No abstract

The turn towards the knowledge-based economy and creative strategies to enhance urban competitiveness within it has been well documented. Yet too little has been said to date about the transformation of land use for new productive activities, and the contradictions inherent to this process. Our case study is Barcelona, an erstwhile 'model' for urban regeneration which has sought to transform itself into a global knowledge city since 2000. Through the lens of Marxian value theory, and Harvey's writing on urban monopoly rents especially, we show how the 22@Barcelona projectconceived with received wisdom about the determinants of urban knowledge-based competitiveness in mind -amounted to an exercise in the capture of monopoly rents, driven by the compulsion of public sector institutions, financiers and developers to pursue rental profit-maximizing opportunities through the mobilization of land as a financial asset.

This article examines the evolution of the ‘Barcelona Model’ of urban transformation through the lenses of worlding and provincialising urbanism. We trace this evolution from an especially dogmatic worlding vision of the smart city, under a centre-right city council, to its radical repurposing under the auspices of a municipal government led, after May 2015, by the citizens’ platform Barcelona en Comú. We pay particular attention to the new council’s objectives to harness digital platform technologies to enhance participative democracy, and its agenda to secure technological sovereignty and digital rights for its citizens. While stressing the progressive intent of these aims, we also acknowledge the challenge of going beyond the repurposing of smart technologies so as to engender new and radical forms of subjectivity among citizens themselves; a necessary basis for any urban revolution.

It is possible to identify a subterranean tradition within Marxism-one in which dialectical thought is harnessed not only to expose the necessarily exploitative and inherently crisis-prone character of capitalism as an actual system of social organisation, but also to critique the very categories that constitute capitalism as a conceptual system. This paper argues that Henri Lefebvre's work can be included within this tradition of "open Marxism". In demonstrating how Lefebvre's work on everyday life, the production of space and the state derives from his open approach, the paper flags a potential problem of antinomy in an emergent new state spatialities literature that draws upon Lefebvre to supplement its structuralist-regulationist ("closed") Marxist foundations. A Lefebvre-inspired challenge is therefore established: that is, to develop a critique of space which does not substitute an open theory of the space of political economy with a closed theory of the political economy of the regulation of space. Now all systems tend to close off reflection, to block off horizon. This work wants to break up systems, not to substitute another system, but to open up through thought and action towards possibilities by showing the horizon and the road. Against a form of reflection which tends towards formalism, a thought which tends towards an opening leads the struggle (Lefebvre 1996a:65).The unfixity of form signals its openness to a future (Gunn 1992:32).A flurry of recent publications of fresh material either about or by the French theorist Henri Lefebvre attests to the contemporary resonance of his ideas. As Neil Brenner and Stuart Elden survey (2001:763), Lefebvre's "writings have served as central reference points within a broad range of theoretical and political projects", ranging from urban theory and the struggle for substantive citizenship to debates over the meaning and politics of space. A dynamic and multifaceted thinker, Lefebvre came to address many of the questions for which his work is today considered germinal relatively late in his own life; however, throughout his writing he maintains a steadfast commitment to Marxism, to dialectical thought, and to a certain notion of critique. Unlike many of his French contemporaries, Lefebvre recognised the continuities running through German Idealism, Kant, Hegel and Marx; suspicious of dogma,

We are the unemployed, the poorly remunerated, the subcontracted, the precarious, the young … we want change and a dignified future. We are fed up with antisocial reforms, those that leave us unemployed, those with which the bankers that have provoked the crisis raise our mortgages or take our homes, those laws that they impose upon us that limit our liberty for the benefit of the powerful. We blame the political economic and economic powers for our precarious situation and we demand a change of direction. ¡Democracia Real YA! website, 2011 Thus explains one of the principal organisations behind the ‘movement of the indignant’ that has re-awakened popular political consciousness in Spain since 15 May 2011. 1 From its origins in a network of activists utilising new social media to coordinate a series of protest marches in cities across Spain, the ‘15-M’ movement has since staged camp-outs in several main city squares, and in the space of a month mobilised 40,000 protestors in Madrid and 80,000 in Barcelona to march against high unemployment, the policies and conduct of Spain’s political class, and to demand ‘real democracy NOW!’ As an important case of potential interest to Capital & Class readers in its own right, but also as one example of contemporary European mass movements like that of the aganaktismenoi in Greece, this report explains the motives and actions of los indignados, while also contextualising it within a critical materialist analysis of the political economy of Spain since the mid-20th century. It concludes with some open questions about the limits to the movement itself and its demands for real democracy and systemic change.