Organizing through and for the urban space. Experiencing of and reflecting on Marghera (mainland Venice)

The present paper represents an exploration of how alternative forms of organizing perform spatial practices to accomplish their social and cultural missions. By analyzing three different case studies of organizations based in the same urban context, we manage to shed light on differences and similarities of the activities made through and towards the spatial dimension, when alternative organizing aims at altering or criticizing how social relations and communities are ruled by dominant power structures. Our study contributes to the literature by showing how alternative organizations enact spatial practices managing to deform their organizational boundaries, expand their reach and scaling through relational networks, and take distance from others’ influence to recreate safe spaces and conduct their activities without external contaminations. All of these spatial practices, we observe, are linked to a peculiar attention to everydayness, both in the sense that they hinge on mundane activities to persist and that entail apparently trivial interaction rituals that imbue organizational spaces with symbolic and emotional valence transforming them into lived spaces.