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Paper short abstract

Cities act on individuals through a dual mechanism of alienation and hegemonic culturalisation, as well as encounter and emancipation. This paper explores how, when diverse epistemologies and ontologies mix, cities can cultivate counter-hegemonic ways of life within the framework of globalisation.

Paper long abstract

The city is often seen as a place of partial alienation for individuals: migrating from rural areas or simply moving to a new location for structural reasons leads individuals to detach from their communities and solidarity networks. At the same time, large cities, as globalisation’s capitals, are centres of innovation that spread and absorb new universalising traits of humanity. For these reasons, the city has always symbolised both a break from ancestral traditions or community bonds and, through the same mechanism, a path to emancipation and liberation from them.

During my ethnographic work on the Okupa and anti-touristification movements in Barcelona (Spain), it emerged that forms of anti-system organisations were configured as forms of decolonisation from the global capitalist system and of urban resistance.

In La Paz and El Alto (Bolivia), the city, historically a site of denial of indigenous identity due to racial discrimination in the South American context and to modern-Western cultural hegemony, is becoming a space for epistemic decolonisation for new generations. This is achieved through new forms of alternative gathering that liberate them from traditional communitarian diktats and, simultaneously, from Western colonisation. The result is counterhegemonic political movements that rebelliously renegotiate the ontologies of globalisation and indigenous ones.

In both ethnographic cases, the development of new community forms repairs the fractures between modernity and political/ethnic identity. These experiences suggest how cities can be reconceptualised as spaces of political resistance to certain globalisation, and, in the case of indigenous peoples, as hubs of transmodernity.