Here is the link to a recent post on Society and Space’s blog by Sophie Gonick, elaborating on her article ‘Indignation and inclusion: Activism, difference, and emergent urban politics in postcrash Madrid’, which was published in the last issue of EPD and is currently available for open access. The article is extremely interesting both in its taxonomy of local alternative housing movements and its insights about a prospective urban politics, but one gets an uneasy feeling while reading it. As Gonick explains in her post, the article was written when Ahora Madrid—the party now leading the City Council—was in the first steps of organization, and has been published about a month ago, at a moment when diverse radical voices are actually criticizing its compromises in several spheres (e.g. see here and here, in Spanish), in a new context where Realpolitik renders the limits of the institutional urban Left more obvious.

Somehow academic rhythms have turned into a measure of how history has accelerated in Spain in the last five years since the May 15 demonstrations in 2011. Something similar happened with the special issue that ACME published several months ago (previous post here), organized before some of its authors became the recognizable faces of political change in the country, and released when they were just warming up to engage in several electoral forays in late 2015. In a way, Spanish politics is ratifying that old intuition by Mandredo Tafuri: that all forms of critique—i.e. theory—are actually history.