Barrio en construcción: an urban political ecology of place-making and displacement in la Cañada Real Galiana (Madrid)

This paper is centred on la Cañada Real Galiana, an informal settlement in the southeast periphery of Madrid. For two years, sectors 5 and 6 of Cañada Real have had no electricity due to a yet unsolved electricity outage on October the 2nd 2020. In its aftermath, the pertinent administrations have prioritised the continuation of pre-existing policy for the progressive dismantlement and re-housing of Cañada, without directly addressing the outage; residents have consistently mobilised not only for the restoration of the electricity supply - but for the regularisation of Cañada and its recognition as a neighbourhood like any other in Madrid. Drawing from recent contributions in Urban Political Ecology, this paper argues that the current conict over the electricity outage is best understood within a broader struggle of place-making and displacement in Cañada Real, closely embedded in the processes of suburbanization of nature that have unfurled in Southeast Madrid. This argument is supported through a combination of interpretive policy analysis, discourse analysis, and qualitative interviewing; most prominently, Bacchi’s What’s the Problem Represented to be? approach to policy analysis is employed as the guiding thread structuring the text. We rst investigate how constructions of place in/of Cañada have been scripted and addressed in media and policy discourse over the last decades, and how they have enabled specic representations and interventions upon the settlement. Followingly, and seeking to develop a situated understanding of the current conict, the paper investigates the everyday practices of encroachment on the ordinary through which residents of Cañada have progressively created a neighbourhood of their own. Lastly, we evaluate the everyday, embodied, aective and dierentiated experiences of displacement that have been engendered by the re-housing programmes - and, more prominently, by the everyday, accumulated burdens of energy deprivation.