New Processes of Collective Identity and Political Praxis: The Emergence of Neighborhoodnalism in Madrid, Spain

At the end of the 1960s, neighborhood movements burst onto the municipal agenda in many metropolitan environments worldwide through numerous demands related to basic needs. In Madrid, these demands took different neighborhood spaces and some former municipalities that were integrated as districts in the city's urban core as a geographic scale of reference. This placed these locations at the center of the political debate, which gradually faded away as a result of the various municipal reforms developed during the first two decades of parliamentary democracy in Spain. In the last fifteen years, neighborhood demands have taken a different turn, as a political phenomenon has appeared linked to new forms of neighborhood protest called neighborhoodnalism. This process was not diminished during the hardest moments of the global covid-19 pandemic; rather, it has been strengthened as a dynamic of political socialization, solidarity, and daily resistance in many of Madrid's neighborhoods. As a result, the referents and elements of identification around the neighborhood, as well as the political practice of neighborhoodnalism itself, have been expanded. From a spatial perspective of neighborhood movements that considers political identity as a dynamic and resignified process through protest and collective organization, and through ethnography and the analysis of in-depth interviews held over five years in the Madrid district of Hortaleza around the Three Kings Parade, this paper studies how these socio-political practices are being articulated in urban space and how the learning of this form of spatial socialization is influencing Madrid's municipal agenda as a whole.