News

07. | 08. | 14. June

07.June - 3.15 pm - Panel Debate at the Campusfest "Urban revolutions? New Municipalisms in Spain and Croatia"

Campus Center, Moritzstr.18, Raum 1117/1118 (Seminarraum 4 und 5)

From the 'movement of squares', anti-austerity protests and strike actions in 2011/2012 in many cities and municipalities of Spain new associations between movements and parties have been created - so-called municipalist lists. These hybrid projects have crossed the threshold of local state institutions in 2015 after the communal elections. Since almost three years they form part of the city councils (and governments) in e.g. Barcelona, Madrid, Valencia, Zaragoza, Santiago und Badalona and are translocally connected in a network of rebel cities in Europe and beyond. Also in the post-yugoslav context a confluence of various movements has created a municipalist platform in Zagreb and is since May 2017 present in the city council and municipal bodies at lower levels.
Municipalist practices comprise a democratisation of institutions and extension of citizens' self-government, the struggle against the further brutal privatisation of life and against austerity policies, the disturbance of politics as usual and the subversion of authoritarian nation states.

The panel debate brings together

• Kike España Naveira, Ph. D. candidate at the University of Seville, activist in La Casa Invisible (http://www.lainvisible.net/) in Málaga and involved in the municipalist movement in Spain
• Isabell Lorey, Professor for Gender Politics in Political Science, University of Kassel and member of the EIPCP and in the editorial board of the book series transversal texts (transversal.at), she works on issues such as the precarization of labour and life in neoliberalism, democracy and representation, as well as social movements and municipalisms.
• Jelena Miloš of Zagreb je NAŠ!(Zagreb is Ours)  (http://www.zagrebjenas.hr/)

08.June - 9.30 - 13.30 - Workshop "Urban revolutions? New Municipalisms in Spain and Croatia"

Arnold-Bode-Straße 8, 0112

The day after the panel debate, there will be a workshop to discuss more in depth the issues raised the day before - the interaction between movements and institutions, the creative potential of municipalism in practice, its limits and contradictions and how such experiences can be a basis to learn and invent in different contexts struggles against the economic, social and political crises of the present. For the workshop, Kike España Naveira and Jelena Miloš of Zagreb je NAŠ!  will join.

14.June - 6 pm - Talk on "Policing the poor in Early Republican Ankara: Historical formation of urban space, state and classin Altindag"

ICDD, Kleine Rosenstraße 1-3, big seminar room

Çağlar Dolek, PhD candidate at Carleton University, Canada.

In his research Çağlar Dolek develops a critical analysis of the historical formation of Altındağ shantytowns from the 1920s onwards, a period when an assertive modernization project was undertaken by the ruling Kemalist cadres in the name of creating a bourgeois capital city out of an Anatolian town. Altındağ emerged as a harbor of “the servants of the city” within a period when Yenişehir was formed through deliberate political attempts increasingly conditioned by land and construction rents. The socio-culturally heterogeneous population of Altındağ was perceived as “the occupiers of the public land,” and thereby politically constituted as a public order problem by the ruling cadres of early Republican Ankara. The response was a peculiar policing project, which was engineered and consolidated on spatial, political and ideological grounds. This fundamental politics of the police arose on the basis of three mutually enforcing and closely intertwined dynamics: policing the urban space, political fabrication of the urban poverty and moral regulation of daily life.