Paper short abstract:

This paper discusses the archiving practices of activist projects of urban intervention, I elaborate the notion of urban archive and describe how these technologies turn into epistemic devices that bring into existence new urban sensibilities.

Paper long abstract:

This paper discusses the archiving practices of activist projects of urban intervention, I elaborate the notion of urban archive and describe how these technologies turn into epistemic devices that bring into existence new urban sensibilities. Archives have proliferated in our societies accompanying the extension of digital technologies; any event is now documented and published on the Internet. Activist initiatives, civic projects and social movements have incorporated archives as part of their digital everyday practices. This is evident in different projects of urban intervention in Madrid like the occupation of allotments, urban gardens or initiatives of material interventions in the public space. I draw on an ethnography that turned into a collaborative project with two architectural collectives whose work is focused on urban interventions in the urban public space to describe how these collectives use archives to document specific places in the city. I contend that these archives are devices for the production of knowledge and sites for the apprenticeship of new urban sensibilities. My argument is that the urban archives points out to a spatial reconfiguration of the places of knowledge production over the city and they respond to the idea that digitization has made vanished the physical place of records. Urban archives signal the complex dynamics in which the past, present and future are articulated in specific places in the city through a particular device for remembering the past and expecting a different future.