POLITICAL SUBJECTIVITIES IN URBAN SPACES

Abstract

The text discusses the constitution of political subjectivities in urban spaces, examining how concrete social practices reconfigure the normativity that structures life in cities. Drawing on the debate surrounding the “right to the city,” it argues that contemporary urban politics operates beyond the classical logic of inclusion and exclusion, instead mobilizing a selective, unstable, and plural dynamic of belonging. It shows that subjects do not preexist the political scene but are performatively constituted through occupying, crossing, and resignifying urban space. Heterotopias, spatial crossings, and infragovernmental practices reveal how everyday forms of resistance, adaptation, and agency create fissures in urban ordering and in institutionalized discourses. Examples such as the reinvention of suburbs by Latin American immigrants or the processes of subjectivation among refugees highlight forms of negotiation and counter-conduct that destabilize rigid categories of citizenship and identity. In this context, politics appears as a contingent event, marked by the emergence of singularities capable of displacing the police order. The urban thus emerges as a privileged space of democratic experimentation, in which differences coexist, collide, and generate new possibilities for life in common.