1. Radical Rupture at the Heart of the City: Institutional Occupations and the Revolution of Everyday Life in Barcelona
The barricades that emerged in the streets of Barcelona in July 1936 cannot be understood merely as military lines of defense composed of sandbags and uprooted paving stones. The barricade was a radical spatial sabotage directed against the vertical and striated geometry through which the state and capital divided, enclosed, commodified, and controlled urban space from above; it was the street’s own will to create its autonomous flow. The modern city, by contrast, is designed to ensure the uninterrupted circulation of commodities, capital, and labor along the lines of power, while enabling dominant forces to subject every street to geometric regulation and the earth itself to cadastral control. This design operates as a rigid regime of order—what may be called a “police order”—that determines from above who may speak, which bodies must remain invisible, and how space is to be distributed. It functions by partitioning the social into assigned shares and confining each subject within a predetermined functional boundary. The moment the barricade interrupts these vertical lines and suspends the rationalist rhythm of circulation, the state’s striated space is radically smoothed. The bourgeois character of space dissolves, and the street becomes a field of participation for nomadic subjectivities that perform and produce it through their actions.
In Barcelona, under the control of the anarchists (CNT-FAI), this spatial sabotage extended far beyond a state of military emergency and evolved into a constitutive social revolution that transformed the micropolitics of everyday life. The Telephone Exchange (Telefónica), banks, and transportation networks were not merely seized; the hierarchical spatial organization of these institutions was completely dismantled, allowing them to become spaces of a new social existence. Luxury hotels such as the Continental, Colón, and Falcón were transformed into collective kitchens and public dining halls. The operation of infrastructure and public services by workers without the need for any central authority spatially demonstrated that anarchism was not a utopia deferred to a distant future, but rather “a living, spontaneous, emergent, and contingent order that continuously arises within the cracks of social life and through non-state forms of association.”
From this perspective, revolution was not an event awaiting preparation or a distant object toward which one strives. It was a process continually reproduced in the signs of shops, the routes of trams, and the rhythms of the streets—something occurring in the immediacy of life, in the here and now. Free from myth and melancholy, it was direct, unmediated, and non-representational; immanent to time and embedded within space.
The aforementioned spatial and political rupture was transformed, through the testimony of George Orwell—an outsider who arrived in the city—into a concrete topography revealing how urban infrastructure and major arteries were fragmented into micro-political frontiers. Orwell describes how the Ramblas, the city’s vital artery, and public squares such as Plaza de Cataluña, with every building, hotel, and street they contained, became politically charged and how different political forces territorially positioned themselves within the urban fabric. While one end of a street could be under anarchist control, buildings such as the Hotel Colón or nearby observation posts just beyond it became territorial landmarks for opposing forces. This demonstrates that space was not a homogeneous whole; rather, the gaze behind every building and every window continuously remapped the street as a political terrain.
Furthermore, the ability of urban subjects to occupy such territorial landmarks instantaneously was inseparable from the historical memory embedded within the streets of the city. As Orwell’s accounts reveal, Barcelona possessed a deep tradition of street confrontations, and for this very reason, "local geography" was not a passive backdrop but a collective reflex inscribed onto the bodies of the masses. The moment gunfire erupted or a political crisis unfolded, subjects who had internalized the rough, embodied knowledge of the streets could “take their places as swiftly as in response to a fire alarm,” illustrating how space itself became an active agent in political struggle.
This instantaneous territorial positioning and mobility of political forces across the streets objectively reveals how the strategic regime of order imposed from above upon urban space could be dismantled within moments through the spatial tactics emerging from below.
Within this astonishing and all-encompassing atmosphere, where class habitus had been almost entirely erased from space, urban space was reorganized from top to bottom:
“…But for someone coming directly from England, the appearance of Barcelona was astonishing and overwhelming. It was the first time I had seen a city where the working class was in power. Nearly every building of any size had been seized by the workers and was draped with red flags or the red-and-black flags of the anarchists… Every shop and café displayed a notice declaring that it had been collectivized. Even the bootblacks had been collectivized and their boxes painted red and black.” (p. 11)
What was perhaps most striking politically, however, was the profound transformation in everyday social relations:
“Servile and even ceremonial forms of speech were disappearing. Nobody said ‘Señor,’ ‘Don,’ or even ‘Usted’ anymore; everyone addressed one another as ‘Comrade’ or ‘Thou.’ ‘Salud’ replaced ‘Buenos días.’ Tipping… had been made illegal… People were trying to behave not as cogs in the capitalist machine, but as human beings.” (pp. 11–12)
The most ordinary moments of everyday life had become constitutive acts of a new social existence. Orwell’s phenomenological depiction demonstrates that space no longer fit within the state’s artificial regime of the “public” or capital’s regime of “private” property. Rather, it had become a relational field of participation constituted by those who performed and produced the street through their collective practices.
Moreover, this rhizomatic mode of relation generated a new form of life even within the very ontology of the military organization established to defend that space. By completely abolishing the vertical hierarchy, ranks, and class distinctions of the conventional military apparatus, this new militia structure can be understood as the bodily extension of spatial horizontality. Such an army became a microcosm of a classless society; in Orwell’s observations, the militias constituted a kind of miniature example of a classless social order (p. 124). Within this army, there were no ranks, titles, salutes, or the blind obedience characteristic of conventional military discipline. An officer did not command a militiaman; they were already comrades, and he merely asked him to carry out a task for a common purpose. Discipline was therefore sustained not through a punitive system imposed from above, but through mutual trust and political consciousness rooted in class solidarity. As Orwell writes:
“Naturally there was not perfect equality, but there was a nearer approach to it than I had ever seen or than I would have thought conceivable in time of war.” (p. 37)
Orwell’s observations demonstrate that the force defending the city itself had been stripped of hierarchy, making even the practice of warfare a lived experience of a new and revolutionary mode of social existence.
Yet this moment also contained an inherent tension, a form of dual power. During the first months of the revolution, while the institutions of the old state apparatus remained physically intact, the streets and the sphere of production were governed by anarchist committees, producing a continuous field of struggle over the question of who truly held spatial sovereignty. This internal contradiction, as interpreted through Gün Zileli’s perspective, points to the revolution’s fatal existential struggle between compromising with existing institutional structures and deepening its own horizontal pathways. In the initial period—when militias marched to the front, factories were collectivized, and state mechanisms were effectively paralyzed—power existed de facto in the streets. However, once the old state apparatus was not entirely dismantled and tactical alliances were established with it (particularly through the governments of Largo Caballero), bureaucracy gradually and insidiously began to re-enclose space. Revolutionary committees were replaced by ministries, official decrees, and mechanisms of centralized control.
This dramatic development forces the anarchist spatial imagination to confront a crucial reality: it is threatened not only by external violence and top-down domination but also by every compromise with the state form—even when that form appears in Bolshevik or Leninist guise. In such moments, space is re-bureaucratized, and the everyday, living texture of the revolution begins to dry up and disappear.
The spatial rupture in question extended beyond urban infrastructure and evolved into a radical secularization of sacred spaces that had, for centuries, functioned as sites of symbolic production and representations of authority. As Julián Casanova points out in his examination of the institutional fractures within the social memory of the Spanish Civil War, churches and monasteries that dominated the hearts of cities as hegemonic centers of fascism, militarism, and large landowners were subjected—within the anarchist imagination—to the spatial liquidation of the Absolute itself. Indeed, the historical evidence and testimonies presented by Casanova concretely document the radical bending of the sacred toward everyday and secular realities:
“All churches were closed for worship and transformed into marketplaces, shops, accommodation for militiamen, prisons, dance halls, public canteens, or garages.” (p. 101)
The transformation of these structures—architectures of ideological domination of the ruling classes—into “lived spaces” through the burning anger of collective memory was not merely a transfer of ownership of buildings. Rather, it constituted the inversion, through space itself, of the symbolic superiority that ruling classes had inscribed for centuries onto the urban skyline and the production of consent: those deeply rooted cultural fortresses of hegemony.
The creation of everyday spaces by the people can be interpreted as an attempt to surround the mental and institutional strongholds of the old world from within the streets and, in Gramscian terms, to construct a new historical bloc. This deconstruction of sacred space completed the libertarian rupture produced by urban barricades; it was a constitutive act of destruction and insurrection that fundamentally destabilized the rigid hierarchies of space.
2. The Spatial Ethics of a Besieged City: Street Warfare and the Postcolonial Rupture in Madrid
As the center of the war shifted to Madrid, space was once again reproduced as a terrain of pure defense, resistance, and the radical coordination of everyday existence. The political discourse of the Republicans became spatially organized, acquiring the character of a concrete spatial barrier woven from building to building and from street to street throughout Madrid. When Franco’s armies besieged the city, Madrid’s rationalist urban order was structurally disrupted and transformed into a geography of struggle, a labyrinth of corridors, passages, and improvised defensive networks. Street warfare dissolved the city as a homogeneous administrative entity, transforming each neighborhood and each apartment block into fractured sites of resistance and autonomous spaces that established their own forms of self-governance.
On the Ciudad Universitaria (University Campus) front, while battles raged through the corridors of philosophy and science faculties, students and workers constructed barricades from library shelves and books. This intellectual defiance, also represented in cinematic works such as Mientras Dure la Guerra (While at War), assumed a material form in the physical reality of the streets and the frontlines. This practice constituted the literal embodiment of knowledge and space as a defensive shield against Falangist occupation and the creation of a topography of resistance. In Madrid, urban space became a hybrid ecology of resistance in which the battlefield and civilian life became deeply intertwined. The constitutive role of women within logistical committees and the continuous operation of neighborhood assemblies transformed the siege into a spatial experience of a new social contract.
However, this geography of urban defense was forced to confront a form of postcolonial violence that extended beyond the Spanish mainland: a violence of “internal colonialism.” Franco had learned the entirety of his military and spatial tactics during the colonial wars in Morocco. The ruthless logic of asymmetrical violence that had been considered legitimate in suppressing colonial populations, besieging settlements, and securing territorial control in Morocco was directly imported into the “metropole” through the transportation of Moroccan troops (Regulares) to Spain by ship (as cited in Zileli from C. C. Seidel, p. 63). This process closely corresponds to the dynamic emphasized in Stephen Graham’s theory of military urbanism: techniques of vertical, extralegal, and asymmetrical destruction tested in colonial territories inevitably return to the center—to Western cities themselves. For Franco, the streets of Madrid or Barcelona were no different from the colonial deserts of Morocco; they constituted a foreign and hostile geography to be dismantled, pacified, and rendered uniform.
Behind this psychopolitical siege also lay a more insidious spatial rupture and a strategy of psychological cartography. By deploying the Moroccan troops particularly to the bloodiest fronts of the siege of Madrid and urban street warfare, Franco sought to activate the deeply rooted fear of a “Moorish invasion” embedded in the historical memory of Republican populations and thereby transform urban space into a racialized landscape of fear. The historical-geographical borders drawn centuries earlier through the loss of al-Andalus, along with the collective traumas and melancholic memories attached to them, were reactivated by Francoist power as psychological instruments within the streets of the city. The horizontality of the street—the very condition of collective encounter and political agency—was thus targeted for paralysis.
The most tragic and politically profound dimension of this confrontation, however, lies in the encounter between the “internal colony” and the “external colony.” Franco recruited impoverished Moroccan peasants—products of the profound colonial dispossession created by Western capitalism and colonialism—and transformed them into instruments of death deployed in the streets of Spain. On the other side of the barricades stood workers, the unemployed, the poor, and the people of Madrid, resisting in defense of their own spaces of life against precisely that same regime of dispossession, namely the mechanisms of “internal colonialism” operating within the metropolitan center itself.
Thus, the subaltern subjects of Western capitalism’s “external colonies” were mobilized by the Francoist bloc as radical instruments of annihilation against those who had risen against the “internal colonies” of the center. Yet the urban geography, doubly besieged by this spiral of colonial violence and the operations of psychological cartography, did not surrender to a condition of total paralysis. On the contrary, this space became one of the most magnificent tactical refuges of “Temporary Autonomous Zones,” emerging in those intensified moments when the sovereignty of the state apparatus was radically interrupted, and when law and property were suspended beyond the horizons of absolute victories or permanent institutions. This process reached its most powerful expression in the Defense of Madrid.
3. Aragon: The Rejection of Title Deeds, the Space of Assemblies, and the Unenclosed Ecology of the Countryside
The urban uprising of the war extended beyond territorial boundaries and, in the rural landscapes of Aragon, evolved into a distinctly Kropotkinian geographical rupture. Kropotkin’s spatial thesis—which challenged the artificial division of labor between the city and the countryside and sought to reconcile industry and agriculture within an autonomous and integrated whole—found its practical realization in Aragon. The rural continuation of institutional occupations in the city manifested itself through the physical erasure of property boundaries that connected or separated villages, and through the burning of title deeds—the juridical texts of feudal and capitalist domination—in public squares. The reduction of land records to ashes represented the return of space from an abstract object of rent and a legal shackle back to the “earth” itself.
As Julián Casanova demonstrates in his mapping of the class geography of the period, the material foundations of this radical transformation become clear when examining the spatial contradiction between the feudal rural regions dominated by large landowners and the industrialized urban centers. The geographical rupture in which anarchist communes took root was not merely a military front line; it was a struggle against the latifundio regime that imposed property as a spatial boundary, and an attempt to reproduce the land as a limitless and unenclosed collective body.
It is precisely at this point that the crucial distinction clarified by Murray Bookchin in his examination of the history of revolutionary popular movements comes into view. Bookchin interprets this rural and urban experience in Spain not as a temporary chaos or a spontaneous wave of rebellion, but as the spatial manifestation of a deeply rooted network of libertarian municipalism and direct democracy. His historical analysis clearly reveals the revolution’s immediate transformative and constitutive dimensions. For Bookchin, the peasant and workers’ committees that emerged during the Spanish Revolution were not merely economic units of production or military cells of defense; rather, they were communal loci of authority that reconstructed everyday life from the bottom up.
“The revolution visibly transformed villages, towns, and neighborhoods at their very roots.”
In factories, village squares, and neighborhood assemblies, the masses who made collective decisions did not postpone the revolution as an abstract promise of tomorrow. Instead, they materialized it in the bread they shared, the justice they practiced, their autonomous forms of administration, and a new mode of civic life (pp. 219–220). In Bookchin’s conceptualization, this practice constituted an organic social ecology in which a space of assemblies—extending from factories to villages—absorbed and dissolved the vertical structures of power from below. War did not extinguish the constructive and organizational will of these assemblies; on the contrary, the necessity for communities to reorganize themselves every day deepened the revolution itself.
The moment of collective deliberation immortalized by Ken Loach in the village assembly scene of Land and Freedom serves as a powerful cinematic testimony to this processual revolution and the space of assemblies. In that scene, where peasants and militiamen debate the future of expropriated land, the removal of fences, and the collective organization of production, one revolutionary subject articulates a statement that encapsulates the transformed political ontology of the street and the earth at that very moment:
“If we do not collectivize the land now, there is no meaning in what we are fighting for. We are not soldiers of an abstract future to be established after victory; we fight by making the land common now, by creating a new life in the present.”
The truth captured through Loach’s camera demonstrates that revolution is not a deferred “golden age” awaiting a future moment; it is a way in which peasants and workers perform their own space in the immediacy of struggle, creating a new world in the very midst of conflict.
It is precisely through this vital experience that the ontology of a stateless sociality, grounded in the Kropotkinian vision as an evolutionary necessity, became visible upon the common ground of the street and the field. This moment of rupture—where a theoretical truth assumed the form of spatial action—was completed through the erasure of the abstract boundaries of property from the landscape. The destruction of field fences replaced an agricultural regime based on individual competition with an understanding of the land as a shared ecology upon which the existence of the community itself depended. The bundles of title deeds burned in village squares demonstrated that revolutionary peasants grasped a theoretical truth through spatial practice.
The state was not understood as a concrete building or institution to be demolished, but as a particular form of “relationship” between human beings; therefore, to abolish it meant to recreate those social relations in a fundamentally different manner. As fences were dismantled and land was collectivized, peasants also began to uproot the abstract spatial, bureaucratic, and statist relations that had governed their interactions. The capitalist rupture between the countryside and the city was challenged through the federation of village communes in Aragon with the syndicalist networks of Barcelona. Space was no longer merely an administrative map divided for the purposes of governance; it became a rhizomatic, boundless, and stateless geographical formation woven from below upward.
4. Guernica: The Colonization of the Sky and Vertical Siege
The radical horizontality woven by the anarchist movement across both the countryside and the city encountered one of the most brutal forms of vertical violence in history. The logic of military urbanism and axial siege, identified by Stephen Graham in his analyses of modern conflict zones, found one of its earliest experimental laboratories in Guernica. For Franco and the Nazi-supported Condor Legion, geography was no longer merely a horizontal plane upon which barricades were erected and factories occupied; it became a three-dimensional space to be colonized from above, disciplined through asymmetrical intervention.
The bombing of Guernica was an act of erasing civilian spaces of life, the memory of the street, and collective space itself from the map through an aerial, geometric, and technological rationality. As Graham emphasizes, when sovereign power loses control over the horizontal plane—over the street, the barricade, and the commune—or fails to absorb its heterogeneity, it retreats to the vertical axis. The sky is transformed into a panoptic domain of bombing, surveillance, and absolute annihilation.
This volumetric siege represented an attempt by totalitarian military cartography to capture and extinguish from above the libertarian and processual form of life emerging from below in Guernica. The true target was not merely military formations, but the very existence of a new, living, and popular everyday life that had begun to take root upon the earth.
Conclusion: The Uninterrupted Pathways of the Underground
The geographical legacy of the Spanish Civil War demonstrates that space is never a neutral and merely representational entity. Against the vertical and hierarchical geography of the rulers—a geography that draws its boundaries through bombs, surveillance, and sieges—emerges the people’s horizontal geography of barricades, occupations, de-enclosures, and commons. Each autonomous practice stands as a radical testimony that even at the very center of war and destruction, a new life and a constitutive everyday order can be created in the immediacy of the present. Revolution is not a static moment of victory and therefore not a finality that ends where it began; rather, it is a processual journey in which social relations are continuously reorganized and reinvented day after day.
Today, in this new age of military urbanism, where urban space is besieged in every dimension, where the sky is enclosed by drones and the earth by cameras and walls of property, we must once again remember the constitutive memory of the street and the commoning of the land. The will capable of disrupting the domination of administrative cartographies still appears to reside within the autonomous pathways of the underground. The chronicle of the Spanish Revolution continues to endure as a living memory and a constitutive possibility for the struggles of the present.
“We are not afraid of ruins. We are also capable of building. It was we who built the palaces and cities of Spain, the Americas, and every corner of the world. We workers can build the cities that will replace them—and we will build them far better. We are not afraid of ruins. The whole world is our inheritance. The bourgeoisie may burn and destroy its own world before leaving the stage of history. But we will remain, carrying a new world in our hearts. And that world is growing at this very moment…”
— Buenaventura Durruti
References
Bookchin, M. (2014). From the Spartacists to the Spanish Civil War (A. Sarı, Trans.). Dipnot.
Casanova, J. (2015). A Brief History of the Spanish Civil War (U. Kocabaşoğlu, Trans.). İletişim.
Graham, S. (2013). Cities Under Siege (L. Aydeniz, Trans.). Nota Bene.
Orwell, G. (2017). Homage to Catalonia
(This article was previously published in Praksis Güncel under the title The War of the Earth and the Sky: Spain ’36 — Space-Political Struggle, the Topography of Revolution, and Radical Coordinates.
Available at: Praksis Güncel - https://praksisguncel.org/yeryuzunun-ve-gokyuzunun-savasi-ispanya-36-mekan-politik-mucadele-devrimin-topografyasi-ve-radikal-koordinatlar/)
Comments