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ARTICLES AND BOOK CHAPTERS

Ana López-Sala: Manteros, in Laura Oso, Natalia Ribas Mateos and Melissa Moralli (eds.) Elgar Encyclopedia of Global Migrations. Cheltenham, Edward Elgar Publishing Limited, 2025: 334-336 https://doi.org/10.4337/9781035300389.ch107

Abstract: Manteros in Spain are street vendors, mainly from Senegal and with a precarious legal status, who since the 1980s have used the urban public space for their economic activities. In this entry, we focus on the process of persecution and criminalization they have suffered since the middle of the last decade in cities such as Barcelona and Madrid, as well as on the forms of solidarity, resistance and protest they have articulated through, fundamentally, the creation of the Sindicato Popular de Vendedores Ambulantes (Popular Union of Street Vendors). This case is illustrative of many of the current debates around the right to the city, as well as some of the forms that increasingly robust migrant activism has taken.

Francisco Colom González: Outlines for a Theory of Urban Justice, en Francisco Colom González (ed): Urban Justice. Debating Spatial Exclusion, Common Goods and the Built Environment. Cham, Springer Nature, 2024, pp. 19-36. ISBN: 978-3-031-73339-0

Abstract: The right to the city, now a viral political slogan, puts an emphasis on the urban condition as something other than a passive container of natural constraints and social relations. Since urban space is a social construction, the idea of urban justice must be able to identify the normative dimensions of life in cities and the qualities that make their habitat a social good. This requires a conception of justice that is more sensitive to space than has been the case in mainstream political philosophy. Cities are a relevant unit of justice because the organisation of their space is inextricably linked to social inequalities. Urban justice must include a perspective that links the urban habitat to the ability of its inhabitants to live a dignified life. Understanding the city as a right also underlines that some social goods are inherently urban and related to human agency. The capabilities approach, taken from a spatial perspective, can be particularly fruitful in outlining a theory of urban justice, as it can illustrate the relationship between the development of life competences, the physical structure of the city and the social relations created around it.

Francisco Colom González: El giro espacial en las ciencias sociales, en Gustavo Leyva (coord.):  Las ciencias sociales revisitadas, México, Gedisa México/Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, 2024, pp. 1095-1114

Abstract: If, as Zygmunt Bauman warned, modernity amounts to an awareness of time from the moment it has a history, the perception of the spatiality of social relations is the other side of the same process. Ancient historiography combined the description of journeys, landscapes, people, customs and myths into an integrated narrative that was self-justifying and needed no further explanation. By contrast, the separation of the categories of time and space in history as a science of human experience in general is a modern concept. Ultimately, just as all history has a beginning and an end, it also has a place. However, the predominance of the temporal dimension in the narrative of historical change was taken for granted by the social sciences of the nineteenth century. Historicism explained change as a sequence of events, not as a juxtaposition of localised actions. The epistemological hegemony of time over space only began to change in the wake of economic globalisation, increased migration and the perceived environmental unsustainability of industrialism on a planetary scale. The founding moment of the so-called ‘spatial turn’ was the affirmation of the ontological parity of space and time.

Paz Núñez Martí and Roberto Goycoolea Prado: Anti-social Public Policy or the Drama of Social Housing. Madrid as Paradigm, in EU COST Action CA18137 Middle Class Mass Housing

Abstract: This text presents a critical reflection on the impact that the public housing policies developed in Madrid in the second half of the last century, during the Franco dictatorship, have had on its inhabitants, its boroughs, and the city. The declared aim of these policies was twofold: (a) to use the construction of mass housing to alleviate the enormous housing shortage that the city was experiencing as result of unexpected population growth and the destruction caused by the Civil War (1936-39), and (b) to use the building impulse to reactivate a depressed economy after a decade of generalised hardship, that of 1940.

Francisco Colom González: La habitabilidad de las ciudades tras la pandemia, en Antonio Campillo et al. (eds.) El des-confinamiento del pensamiento. Red Española de Filosofía/Laboratorio Filosófico sobre la Pandemia y el Antropoceno, 2023, pp. 321-323. ISBN:  978-84-09-48087-6

The liveability of cities in the aftermath of the pandemic

Abstract: Some of the problems generated by contemporary urbanism stem from the neglect of liveability and the loss of control over lived space. The pandemic has reminded us of the need to pay primary attention to urban assets that are constitutively communal: those that foster the development of urban capabilities, promote social inclusion and transform the built environment into a true habitat.

Roberto Goycoolea Prado y Paz Núñez Martí: Procesos de turistización de memoriales en Latinoamérica: ¿Oportunidad o amenaza para la reparación? Análisis de casos singulares. 1990-2020, en Historia y Memoria 26 (2023), 21-57 https://doi.org/10.19053/20275137.N26.2023.13777

Touristification processes of memorials in Latin America; opportunity or threat to reparation? An analysis of individual cases – 1990-2020

Abstract: In the last three decades, there has been a significant increase in touristification processes in places of remembrance, with growing, although not homogeneous, impacts on a just social and spatial reparation. Regarding this, in this article it is maintained that the nature and intensity of the touristic impact depends on how the memorials are manifested. According to what has been studied, there are three modalities to creating them, distinguished by the place where they are built, their formal characteristics, and who promotes and administers them. To develop this thesis, two Latin-American memorials were studied from each of the modalities. These were selected for constituting paradigmatic and generalizable cases. The results show, on the one hand, that tourism has become a key factor in increasing interest in, and the numbers of visitors to, memorials and with that it is contributing to victim reparations and the recovery of spaces. However, on the other hand, under certain conditions, the touristic incursion can trigger disturbing processes for memory, the reparation to victims and the place of remembrance. The impacts range from trivialising to hiding, from museumizing to spectacularizing, and even reaching the intentional use of tourism as a way to whitewash traumatized territories, both in terms of memory as well as reparation.

Ana López Sala y Yoan Molinero Gerbeau: Coming out of the Shadows? Housing Conditions of Irregular Migrant Workers in Spanish Agricultural Enclaves, en Calitatea Vieții 33(2), 1–17. https://doi.org/10.46841/RCV.2022.02.02

The development of industrial agriculture in Spain has been accompanied, in recent decades, by an itinerant, recurrent and temporary mobility of immigrant workers between different productive enclaves. Although this group presents a wide internal diversity, an important segment of it is made up of workers in an irregular situation who participate in the seasonal circuit and who reside temporarily in some of these intensive production geographies. Their employment in conditions of informality makes them highly susceptible to extreme forms of labour exploitation, and to widespread difficulties in gaining access to a non-precarious legal status, which has turned their lives into an overlapping succession of chronic forms of social and labour exclusion. Additionally, the lack of political will, along with institutional and social racism has condemned many of these migrants to extreme forms of housing exclusion that has led them to reside in abandoned buildings, and spatially segregated informal settlements. In this article, we focus on this housing dimension, analysing the intersections between having an irregular status, performing agricultural work, and experiencing a subaltern spatial – residential situation. However, far from aiming to reproduce a passive vision of this issue, we analyse how migrants themselves have tried to respond to this situation. Recently, they have channelled a mobilization around the right to live in dignified conditions that has integrated demands for regularization, demands articulated around labour rights, and demands for the right to decent housing in the enclaves where they reside, thus contesting a deeply rooted policy of indifference that extends to the host societies

Francisco Colom González: Los espacios urbanos de la democracia. Del ágora a la plaza, en ARBOR. Ciencia, Pensamiento y Cultura, Vol. 198, 803-804, enero-junio 2022, a635 | ISSN-L: 0210-1963, https://doi.org/10.3989/arbor.2022.803-804002

The Urban Spaces of Democracy: from the Ágora to the Square

Abstract: Throughout history, the city has been the quintessential space for democracy. This is why it is possible to trace the genealogy of the public sphere by reconstructing the changing functionality of urban spaces. This article addresses the study of democratic practices through the places in the city where they have been developed, especially public squares. From this point of view, squares are presented as an agonistic space added to the formal institutions for political representation.

Francisco Colom GonzálezDe la ciudad como utopía a la utopía de la ciudad, en Francisco Colom González (coord..): Pasajes del pensar. Ensayos sobre filosofía, literatura y sociología en homenaje a José M. González García. Bilbao, Publicaciones de la Universidad de Deusto, 2020, pp. 135-174. ISBN: 978-84-1325-119-6

From City as Utopia to the Utopia of the City

Abstract: The role of cities has not only been important for their geopolitical and economic function. Their performance has been equally conclusive in cultural history, particularly in the West. The city was conceived by the Greeks as the ideal space for the development of human nature. Since then, the political imagination of the city has assumed multiple forms as an idealized reference for a morally and materially fulfilled life. This text explores the different urban representations of the emancipatory social imaginary and the connotations that have been attached to it in the history of urban planning.

Francisco Colom González: Max Weber y ‘La ciudad’. Una interpretación a la luz de la experiencia hispanoamericana, en Álvaro Morcillo Laiz y Eduardo Weisz (eds.): Max Weber en Iberoamérica. Nuevas interpretaciones, estudios empíricos e interpretación. México, Fondo de Cultura Económica – CIDE, 2015, pp. 419-446. ISBN: 978-607-16-2130-6

Max Weber and the City: an Approach from the Spanish American Perspective

Abstract: The text by Max Weber that has come down to us under the title The City is a posthumous and incomplete manuscript edited by his widow, Marianne Weber. The circumstances surrounding the discovery of the manuscript, the changing subtitles added to it, as well as the internal articulation of the text, have led to the loss of much of its original meaning. Although we can observe the emergence of cities in different geographical areas and historical moments, for Weber the Western process of urbanization offered extraordinary characteristics. With it came the historical genesis of specific forms of political socialization and the emergence of an autonomous urban class with differentiated economic interests. Given the importance of cities in the colonization of Spanish America and its subsequent historical development, Weber’s urban theory has a potential that has been little exploited. The colonization of America is part of the dynamics of Western expansion around the globe. The proliferation of cities in Spanish America projected onto the New World a process of urban consolidation whose social, political and cultural conditions had matured in Europe during the late Middle Ages and culminated in the Renaissance. Colonial societies, although subjected to dependence on the metropolis, were therefore in their own way Western societies. In this sense, the Latin American city constitutes a variant of the Western city and many of the features described by Weber in his work can be recognized in it. Even so, the transposition of European urban categories to America must be qualified, since there is not only a gap of several centuries between the processes described by Weber and the development of cities on the other side of the Atlantic. Their internal stratification was also qualitatively different from that of Europe. The comparative study of urbanization processes in the Old and New Worlds allows us to better understand the characteristics of Latin American social and political history and its links, similarities and differences with European history.

Francisco Colom GonzálezLa ciudad en la tradición política hispanoamericana, en TEORIA E CULTURA (Brasil), Número monográfico sobre: Cidade, Música, Tempo, Barroco, Vol. 8, Núm.2  (2013), pp. 9-29. ISSN: 2318-101X

The City in the Political Tradition of Spanish America

Abstract: Territoriality, understood as political spatiality, is not merely a physical dimension, but a social production: the link between space, history and power. In this sense, the political territoriality of the Hispanic world has been eminently urban. One of the most characteristic features of its political tradition lies in its intimate connection with the city. The Hispanic political subject has historically been so in its condition of urbanized subject, a trait that reached its full meaning in the American enterprise. From the Roman municipium to modern populist movements, the urban condition has marked the territorial nomos of Hispanic societies. This text offers a long-range historical look at the changing role of the city in the Hispanic American political tradition: its founding rites and patterns, the function of its governing bodies during the colonial period, its contribution to the formation of nations, and its role as a stage for the mass movements of the twentieth century.