DOCSPACE: Documenting, Observing and Co-producing Spatial Practices and Audiovisual Counter-Imaginaries in Autonomous Urban Spaces

Objetivo

DOCSPACE investigates how, in contexts of financialisation and media concentration, urban social movements create, use and defend self-managed spaces, turning housing, care and civic practices into common goods. Using Tepito (Mexico City) as a laboratory with implications for Europe, the project operationalises Lefebvre’s theory of space through a new analytical triad: emancipatory practices, contextual narratives, collective dynamics. It addresses the main deficit in the study of autonomous spaces, namely the lack of an integrated framework linking material practices and symbolic–narrative dimensions with comparable and reusable tools, capable of translating local evidence into procedures transferable across contexts.

By integrating urban studies, critical geography, visual anthropology and media studies, DOCSPACE connects practices, audiovisual narratives and organisation within a unified framework, treating the audiovisual both as research data and as public communication with traceable circulation. Three objectives guide the work: (1) to document everyday management and care practices that sustain autonomous spaces; (2) to co-produce and analyse an audiovisual corpus to understand counter-imaginaries and processes of legitimation; (3) to design and validate the Spatial Triad Analytical Toolkit (STAT) for adoption by civic networks.

The methodology combines activist ethnography, mapping, archival recovery and new ethnographic filming, within a multimodal and open science design. The research path foresees 24 months in Mexico City and 12 in Madrid; a six-month non-academic placement at Habita65 (Lisbon) will test STAT in European contexts, supporting its adoption. DOCSPACE is ambitious as it makes the theory of space operational in a measurable triad, innovates methodology by linking ethnography and audiovisual production to legitimacy metrics, and translates results into shared tools that strengthen dialogue between research, movements and institutions.