Free Culture and the City

Free Culture and the City examines how and why free software spread beyond the world of hackers and software engineers and became the basis for an urban movement now heralded by scholars as a model for emulation.

By the late 1990s, digital activists embraced a philosophy of free software and "free culture" in order to take control over their cities and everyday lives. Free culture, previously tethered to the digital realm, was cut loose and used to reclaim and resculpt the city. In Madrid the effects were dramatic. Common sights in the city were abandoned as industrial factories turned into autonomous social centers, urban orchards, guerrilla architectural camps, or community hacklabs.

Drawing on two decades of ethnographic and historical work with free culture collectives in Madrid, Free Culture and the City shows how, in its journey from the digital to the urban, the practice of liberating culture required the mobilization of, and alliances between, public art centers, neighborhood associations, squatted social centers, hackers, intellectual property lawyers, street artists, guerrilla architectural collectives, and Occupy assemblies.

Alberto Corsín Jiménez is Associate Professor in the Department of Social Anthropology at the Spanish National Research Council in Madrid. He is the author of An Anthropological Trompe l'Oeil for a Common World and editor of Prototyping Cultures, Culture and Well-being, and The Anthropology of Organisations. Follow him on X @acorsin.

Adolfo Estalella is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the Complutense University of Madrid. He coedited Experimental Collaborations and is founding convenor of Colleex. Follow him on X @aestalella.

Through its vivid stories of a world of activists, feminists, hackers, architectural collectives, geeks, neighbor assemblies and cooperatives, Free Culture and the City inspires us to imagine new possibilities for our cities and communities. It's a must-read for anyone who cares about the future of our cities, and the role of technology and culture in shaping it.

Marisol de la Cadena, UC Davis, author of Earth Beings:

This is ethnography at is best, writing as constant unraveling: descriptions reveal methods able to make concepts that, in turn, become epistemic tools of both, movements and ethnographers, to relentlessly fold copyright and the right to the city into each other through practices of doing, sensing, affecting, and caring.

Erik Swyngedouw, University of Manchester, author Promises of the Political:

Beautifully written and carefully crafted, Free Culture and the City fuses together theoretical insights and ethnographic analysis, conveying the same joyfulness that was part and parcel of the activist mobilization and activities it reports on. A pleasure to read.