Occupying the #Hotelmadrid: A Laboratory for Urban Resistance

Occupied the night after the worldwide mobilisation of 15 October 2011, the #hotelmadrid was an intensive, 50-day-long political experiment that turned an abandoned hotel in the heart of the Spanish capital into a radical political space and the perceived node of the indignados movement. The squatting of the hotel accomplishes key demands related to 'real democracy' and the re-appropriation of public space as a political space with claims for the right to housing, providing an excellent example for the discussion of the shifting dimensions of emancipatory struggles that emerged in the course of the Spanish 15-M Movement. In this regard, squatters engage actively against neoliberalism, promote the right to housing and convert such mobilisation into a forward-looking project that not only reclaims but also takes, socialising private properties through common repossession. Referring to strategic disobedience we discuss how protest camps, public political assemblies and squatting create spaces of citizenship and intend to crack naturalised facets of capitalism such as the powerful discourse about property rights.