By interrogating Spain’s contemporary migration apparatus through a decolonial lens, this article unveils the hidden continuities between colonial power structures and present-day urban governance, particularly in Hospitalet de Llobregat. Dorrego traces how state-led urban policies and migration controls—from detention centers (CIEs) to real estate speculation—echo the disciplinary logics rooted in Francoist developmentalism and extend them through a neoliberal framework. Migration is not merely regulated through laws but is spatially governed, embedded in urban form, bureaucratic procedures, and racialized exclusion zones. Drawing from Mignolo’s “coloniality of power,” the text emphasizes that modern state institutions manage life through biopolitical instruments that produce dispossession, invisibility, and subordination. Particularly insidious is the construction of "cultural inadaptability" as a justification for excluding migrants from citizenship and urban belonging. These practices naturalize spatial inequality and create urban invisibilities, in which racialized bodies are confined, erased, or criminalized. Rather than treat these exclusions as policy anomalies, the article frames them as systemic technologies of spatial control derived from colonial epistemologies. The argument culminates in a call for epistemic disobedience and radical decolonization of urban planning, insisting that the true revision of urban life will only be possible when cities are imagined and constructed outside the frameworks of colonial inheritance.
Dorrego, N. (2015) ‘Fuera de marco. No habrá revisión si no es (de)colonial’, URBS. Revista de Estudios Urbanos y Ciencias Sociales, 5(2), pp. 257–263.
