From cigarreras to indignados: Spectacles of scale in the CSA La Tabacalera of Lavapiés, Madrid

In Lavapiés, Madrid, the Centro Social Autogestionado La Tabacalera (The Tobacco Factory Self-Managed Social Centre) recalls the prevalence of the cigarrera in the popular theatre of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries while continuing the neighbourhood’s contemporary tradition as one of the epicentres in Madrid for grass-roots activist politics. While these connections activate cultural circuits of meaning that simultaneously evoke local and national imaginaries, they have made La Tabacalera a site where the intersection of the scales of the local, the urban and even the national has been a key component of the convergence of culture and space that urban theorist Henri Lefebvre would call lived space. Through a close reading of a series of cultural events held at La Tabacalera in 2010 and an analysis of the discourses of scale found in the ‘Dossier de Renovación del Convenio’ (‘Renewal Agreement Dossier’) from 2011, the present article will demonstrate how cultural production at the scale of the urban has been employed as a means of resisting spatial and cultural commodification at a range of other scales.