Global social activism, DIY culture and lack of institutional help

Since the 2008 world economic crisis, new and different ways of community organization, resilience and urban initiatives for provisioning and survival have emerged all over the world in an attempt to create urban spaces and opportunities in areas where institutions and governments are unable or unwilling to devote time and resources. Also, economic and sustainable models have found physical spaces from which to operate in the aftermath of the crisis and outside the ontological frame of extreme neo-liberalism. This article discusses the approximations to these initiatives in three texts addressing urban contexts in the United States (Detroit), Spain (Seville, Barcelona, Bilbao and Madrid) and Mexico (Mexico City). These three works call attention to the specificity of these projects and expose recent approaches to community building and organizational solutions in the Hispanic world.