Street art and new forms of urban belonging

Street and action art has become an important resource for those who are widely excluded from hegemonic social, economic, political and cultural participation. Alternative cultural expressions are nowadays synonyms for the countervailing power of the subalterns. This was nicely documented at the example of the symbolic re-appropriation of North American cities since the late 1960s through Graffiti. While Graffiti has been used mainly by young artists to allow for the articulation of political and other forms of self-manifestations, there are nowadays different forms of street and action art used by activists and migrant groups to escape from voicelessness, to articulate exclusion and the lack of rights and access to resources. By that means new forms of individual and collective identities are reconstructed, new forms of urban belongings are produced, and citizenship is enacted by those who are not seen by the polity.

There is no space where individual and collective identities of migrants can better be studied than in the urban space. Recent migration flows to Spain have transformed the urban space in Madrid into a playground for the articulation of migrants’ position and positioning in the world. Here, the cultural expressions may evoke both, the re-affirmation of naturalized collective identities and belongings or the breaking up of pre-defined social boundaries in favour of new collectivities.

Giving the example of an immigration neighborhood and a self managed social and cultural Center in Madrid it will be shown in how the symbolic re-appropriation of the urban space counteracts rehabilitation programs to commercialize and control the city and thus repel heterogenous urban and migrant lifelihoods.