Asambleas y prototipos, ambos constituyen formas urbanas que beben del imaginario de la cultura libre y de sus infraestructuras materiales para proponernos nuevas maneras de imaginar y practicar la ciudad. Ese es el argumento fundamental tras mi proyecto postdoctoral. Recoge buena parte del trabajo conjunto realizado con Alberto Corsín Jiménez en los últimos tres años. Me marcho en febrero de 2013 a la Universidad de Manchester para escribir sobre ello. La Generalitat de Catalunya me concedió una beca postdoctoral y pasaré allí al menos dos años colaborando con Penny Harvey.

Lo que sigue es el resumen del proyecto y su versión completa: Open urban forms. An anthropological analysis of civic experimentation with free culture in the city. Sólo ocasionalmente publicamos nuestros proyectos de investigación, pero si hemos de practicar una ciencia en borrador, qué hay más en borrador que un proyecto futuro.   El presente fue elaborado con la ayuda de Alberto Corsín y las lecturas atentas de Rebeca Ibáñez Martín y Ana Vitores.

The city has become the paradigmatic site for social struggles in the context of large urban transformations during the twentieth century. An intense renovation of some forms of civic political associations has taken place resulting from the incorporation of Internet and digital technologies in the political activism since the late nineties. This project aims to explore the transformations in the way the city is imagined and practiced in urban contexts where forms of relationality and political association are intensively mediated by digital technologies. More specifically its research object are the urban articulations of what has started to be known as free culture. Free software has emerged since the mid-nineties as one of the most exceptional creations of the Internet, it has been considered a model for innovation, a form of production and governance of knowledge and a radical innovation in the regimes of intellectual property. The notion of free culture points to the extension of this social form to new domains. The concept of open urban forms follows up into this trail and tries to conceptualize the novel urban articulations of free culture.

The project aims to research the next two interrelated questions: how is free culture spatially translated in contexts of civic political association? And how is the city imagined and practiced in those contexts drawing on free culture? This proposal sets up the continuation of a 24-month ongoing ethnography conducted in two field sites in Madrid (a medialab and an assembly of the 15M indignados movement). More specifically the project aims to: (i) analyze the urban articulations of free culture and its spatial translation into specific places, (ii) describe and analyze the novel modes of relationality and political association which produce a new “right to the city ” drawing on the language and material infrastructure of free culture, (iii) describe and analyze the emergence of novel forms of production of public space and the new models of urban citizenship which are inspired in free culture. The project aims to contribute to three areas of knowledge: the anthropological study of digital culture, urban anthropology and the social studies of science and technology.

 Imagen: Acampadasol. Puerta del Sol, mayo de 2011, Madrid. Julio Albarrán. Licencia CC by-nc-sa.