[Air-L] Free Culture and the City interview

[Ilana Gershon]

Dear Colleagues,
Alberto Corsín Jiménez and Adolfo Estalella discuss their book,Free Culture
and the City: Hackers, Commoners, and Neighbors in Madrid, 1997–2017, with
Nomaan Hasan today on the CaMP blog.

campanthropology.org

Best,
Ilana

Press blurb: *Free Culture and the City* examines how and why free software
spread beyond the world of hackers and software engineers and became the
basis for an urban movement now heralded by scholars as a model for
emulation. By the late 1990s, digital activists embraced a philosophy of
free software and "free culture" in order to take control over their cities
and everyday lives. Free culture, previously tethered to the digital realm,
was cut loose and used to reclaim and resculpt the city. In Madrid the
effects were dramatic. Common sights in the city were abandoned as
industrial factories turned into autonomous social centers, urban orchards,
guerrilla architectural camps, or community hacklabs.

Drawing on two decades of ethnographic and historical work with free
culture collectives in Madrid,* Free Culture and the City* shows how, in
its journey from the digital to the urban, the practice of liberating
culture required the mobilization of, and alliances between, public art
centers, neighborhood associations, squatted social centers, hackers,
intellectual property lawyers, street artists, guerrilla architectural
collectives, and Occupy assemblies.