The futile condition of something always entails a judgment of value and this applies to politics too, this judgment may be based on a goal that has to be attained (Peacock, this collection) or the intention of the protagonists (Llera Blanes, this collection). This is something I have learnt in my research and involvement with activist collectives and civic initiatives concerned with the city. Activist political practices are always subjected to a comparative view that tends to contrast their practices, goals and achievements to those of the institutional politics (parties, unions, etc.). This leads very often to judging activists’ doings (be it large actions or small gestures) as politically futile. This was my experience since 2010, when I spent almost three years engaged in a long ethnography with urban activists in the Madrid post-crisis. Participants in the 15M movement (Spanish precursor of the Occupy movement) periodically gathered in open air assemblies in the street where they debated on the most variegated issues and discussed the most mundane details at the cost of prolonging their meetings for hours… passers-by very often despised those assemblies and their devotion to the minutiae. A similar judgment was made in other occasions by external viewers contemplating vacant plots of land recuperated by neighbours and urban guerrillas and turned into urban community gardens and self-managed spaces. The modest auto-constructed infrastructures that enliven previously derelict spaces were considered worthless: urban anecdotes with limited (if any) value.

Engaging in these projects was not easy for participants. Neighbours and urban dwellers of diverse condition alike had to learn their way into the urban space. They had to acquire skills to speak in public or learn how to use digital technologies. Many of them developed abilities to mediate in conflicts and learnt to auto-construct (their own term) mundane infrastructures to refurnish the urban space with new capacities. Thrown into a city in a period crisis, neighbours engaged in experiments exploring novel forms of living together, as we have argued elsewhere (Corsín Jiménez and Estalella, 2017), and in these efforts they literally instructed the city about the political value of these collective experiments, as I describe below.

It was a Sunday winter morning when we got together in a community garden in the south of Madrid to hold one of the workshops of auto-construction organised by a pedagogic project I was involved at the time with an architect and three more urban gardeners: Ciudad Escuela (The City as a School). Participants had been called to intervene in a recently set up garden and build three pieces of furniture. They were handed out a manual of instructions describing in fine graphics how to de-assemble and reuse wood pallets for constructing a series of pieces of furniture (a bench, a table and a sand box), a common practice during these years.

The 32-page apprenticeship guide (Guía de aprendizaje) elaborated and distributed by Ciudad Escuela’s organisers showed two versions of a bench design called Herminio, it was accompanied of a collection of other pieces of furniture. The instruction manual nicely depicted in neat graphics the method to partially disassemble a wooden pallet followed by a ten-step process for constructing a bench. Despite their lack of experience, participants ignored the instructions and improvised their own designs. At the end of the day, three wooden pieces of furniture were installed in the centre of the garden. They had unusual shapes resembling a mix of flowerpot and bench. A few months later I found again the same instructions booklet in another Ciudad Escuela workshop in a different community garden located to the east of the city. A group of five men were building a bench, closely following step by step the guide in this occasion. Lying over the semi-built piece of furniture the instruction manual offered a glimpse into the bare and modest diagrams of the Herminio guide.

These manuals of instructions may resemble common how-to guides accompanying DIY commercial pieces of furniture, yet they are something different. The instructions I have described had been produced months before in another workshop organised in one of the most paradigmatic projects that emerged in Madrid during the crisis: El Campo de Cebada (The Barley Field), a large vacant plot located in the city centre self-managed by neighbours between 2011 and 2018. The instruction manuals had been produced by the urban guerrilla Zuloark and the Madrid Urban Community Gardens Network, both of them promoters of the Ciudad Escuela project. A few pieces of furniture constructed in the workshop were documented and then were later included in the manual of instructions circulating in other workshops. The instructions were thus not mere prescriptions (guiding the furniture assembly) but descriptions of previously auto-constructed infrastructures: diagrammatic accounts of a handcrafted city.

Considering the value of these diagrams, I would resort to the recent exploration of Michael Taussig of the practice of drawing, when he argues that ‘what’s important in drawing is the process of looking. A line drawn is important not for what it records so much as what it leads you on to see’ (Taussig, 2011: 22). Taussig is referring in his argument to the practice of drawing but I would suggest that the diagrammatic instructions lead others to see the city differently too. Despite their modesty, these instructions show a city that has been auto-constructed by its own inhabitants and neighbours in activities in which they look after the urban space.

Very often, when accompanying architects in different itineraries through the city, I was led to pay attention to details, objects and things that would have passed unnoticed to me had it not been for Manuel’s (a Zuloark member and part of Ciudad Escuela) practice of taking photos of any makeshift infrastructures like benches, tables or any other construction detail. In these moments, I learnt to appreciate the nuances of those modest designs. My sensibility was educated (or perhaps I should better say instructed) by travelling the city and going through the manuals, ‘how to’ guides and archives of instructions produced by many of these projects.

Working with grassroots in Mumbai engaged in the production of documentation in their fight for their right to the city, Arjun Appadurai (2006) has argued that documents are forms of intervention in the city. I would follow here this argument to consider those modest manuals as integral to the efforts of the auto-constructed city emerging in a period of crisis. I would like to suggest that these diagrams not only offer a guide to join together pieces of furniture but they assemble a distinctive urban sensibility, one that is able to appreciate the value of mundane materials and derelict spaces refurnished with precarious infrastructures. Manuals instruct us about the political value of the collective experiments in which people engage in the city: they teach how to dwell in the city, offering the practical knowledge needed to establish a different relation to the urban space, but beyond any practicality they instruct us about the political value of urban apprenticeship too. The city of auto-construction produces the documentary sources for the appreciation of its own political value.

While the political futility (or utility) of a practice is discussed sometimes (in this collection) as an external judgment to the activities under consideration, I would intimate that the above description shows something different: that politics always enacts its own regime of value, not only what is relevant and useful but what is political too. Judgments of futility thus evince the incapacity to understand the regime of value of those with divergent political horizons and, with it, futility instructs us to reconsider our own notions of politics.

References

Cite As

About the author(s)