%0 Journal Article
%A Corsín Jiménez, Alberto
%A Estalella Fernández, José Adolfo
%T The atmospheric person: value, experiment, and “making neighbors” in Madrid’s popular assemblies
%D 2013
%U https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14352/100573
%X The Occupy movement in Spain, locally known as the May 15 movement (15M), singularlydeveloped throughout 2011 into a network of local neighborhood “popular assemblies.”Over one hundred assemblies cropped up in Madrid alone. This article explores theconceptual and infrastructural work invested by the assemblies in the production of aparticular experience of neighborhood (barrio). The barrio has become the centerpiece ofthe assemblies’ political and geographical imagination. We offer here an ethnographicaccount of how the work of assembling is constitutive of a new experience of relationality,which assembly-goers refer to as “making neighbors.” One makes neighbors throughprocesses of deambulation and through an investment in the rhythmic and atmosphericproduction of space. The neighbor fares thus as an atmospheric person. Further, in thisguise it has become both a model of and a model for political citizenship expressive of aright to the city. People’s exploration of the question, “What is a neighbor?” offers anethnographic case study on the invention of novel forms of social relations and politicalvalues in an urban commons—on the rise of the urban persona of the neighbor as a socialcum-political experimenter. Value, then, as an experimental form.
%~