Presentation short abstract

This research explores how collective practices of care and social reproduction in Barcelona’s public spaces re-signify urban life, challenging neoliberal security policies and fostering a transfeminist reimagining of the city through embodied resistance and desire.

Presentation long abstract

This research focuses on the city of Barcelona and examines the relationship between space, time, and body as a central axis for understanding urban dynamics and the forms of exclusion produced by global and local security and prevention plans. These policies, embedded within a neoliberal framework, generate processes of displacement and expulsion of Otherness from public space, reinforcing vulnerabilities tied to the commodification of the city. Building on Cooper’s Everyday Utopias (2016) and redefining utopia as a practice, the central research question guiding this work is: how can the collective work of social reproduction in Barcelona’s urban public space, carried out by groups that transgress socio-spatial codes, contribute to a political re-signification of those spaces?

The hypothesis argues that the processes of reappropriation of neighborhoods by non-normative and desiring bodies generate transformations that place care and life at the center of a new conception of the space–time relationship. The study suggests that inhabiting public space with these bodies constitutes a political and affective practice that challenges the sexist and racist rhetoric of “citizen security,” opening up new forms of resistance and self-organization. Through the analysis of urban policies and local legislation in Barcelona from the late 1990s to the present, the research traces the effects of urban transformations and the responses of social movements. In this context, desire functions as a compass for imagining a possible transfeminist city, where connections, care, and everyday utopias act as transformative forces.