The concept of lived space unsettles the neutral image of the city as geometry or infrastructure. It insists that urban space is never simply built or planned, but experienced through everyday practices, conflicts, and symbolic attachments. When capitalist urbanisation advances through the circuits of finance and real estate, lived space becomes the terrain where its contradictions are revealed: rising housing costs, displacement, and the erosion of common life. What appears as orderly planning is often a strategy of domestication, absorbing dissent and converting neighbourhoods into spaces of controlled consumption. The destructive effects of financialised urbanisation in cities such as Barcelona exemplify this tension. Global flows of capital exceed municipal regulation, transforming housing into an asset class and narrowing the margins for social use. Yet, precisely in these fractures, lived space stages its rebellion. Informal practices, community networks, and everyday appropriations resist enclosure, keeping alive the use-value of the city against its reduction to exchange-value. These struggles do not merely defend existing urban forms but propose alternative modes of inhabitation, rehearsing a differential urbanity. The link between architectural practice, artistic experimentation, and critical urban thought underlines how space is shaped not only by economic power but also by imagination. From Hansen’s “form of the possible” to Constant’s utopias, spatial invention has always operated as a political gesture, exposing other ways of living together. Lived space, therefore, is both vulnerable and insurgent: vulnerable to the circuits of capital, insurgent in its capacity to generate counter-practices that interrupt them. The rebellion of lived space is not spectacular but persistent. It emerges in neighbourhood assemblies, in the reclamation of housing as a right, in small appropriations of streets and squares that resist privatisation. These acts, however minor, accumulate into an urban offensive that challenges the logics of accumulation and affirms the city as a collective work. What is at stake is not only the form of the city but the possibility of producing another social order through space itself.
