City

I am an anthropologist interested in the city. My work investigates how urban grassroots produce novel forms of urbanism and alternative forms of city life. I have investigated with concerned residents and neighbours that take a hold of the urban affairs and speculate with alternative modes of urbanity.

I have carried out my work in Madrid, my first ethnographic project was carried out in three stages between 2010 and 2015. Central in this project was an ethnography I developed with the Indigados movement, the 15M movement of 2011, Spanish precursor of the Occupy movement.

My current project investigates the transformation of property regimes and the production of alternative relations of property in the city. I am intrigued by a number of urban projects that problematize traditional conceptions of liberal ownership and design alternative modes of property in the city.

Selected Publications

Alberto Corsín Jiménez & Adolfo Estalella. 2017. Political exhaustion and the experiment of street: Boyle meets Hobbes in Occupy Madrid. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 23(S1):110-123. (PDF)

Alberto Corsín Jiménez & Adolfo Estalella. 2017. Ecologies in beta: the city as infrastructure of apprenticeships. In Infrastructure and Social Complexity: A Routledge Companion, eds. Penny Harvey, Casper Bruun Jensen and Atsuro Morita, 141-156. London and New York: Routledge. (PDF)

Adolfo Estalella & Alberto Corsín Jiménez. 2016. Matters of sense: pre-occupation in Madrid’s popular assemblies movement. In A. Blok & I. Farías (Eds.), Urban cosmopolitics: Agencements, Assemblies, Atmospheres (pp. 147-163): Wiley-Blackwell. (PDF)

Alberto Corsín Jiménez y Adolfo Estalella y zoohaus. 2014. Assembling Neighbors. The City as Archive, Hardware, Method. Common Knowledge 20:150-171. (PDF)

Adolfo Estalella y Alberto Corsín Jiménez. 2013. Asambleas al aire: la arquitectura ambulatoria de una política en suspensión. Revista de Antropología Experimental, 13, 73-88. (PDF)

Projects

Madrid, a medias
A series of three exhibitions dedicated to the narrate forms of emergent grassroots urbanism developed in Madrid during the period 2007-2017. It was exhibited in the public cultural centre Centro Centro in Madrid in 2017-2018.

Sendas (o)cultas
Sendas Sendas (o)cultas es un proyecto que navega entre la investigación y la intervención artística realizado en el barrio madrileño de Fuencarral durante el año 2020. El proyecto está movido por el afán de desvelar de esos saberes diseminados por la ciudad (y ocultos) a través de los cuales podemos aprender otras formas de relacionarnos con la naturaleza urbana (en su doble sentido). Más sobre Sendas (o)cultas en Ciudad Huerto.


Image: Puerta del Sol square (Madrid), during the 15M/Indigados encampment in May 2011. Credits: Julio Albarrán.