The suburban question: grassroots politics and place making in Spanish suburbs

Abstract

Manuel Castells spoke of the urban as a unit of collective consumption, yet much of the politics of collective consumption he documented was evident in the suburbs. The tendency for suburbs of most complexions to lack services and amenities has been and continues to be a focus of politics in Europe. In Spain, as elsewhere in Europe, a grassroots politics surrounding the making good of these deficits in basic services and amenities has broadened and formalised somewhat to become part of a competitive local representative politics concerned with shaping a sense of place. Here we consider this legacy of grassroots politics as it has played out more recently in a politics of place making in Getafe and Badalona in metropolitan Madrid and Barcelona. In conclusion we suggest that this enduring suburban question -of making the suburban urbanplaces them at the centre of contemporary metropolitan governance and politics. However it also raises further issues for study -notably the scalar politics in which suburban place-making is empowered or constrained, the role of political parties and individual politicians on the place making process, the point at which grassroots politics of collective consumption becomes urban entrepreneurialism.

Extended urbanization, “disjunct fragments” and global suburbanisms

“…Suburbanization here refers to “a combination of non-central population and economic growth with urban spatial expansion” (Ekers et al, 2015: 22). 1 Suburbanization today also includes processes of city building and re-building at the metropolitan edge that we can call post-suburbanization: “a process of de-densification (classical suburbanization) is partly converted, inverted or subverted into a process that involves densification, complexification and diversification of the suburbanization process” (Charmes and Keil, 2015: 581; Knox, 2017; Le Goix, 2017; Phelps, 2015; Phelps and Wu, 2011; Phelps et al, 2010, 2015; Sieverts, 2003). This is happening around the world in a variety of modalities of governance, involving a broad array of land markets and infrastructural constellations (Angel et al, 2010; Harris and Vorms, 2017; Keil, 2013).…”

Beyond the urban–suburban dichotomy

“…In their broad empirical study of 158 European agglomerations between 1991 and 2004, for instance, Kabisch and Haase (2011) found similar evidence of population mobilities having diversified. Perhaps even more graphically, suburbs are increasingly entry points for international migrants, pointing towards the consistent manifestation of suburban multicultural spaces (Frey 2001;Waters and Jiménez 2005;Dawkins 2009;Liu and Painter 2012;Phelps, Vento, and Roitman, 2015).…”

Rescaling the suburban: New directions in the relationship between governance and infrastructure

“…The examination of the relationships between the urban core and its suburban periphery demonstrates that these are frequently beset by political conflict and opposing objectives (Phelps et al., 2015). Cities are concerned with growth, not least as they demand more space for both wealth-generating activities and the needs of the people employed to support the economic system.…”