or a copy of a document presented to the assembly. The minutes of every assembly meeting are recorded by the secretaries. They include the days agenda, a record of the various reports received, proposals to be made, the discussions had, and consensus reached, if any. They also mention proposals or recommendations to be taken to Madrids Popular Assembly (Asamblea Popular de Madrid), which is the name under which all of Madrids neighbourhood assemblies meet. The final version of the minutes is sent to the assemblys Communication team,

We shall note only every first reference to the online documents that the various assemblies have made publicly available on the Internet. Toma los barrios. Metodologa asamblearia. Accessed October 10, 2011. http://madrid.tomalosbarrios.net/metodologia-asamblearia/ 5 Toma los barrios. Qu es la Comisin de Barrios?. Accessed October 12, 2011. http://madrid.tomalosbarrios.net/%C2%BFque-es-la-comision-de-barrios/

who then posts it on the assemblys website.6 Much is made of the public and open availability of minutes over the Internet. The methodological guides further describe how to turn the space of the assembly into a convivial atmosphere. It is insisted throughout on the importance of keeping a relax and respectful atmosphere. A variety of texts offer techniques and advice to such an effect. For example: when someone who is known to be sensible and positive finds herself constrained and incapable of reason, we embrace her and tell her: dear friend, we know what your are capable of Similarly, the documents invite to greet new members to attenuate their feeling strangers; reading poetry or texts that enrich and enliven the emotional and affective character of the assembly meeting; or to occasionally break-up the gathering with a game. The assembly-form cultivates thus an aesthetics that is both therapeutic and ludic. People are encouraged to attend dressed-up in fancy costumes, in an attempt to draw into the assembly parents who might be roaming the plaza with their children. In Coslada, for example, one of the attendants to the assembly, a professional clown, regularly performs in the assembly space to intersperse and cheer-up the long-hours of meetings. In Lavapis and Dos de Mayo children assemblies (chiqui-asambleas) are organised were children are invited to discuss the issues that are of concern and importance to them. This enables parents to attend the assembly and not have to worry about parenting, but children-assemblies are also productive themselves of worthy recommendations which are reported back to the general neighbourhood assembly. Some assemblies organise parallel activities, such as barter markets and workshops, or they open or close with a breakfast or lunch, where attendants share their food with the rest of the party. The method of the assembly thus spills over as a general method for hospitality in public spaces. Central in the discursive production of hospitality within the assembly space is the notion of consensus. It has been widely recognised, in written documents, conversation and public speech, that a defining characteristic of the 15M movement is the importance given to consensus as a decision-making mechanism. To the definition of consensus as the general agreement or concord in opinion, sometimes expressed unanimously by a collective, the production of consensus in Madrids popular assemblies has offered a methodological inflection. Consensus is specifically defined as a non-quantitative operation: decisions are not voted in an assembly space, they are to be reached by consensus. Consensus is the relational outcome of dialogue and debate, not of individual opinion. A Rapid Guide for assembly-facilitation (Gua rpida de dinmica asamblearia)7 describes thus a technique or protocol for the production of consensus: After the presentation of a motion or proposal, the moderator asks: Any arguments strongly against the proposal? Should there be any, a turn for questions and debate is opened: THREE arguments for and THREE arguments against the positions discussed. Having had an opportunity for debate, the moderator turns to the Assembly and puts the question back to it, inviting the
6

Toma los barrios. Asamblea Popular de Lavapis. Accessed December 1, 2011. http://lavapies.tomalosbarrios.net/category/actas. 7 #Acampadasol. Gua rpida para la dinamizacin de asambleas. Accessed December 1, 2011. http://madrid.tomalaplaza.net/2011/05/31/guia-rapida-para-la-dinamizacion-de-asambleas-populares

Assembly to pronounce itself for or against the proposal using sign-language. If there is still no consensus, the moderator will allow 3-5 minutes of debate within the Assembly, such that smaller groups may be formed to discuss the matter internally. Following this, a new round of interventions is opened, where groups may put forward their new proposals for consensus. Failing this, two paths are opened: (i) if the proposal was originally made by a commission or working group, it shall be taken back to its constituency so that it can be properly reformulated; (ii) if the proposal was originally made by an individual, it is recommended that he or she takes it to an appropriate commission or working group, where it will be discussed internally so that a first degree of consensus is reached at that level. In both cases, once properly reformulated, the proposals may be brought back to the Assembly to be discussed anew. As the above description intimates, reaching consensus takes time. Such temporality, however, is rejoiced by the assembly movement, and in fact is often singled out as the movements very singularity and specificity. The assembly is not a decision-making forum. Assemblies, a number of people have told us, are not operative or practical structures. Their ultimate aim is not making decisions but building consensus. The Rapid Guide says it somewhat differently: the Assemblys membership is its very raison d'tre. They [members] are its principle and ultimate objective. One of the 15Ms most famous slogans responds to this experience of political dure: We proceed slowly because we aim highly (vamos lento porque vamos lejos). Although there is general agreement that the temporality of the assembly is one of its greatest virtues, in practice the time that it often takes to build consensus is dreaded by many. Some proposals which are expected to provoke controversy are postponed or deferred to a future assembly to which experts are invited to help make better informed decisions. Moreover, some methodological texts make a distinction between urgent or unpostponable consensuses and non-urgent ones. Whether a matter under dispute is unpostponable or not is decided on the spot by the assembly itself. An urgent protocol is activated such that the assembly is asked to express its view on the urgency of the matter in question. There are two steps to this protocol. First, a visual criteria is employed to decide whether there is a majority of opinion for or against the urgent qualification: the urgent protocol will be applied so long as a visible 1/5 of the assembly does not oppose it. Second, two teams of five people each, for and against the original proposal, must agree on this visual count. If no agreement is possible, an individual count would be required. The awkward prescriptions that make-up the protocol for urgent consensus capture well the political complex of the assembly as a neighbourly and urban form. After a month of occupying Puerta del Sol, and once the assembly movement had successfully spread to Madrids neighbourhoods, the suggestion that it was high time for dismantling #acampadasol mounted pressure. The local authorities had already attempted to evict the campers in a couple of occasions and there were rumours and threats that more violent charges might follow. There was also concern that popular sympathy for the movement was declining, at the time when its political purchase was most at stake. It was felt that the iconicity of a central encampment rested political visibility to the neighbourhood assemblies, who were in fact increasingly successful in their local organisational deployment. Faced with such demands the assembly at #acampadasol persistently failed to reach consensus on the convenience and timing of the camps dismantling. The arguments for and against were many and complex, but it was widely held that the camp signalled the infrastructural fragility of the public space: it was the

spatial qualities of the encampment as an urban public object a city in miniature that many campers thought had been the camps greatest political innovation, and thus resisted its disintegration. As a forum where strangers discussed their mutual affairs into a web of neighbourly ties, the camp, the assembly-form and the process of consensusbuilding offered a method for convivial relationships in the city. The awkwardness of the urgent protocol points to this insistence on methodological conviviality. The assembly-form stands for this view of urban life as method. It is the assembly-form that must prevail over and above its individual members, even if this requires resorting to slightly clumsy representational techniques. Assembling Assembling is hard work; it is also hardware. An Infrastructures Commission takes responsibility for keeping and maintaining the necessary materials and equipment to be used in the assembly. The assembly-form depends on these materials. Thus, objects and devices such as audio systems, megaphones, long cable-extensions, or, simply, writing sheets, highlighters and markers, become crucial infrastructural equipment for an assemblys happening. Making ones voice heard in an open space is an issue that all assemblies have had to deal with and resolve. The use of a megaphone has often proved unsatisfactory, for the sound is directed at an angle and therefore tends not to encompass the whole arc of attendants surrounding the moderators stage. It has therefore been common of assemblies to ask local bars or cafes in the vicinity of a plaza to pluck audio systems into their electric supply. This has also required purchasing or improvising some handicraft extensions to electrical cables, capable in some cases of traversing a fifty metre distance between the assembly space and an electric socket. The storing of these materials is also problematic. In Lavapis, for example, the equipment is kept at La Tabacalera, an old tobacco factory which on February 2010 was occupied with the authorities approval and turned into an experimental social squatting centre (centro social autogestionado). In Prosperidad the equipment is stored at one of the local neighbours associations (asociacin de vecinos). These relations are not exempt of troubles; negotiating access is often a fraught process. La Tabacalera, for instance, is the latest reincarnation of one of Madrids most famous squatter movements. Their radical political agenda has been cultivated over years of social mobilization, and although praised by many there is concern that the assembly will simply import a cultural and political practice cultivated elsewhere. Some local neighbourhood associations, on the other hand, are known to have strong ties to the communist party. For these and other reasons, many assembly-goers repudiate the links to established organisations. The assembly, they observe, is an autonomous entity, representative of no one, and represented by no one. At a meeting in Prosperidad someone said that what ought to characterise the assembly-form is that there is no house to it: We do not, we should not have a place that we can go to, that can house us. We need to reassemble and reinvent ourselves at every meeting. At a meeting in the Puerta del Sol assembly, Adolfo overheard someone note that the assembly is a topos: a spatial form that belongs nowhere, whose defining trait is its openness to the city at large. In Lavapis the assembly meets on a weekly basis alternately at the Parque del Casino and Plaza de Cabestreros. In Prosperidad it meets every two weeks at the plaza of the same name. The space of an assemblys meeting has been a matter of dispute at one time or another in almost all cases. The Plaza de Prosperidad is an open air space at the very heart of the neighbourhood, next to the local market and the local underground

station. It is, as an attendant to the first assembly put it, the point of passage (lugar de paso) for the neighbourhood. On a Saturday morning it is the place where people bump into each other when going to the local market or bakery, whilst waiting for a bus or an acquaintance at the metro exit, or on their way to have an aperitivo (snack) at a local bar. But the plaza is a dry, cemented space, with few if any trees, and therefore no shadows and hardly any breeze. During the first three weeks of assembly meetings back in May, it was intensely debated whether the plaza was the most suitable place to hold the gatherings. People were concerned that the lack of trees and shadows would make the plaza unbearably hot during the summer months. Some suggested that the assembly ought to be relocated to the nearby Parque de Berlin, where esplanades of grass and tall trees would make meetings more tolerable and pleasurable. In the end it was decided that the assembly would stay in the plaza, for it was agreed that the plaza complied with the infrastructural, social and political requirements that the visibility of the assembly as an urban piece of hardware demanded. In Lavapis the weekly assembly meeting is signalled by a giant piece of yellow cloth with the words Lavapis Popular Assembly on it. The cloth is hanged near the entrance to the park where the meeting takes place, although some people have complained that it is not visible enough. There is concern, it seems, that passers-by do not recognise the gathering as a popular assembly. In Prosperidad part of the debate around the assemblys location centred on its visibility; it was thought that the plaza was more visible than the park. An attendant put it eloquently at the time when noting, We cannot afford to become part of the urban equipment (mobiliario urbano). There are many reasons why we are here; but we are here to be seen also. The naming and iconicity of the assembly signals therefore to its own aesthetic as a boundary object: a form of political hardware that must simultaneously extract itself from, and yet reabsorb itself back into the neighbourhoods landscape. Even when a consensus has been reached over the location of an assemblys happening, the space of the assembly-form remains fragile and provisional. In Lavapis, for example, at one of the assemblys first meetings, attendants found out that the plaza of the Parque del Casino was already occupied by a batucada (a large ensemble of percussionists). The assembly had to improvise a location for an alternative meeting place. On another occasion, a woman interrupted Sols assembly desperately calling out that she had just been assaulted. A number of people stood up in her aid, whilst others left amidst the confusion and the fear. Last, rain and bad weather are a permanent threat to all assemblies, and there is no assembly that has not at one point or another discussed alternative locations for the winter months. Such debates have exacted pressure on the assembly-form, on its political and material qualities, on its spatial and temporal registers. They make visible a point to which we shall return throughout: the precarious and yet productive fuzziness of the assembly as an urban form. The assembly-form recruits a variety of local actors in its manifestation as urban hardware. On the one hand, public spaces and plazas are wired and inscribed with devices, materials and do-it-yourself circuitries that enable a novel, if temporary modality of urban encounter.8 On the other hand, shops, bars, political and autonomous collectives, they make themselves present in the assembly in and through different formats, channels and capacities. The assemblys porosity and openness is a source of frailty and instability, but it is also inventive of novel forms of urban occupation and relationship.
8

For an object-oriented politics see Noortje Marres and Javier Lezaun, Materials and devices of the public: an introduction, Economy and Society, 2011, 1-21 .

All meetings follow a roughly similar agenda. First, the team in charge of facilitating the meeting is introduced. In Lavapis the facilitation commission meets the evening prior to an assembly meeting. They go over the days agenda and sometimes rehearse and practice techniques of facilitation. Such routines are important, for at least two reasons. On the one hand, the assembly proscribes permanent roles for individuals. Volunteers must rotate in performing different assembly roles. Therefore, people new to a role often require a little training before going live in front of an audience. Second, rehearsing the days agenda helps the team anticipate possible controversial topics. The rehearsal offers a venue for sharing experiences of conflict management and resolution. Such moments of tension bespeak of the assemblys larger presence as a neighbourly form. On September 17, for example, the Lavapis assembly was discussing a Housing Manifesto that included claims for sustainable and decent rentals, and extended a criticism to greedy landlords.9 A woman stood up and interrupted the reading of the manifesto. She identified herself as a landlord and pointed out that not all landlords are the same and that it was unwise to generalise. A voice was heard that demanded her to shut up and, should she want to intervene, request a turn for comments. The woman indeed shut up. But when the reader of the manifesto had finished going through the text she approached him in an aside and interpellated him. This distracted the reader from the questions and comments that members of the assembly were now addressing at him. The team of moderators felt at a loss and uncertain how to react. One of the facilitators turned to the woman and told her that her observations ought really to be addressed to the assembly at large and not simply to the reader. The issues that are debated in an assembly are a matter of concern to all; it is the assemblys method of hospitality and inclusion to warrant that issues that are of concern to one individual are assembled into matters of concern for the neighbourhood at large. People are assembled into neighbours around shared concerns, even if they hold antagonistic or conflictive positions. The episode of the Housing Manifesto offers some further insights into the blur of assembling. The Manifesto provoked disparate reactions. Some people observed that the text was hardly different from one presented to the assembly a week previous. The assembly objected to the draft then and the Housing Group (an established working group within the assembly) was encouraged to resubmit a new version once they had included the comments and nuances made to the text by the assembly. Other members of the assembly had more specific concerns. For instance, the Manifesto made a demand for a twenty five per cent reduction in rentals. Such specificity made a number of people uneasy, who suggested instead making no quantitative claims. The Manifesto also called for a general strike in the autumn, which again was a sentiment unequally shared by the assembly. A group of about six people spontaneously decided then to work together on the spot redrafting the text for immediate reconsideration by the assembly. The group took to an aside and dedicated itself intensely to the task of rewording the document. A text was produced in time for the assembly to reach a consensus on it later that morning. Archiving The speed with which the group produced a new version of the manifesto contrasts with the general political dure of the assembly-form, at least as one finds it in its discursive texts and methodological programme (we proceed slowly because we aim highly). It
9

Vivienda y desahucios de Lavapis. Bando alquiler. 17/9. Accessed December 1, 2011. https://n1.cc/pg/file/read/761216/bado-alquiler-1709

does not contradict it, but it does supplement it with a textual and temporal register that echoes what, in a very different context, Tony Crook has called The Textual Person. The textual person, writes Crook, intends to characterize both the person-like relationships of texts, and the textual-like relationships of anthropological persons. As an aesthetic artefact, a text is the composite outcome of disparate relational engagements. The text has a social efficacy that responds to and anticipates a world of relationships: Recognition and currency for these objects the capacity to animate analytic and social relations in others is governed by exhibiting this aesthetic form [T]he textual person is composed through combining distinct relations: although data/theory, spoken/unspoken, originality/analytic precedence, and literal/figurative are kept scrupulously separate, they are also combined according to kinship-like strictures.10 Texts are assembled and disassembled as aesthetic and efficacious forms through the relationships they engender. The assembly-form, we have seen, is a textual corporate person, in the methodological documents and guides, minutes and reports that it produces. The assembly is as much produced by these documents as it is itself productive of novel documents. The rush to produce a new version of the Housing Manifesto shows the extent to which the textual artefact stands for the assemblys political efficacy. Although much is made in text about the assemblys strategic longterm agenda, about its structural dure as a political form, in practice this is somewhat contradicted, or let us say supplemented by an urgency to constantly re-inscribe its political presence through documentary objects. The documentary form that exemplifies the assemblys nature as a Textual Person is its minutes (actas). Minute-taking is widely acknowledged to be the most important of an assemblys activities. At a meeting in Sol, for example, a group of people brought forward to the assembly a motion for convoking a national referendum. The group presented a document that explained their arguments and sought the assemblys endorsement. A number of people aired their concerns. Some where uncertain as to the documents origin: who drafted it?, where do you meet?, where do you publish your minutes? The group remained silent and this prompted a strong exchange of accusations. A few voices suggested that the group belonged to an extreme right party. A young man took the microphone. He held the document distributed by the group in one of his hands. He then pointed to the documents first page, which displayed a 15M logo. You shouldnt come here to flag a document around as if it had been produced by the movement. Nor should you come here and use this space to publicize a meeting that hasnt actually been approved by the assembly, he said. A member of the group asked belligerently whether the young man worked for the 15Ms police force, whilst others pointed out that they had come as individuals to make a public announcement. The exchange vividly captures some of the tensions that are employed to negotiate the insides and outsides of the assembly-form. In this particular case these were brought out into the open by a documentary object: the manifesto for a national referendum. The textual artefact mobilized questions about its authority, its representativeness, and its larger social engagement in and with the assembly-form. But there were yet more tensions and documentary inscriptions to flourish. A number of voices insisted in finding out more about the group. Over and over again they asked about the minutes of
10

Tony Crook, Anthropological knowledge, secrecy and Bolivip, Papua New Guinea: exchanging skin (British Academy/Oxford University Press, 2007), 218, emphasis in the original.

their meetings: Where do you publish your minutes? Where should we look for to find out more about the nature of your meetings? The group responded elusively. A member of the group said they met weekly at a cafeteria and had a blog where they uploaded the minutes of their meetings. The response was hardly satisfactory and the assembly reacted with suspicion. Another member of the group added they had also worked with the assemblys legal commission, and that the absence of a record of minutes was extensive to all the legal commissions projects. A member of the legal commission then jumped up to observe that consensus over such manifesto had never in fact obtained within the group, and that the absence of a published record of minutes was hardly a reason for elevating the proposal for a referendum at another level. The moderator finally sentenced that the methodological guide clearly states that all minutes need be sent to the Communications Commission, who shall then proceed to publish them on the Internet. In other words: no archival record, no method, no politics. In an important recent article, Vyjayanthi Rao has offered the concept of the city as archive to think through the complex tides and traces of the urban condition. The archive stands for the living memory and practice of the urban experience.11 The city faintly apprehends its own process of understanding through its archival deposits and infrastructures. The archive fragilely anchors the experience, and helps moor the memory, of the incessant vicissitudes and exchanges that traverse the urban landscape: rather than highlight the archives capacity to accurately represent a past, [I suggest] we use the notion of archive as a way of navigating the voids of the present, as a practice of intervening into and reading the urban fabrics created by these voids, not for reading the urban fabric as a quilt or a palimpsest of historical forms preserved within the archive the city-as-archive serves as a methodological intervention into the re-creation of everyday relations the cityas-archive works as a tool, re-fashioning our relation to the future.12 If Rao finds in the archive a powerful conceptual analogy for the contemporary urban condition, participants in Madrids assembly movement are deploying instead the inscriptive and documentary practices of archiving as technologies of hospitality. The archive is both a methodology and a method of urban life. It is both a means to document the city and a praxis that elicits new forms of stranger-relationality; an instrument that aims both to stabilize the neighbourhoods commons and define the terms of recruitment and membership into them. The textual person, then, inscribes the assembly-form in a circuit of documentary and archival practices that stretches out of the assembly space itself and in so doing throws into the air and questions the terms of its internal democracy. Who wrote this manifesto? and Where do you publish your minutes? are questions that re-describe the spatial politics of the assembly-form as textual politics. Thus, the relation that the assembly-form claims to establish with the neighbourhood is re-contextualised across texts, inscriptions and networks that in actual fact may challenge and blur its spatial circumscription. The city and the neighbourhood disappear as spatial objects and reappear as archival ones. In the process of assembling neighbours, the assembly-form re-inscribes the city in a novel archival landscape. De / territorialisation
11 12

Rao, 371-383. Rao: 381382.

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The territorial and spatial dimensions of the assembly-form have in fact been the subject of numerous discussions in most assemblies. When the call for organising neighbourhood assemblies was first issued on May 2011 the people of Chamartn (a district in northern Madrid) showed up at two assemblies, in Prosperidad and Hispanoamerica, which had been separately convoked by groups of neighbours who knew not of the others existence. Over the following days each assembly discussed the convenience of merging with the other. The assembly of Prosperidad drew in more people and the local plaza seemed to offer a better infrastructural and social space: there are nearby bars that can offer electric supply and the plaza itself is an open space that can be easily occupied. Thus, for a few days, Prosperidad became the point of assembly for the district of Chamartn. It seemed as if the territorialisation of the neighbourhood around the plaza offered enough of a political case for the assembly. Soon enough, however, the case for the plaza began to lose weight. At Hispanoamerica a group of people had already set up a website with their own neighbourhood domain. A number of incipient working groups (on politics, education, economics, etc.) had also set up their own email distribution lists and Google groups. The prospect of having to integrate or abandon these tools in favour of those created by the assembly of Prosperidad was unappealing. Hardly a week into the whole process, then, Hispanoamerica reclaimed its autonomy as a popular assembly. The episode is indicative of the de/territorialisation of the assembly form. Assemblies come into being as topological artefacts. There are a variety of factors that contribute to such topological immanence. For a start, the politics of digital networking. As the above example illustrates, digital communications have been crucial in the articulation of the assembly movement. Digital relations have traversed and inflected street mobilizations. That the original encampment at Puerta del Sol is known as #acampadasol (Twitter hashtag) is a testament to such importance. Notwithstanding, this is a dimension of the movement that we shall do no more than gesture to here.13 Our interest, rather, is in the fold and foil of spatial, hardware and social relationships in the mutual constitution of an emerging form of municipalist politics. Another important aspect of the topological de/territorialisation of assemblies revolves around a particular scalar and scopic imagination. Thus, throughout assemblies we have encountered a heightened concern with scale and scale-shifting interventions. There is a deliberate investment in making the urban condition appear where one would least expect to find it. A plaza or a park are obvious urban sites; an email list or a website are somewhat less obvious. The city is thus emptied-out as an urban form into a variegated array of practices and objects. The case of the chiqui-asamblea (childrens assembly, but the word chiqui also means small) above is a candid and poignant example. The childrens proposals were taken note of and incorporated into the assemblys minutes: Children ask for a play centre; for the right not to wear uniforms in public schools; for getting people to throw away cigarette buds to the rubbish; for public toilets, so we are not forced to pee in public; to be kind to one another; to have dog shits cleaned up; and for more flowers in the streets. They say they do not like churches

For a tentative history of the events leading up to #acampadasol, including an account of the importance of digital relationships, see Alberto Corsn Jimnez and Adolfo Estalella, #spanishrevolution, Anthropology Today, 27 (2011), 19-23 <doi:10.1111/j.1467-8322.2011.00818.x>.

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because one cannot play in them. They like to play with neighbours. They further ask for a local swimming pool and a football pitch with grass. 14 The assembly agrees to discuss some of these proposals in future assemblies and to make signposts with some of these issues and distribute them in the neighbourhood. In writing and in word there is continuous insistence that little things matter. Childrens issues are small (chiqui) issues, but they matter too. However, this also leads to vexing questions about the sizes of political action. The resources that assemblies can mobilize are scarce, so there are ongoing discussions about how best to deploy them. For example, the topic about the importance of making assemblies visible and iconic has evinced some disparate assumptions about the aesthetics, location and sizes of the political. As noted above, a suggestion was made at the Lavapis assembly to have a large yellow cloth identifying the assemblys location to passers-by and the neighbourhood at large. Although the proposal was welcomed, a discussion ensued around who would take responsibility for finding a location for the poster. A few voices suggested that this might be something the Information Commission could assume as part of its remit. It was quickly pointed out, however, that the Commission was understaffed and overworked. Someone suggested instead, then, to ask local neighbours with a balcony to the plaza to hang the poster from their balconies. However, although a balcony position was certainly iconic enough, some people felt such an emplacement would delegate out the practice of political intervention. There was a danger that the balconies would in time naturalise the political visibility of the assembly; that the poster would be reabsorbed into the neighbourhoods landscape. In its stead, a new proposal was made for small situated direct actions: to have assembly-goers walk around the neighbourhood advertising the meeting some time prior to its happening. Another person recalls that in the early days of the movement the assembly used to have an information point in the plaza. The information point had been very successful at stabilizing the assemblys iconic and political visibility. Perhaps it was no coincidence, it was pointed out, that attendance to the assembly started to decline once the information point was dismantled. The trouble with the information point, someone else noted, was that it overworked those who staffed it. We need to find a way to publicize the assembly that does not tax its members. That was the idea behind the poster: to liberate otherwise scant human resources from taxing activities. The question of the sizes of political action is nowhere seen as clearly as in the assemblies held in some of the villages surrounding the capital. For instance, we have been told by some assembly-goers to Hoyo de Manzanares assembly that there is considerable caution and prudence in the use of sign-language there, say, in its use to alert someone that she has been speaking for too long. In such small villages, we were told, relationships between attendants are often inflected by kinship or friendship ties. I have been approached by quite a few people at the village supermarket, an informant told us, eager to express their support to me in person, but who felt that if spotted at the assembly were liable of bringing shame to their families. We see thus the process of assembling constantly zooming-in and out of its own sense of political agency and installation. Between the village structure and the urban plaza, the assembly-form seems to have carved out for itself a fragile yet productive space of hospitality at the level of the barrio. Of course it is this capacity to shift scales that lends political agency to the assembly to start with: from an information point to a balcony, or a poster, or direct action, the assembly allows itself the capacity to
14

Toma los barrios. Asamblea Popular de Lavapis. Acta de la chiqui-asamblea 01/10/2011. Accessed October 10, 2011. http://lavapies.tomalosbarrios.net/2011/10/05/acta-de-la-chiqui-asamblea-01102011/

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transform its political practices and imagination. It recruits as many new objects, places and actors as it deems necessary, even if this blurs its own internal configuration as a political body, and occasionally threatens with its dissolution. As a piece of urban hardware the assembly remains therefore open and fuzzy. If back in May the movements intensity and vibrancy led to the bifurcation of some congregations (such as that between Prosperidad and Hispanoamerica), there have been some proposals more recently to coordinate political actions between assemblies, even to unify neighbouring assemblies. Perhaps the clearest example of the de/ territorialising tensions that traverse and in many ways constitute the very assembly-form is the debate around the purpose and remit of Sols General Assembly. The debate, as we will see below, tightens the screw a notch, as it were, pushing the conceptualization of the assembly-form up towards a very specific level of political and urban abstraction. When #acampadasol was dismantled and the assembly movement took off to the neighbourhoods, Sols General Assembly remained in place as a symbolic capital. Sols assembly had proven its political capacities and there was little point in dismantling these too. Across Madrid, then, neighbourhood assemblies replicated Sols structure and organisational apparatus. However, it quickly became obvious that one thing Sol was not prepared to do was act as a communications hub for the rising number of neighbourhood assemblies. Thus, a new assembly was constituted under the overarching term of Madrids Popular Assembly. The MPA is a nominal figure. It has no membership and no meeting place. It is simply the organisational space where the spokespersons (the term representative is expressly disavowed) of all neighbourhood assemblies meet, report on initiatives and proposals, and coordinate supraneighbourhood actions across the city. It is not, however, a decision-making or initiating organon. It has not political capacity of its own accord. We might dub it the Assemblies Exchange. The relationship between the MPA and Sols General Assembly has excited numerous polemics and debates over the past months. There is for example growing scorn in some neighbourhoods over Sols symbolic status. As it turns out, Sol is the only assembly that it is not accountable to a neighbourhood. As the original offspring of #acampadasol, Sols General Assembly has no political or administrative unit to respond to. There is no Sol barrio, as there is a Prosperidad or Lavapis one. Yet it has become commonplace for the mainstream media to report on decisions taken at Sols General Assembly as exemplary of what the assembly movement is up to. Sol has become a symbol that stands for the movement, despite the strenuous investment by assemblies everywhere to make clear that assemblies are representative of no one and represented by no one, that they are symbols that stand for themselves15. Sols outshining of neighbourhood assemblies has provoked a backlash that calls for merging the MPA and Sols General Assembly. If there is slack of political decision at MPA on the one hand, and over-representativeness by SGA on the other, then there is scope, it is argued, to have both converge into a unified central assembly. This argument has been widely voiced by a number of people expressly in terms of territorialisation. Thus, for a number of people Sols surplus of symbolic capital has been accrued at the expense of territorial legitimation. As noted above, Sol is not a barrio assembly proper. There is no territorial unit to which the assembly might ascribe itself. Its politics are ungrounded, out of touch with neighbourhood dynamics. On the other hand, however, the MPA lacks too the institutional mandate to envision and sanction a proper territorialisation of political initiatives. As a spokesperson put it, the MPA is a hearing
15

Roy Wagner, Symbols that stand for themselves (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1986).

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(audiencia) of neighbourhood concerns. Neighbourhoods stretch themselves outwards to the MPA, and then they stop. The MPA puts a stop to how far the neighbourhood project can go. The movement is thus falling short of itself (quedarnos en los barrios es escaso). This frustration at what the MPA can and cannot do has led a number of assemblies to propose both a change in structure and change in name. As for the change in structure, there have been proposals to open-up the MPA to sector-based assemblies. To this day the MPA is an exchange for assemblies spokespersons: a forum where we bring together and exchange assemblies minutes. But as one person put it, this is what an announcements board would do. We can use a website for this kind of work. There is no point in having an assembly for this. The proposal to change the MPAs structure, then, aimed at awakening the MPA from its political slumber. The idea was to have sector-based assemblies that would coordinate political programmes and agendas, such as those of the various Housing, Politics or Unemployment groups that were working separately in a number of neighbourhood assemblies. The proposal, however, was energetically contested on the basis of not making explicit the territorial underpinnings of a sector. As an eloquent opponent put it: We do not know the territorial weight of such groups. Where are these sectorbased groups located? How many people make them up? What are their whereabouts? What problems do they deal with? What is their weight in the territory? Such groups should really be working for their assemblies. Take the Housing Groups. They are the ones gathering local information about repossessions, about the needs of people. What use is there in them reporting to a distant assembly? We need them here their knowledge is useful here. As for the change in name, a proposal to substitute the MPA name for Coordinating Platform (Coordinadora) has found considerable opposition to this day. Those in favour of the change of name are adamant about the MPAs misuse of the term assembly. The MPA is not an assembly, they insist; it is not a space where people come with proposals seeking to build consensus around them. Thus at an assembly in Lavapis a number of people expressed serious concern that the MPA had no sovereignty: there was no constituency to which it responded. Those against the change of name, on the other hand, hold that the MPAs design is to become an assembly. Their hope is that the MPA will eventually become the assembly of assemblies. If in its present incarnation the MPA is putting a stop to neighbourhoods self-realisation, as some people put it, it is hoped this would finally obtain were the MPA to assume a meta-assemblage form. The neighbourhood is therefore finally abstracted as a political form through the purity of a topological assemblage. Conclusion: What is a neighbour? We need to think of the relationships which link children to their parents and the parents to one another, wrote Edmund Leach in 1961, as constituting a neighbourhood system a topological space.16 When Leach wrote these lines he was trying to get himself out of the riddle of kinship structural and classificatory systems, which he famously thought did little but produce highly suspect categories out of butterfly collecting activity.17 He offered the concept of topology instead, where the fluency and elasticity of relationships could perhaps be grasped by analogy to a
16 17

Edmund R. Leach, Rethinking Anthropology (Oxford: Berg, 2004), 26. Leach, 26.

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neighbourhood system. Of course he left the notion of neighbourhood undefined, perhaps hoping that some day, someone, would take his own neighbourly assumptions to task. In this article we have offered an ethnographic instance of how participants in the popular assembly movement in Madrid are redefining their sense of ownership over the urban commons as, indeed, a neighbourhood system a topological space. The neighbourhood emerges in this context as an infrastructural and methodological event: the assembling of neighbours as both public form and sociological figure. On the one hand, the assembly-form requires of a strenuous investment in the material, textual and archival production of assembling as an urban and spatial object. The assembly inscribes itself as a piece of urban open hardware through the objects, devices and technologies that participants have to mobilize in order to warrant its own temporal and spatial continuity. On the other hand, the process of assembling is constitutive itself of the production of a novel sense of neighbourliness. The method of the assembly bodies forward the neighbour as an emerging urban relational figure. Neighbours are assembled into social and political subjects through the process of assembling. We have offered an ethnographic argument here, then, about how the popular assemblies movement in Madrid is reimagining citizenship in terms of an archival, an infrastructural and a methodical praxis of urban conviviality. The assembly-form hopes for the city as archive, hardware and method. There are a number of suggestive corollaries to this ethnographic discovery, which we shall do no more than allude to here. There has recently been a burgeoning of interest in the right to the city as an idiom through which to reclaim the urban condition as a commons. Thus, for example, for David Harvey the right to the city should be materialized in the democratic management of the forms of surplus absorption that cities generate: Since the urban process is a major channel of surplus use, establishing democratic management over its urban deployment constitutes the right to the city.18 As Kafui Attoh has noted, however, the right to the city remains a fuzzy concept19, for it remains unclear that the democratic management of surpluses entails the right type of urban right, or whether these rights should aim for, say, socio-economic justice or a civil liberty. In our article we have attempted to offer some insights into these debates by describing in detail the social construction of a rights discourse in Madrids popular assemblies. Rights are entangled in persons, spaces, technologies and infrastructures. Rights are fuzzy concepts because they are fuzzy assemblages. Thus, the building of consensuses within the assemblies demanded of the complex management of methodological roles, temporal registers, as well as practices of care, empathy and hospitality. Consensuses were deemed postponable or unpostponable because their realization was perceived as fragile and conjunctural. They are hard work and hardware; hard-won exemplars of a labor of urbanization.20 A question poses itself, however, as to who might be the holders of such complex topological rights-objects? The ethnographic material we have presented suggests that much of the labour of urbanization is invested in the practice of neighbourliness as an infrastructural experience of urban hospitality. The neighbour emerges in the material and inscriptive process of constructing entitlements over a new urban commons. We
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David Harvey, The right to the city, New Left Review, 53 (2008): 37. Kafui A. Attoh, What kind of right is the right to the city?, Progress in Human Geography, 35 (2011): 678 <doi:10.1177/0309132510394706>. 20 David Harvey, Spaces of hope (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000), 159.

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should hasten to add that this is not a local community neighbour, of the intimate kind famously proposed by Jane Jacobs21, or of the new urbanism kind famously criticized by David Harvey22. Our ethnographic neighbour is not a figure for a new urban identity, but a relational and topological subject. We are intrigued by this notion of the neighbour as an emerging topos, to cite a term used by one of our informants above, and believe its form offers a suggestive point of departure for critical urban studies. A view of neighbouring, then, where the city becomes knowable as a social relationship through archival, hardware and methodological practices.

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Jacobs. Harvey, 169173.

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