October 2026
In October 2019, the occupied streets, the mobilized bodies and the multitudes who said enough expressed a revolt that was not an isolated event, but part of something that was already happening in other parts of the world: Ecuador, Haiti, Iraq, Lebanon, Hong Kong and France.
An October marked by a challenge to an order that organizes not only the economy, but also the ways of inhabiting, moving through and surviving in the territory.
It seemed possible that space might cease to be understood solely as property, commodity or mechanism of control, and could once again become a common ground of conflict, encounter and life.
But what came next was neither emancipation nor the creation of a revolutionary subject. The social force of the revolt was transformed, to a large extent, into an institutional process.
Seven years later, the outcome is different: the strengthening of the far right, the normalization of its discourses on migration, security and order, and the establishment of an authoritarian common sense.
This political reaction does not occur in a vacuum, nor does it affect all territories in the same way. It unfolds over concrete spatialities, at different scales and at different speeds.
Climate chaos manifests itself in droughts, fires, floods and displacements. Forced migrations encounter increasingly militarized borders. Violence unequally affects racialized, feminized, dissident, impoverished and non-human bodies.
Meanwhile, extractivism continues to open up territories for lithium, copper, water, salmon and other resources.
Added to these crises is a housing crisis that expels, overcrowds and precarizes, together with a deeper crisis in our relationship with the non-human: with those others who are not simply «resources», but beings and forms of life with whom we share territories that, very often, we also dispute.
In the face of these transformations, the question of territory becomes unavoidable: how is space organized? Who decides over it? Which forms of life are sustained and which are displaced?
In the face of this accumulation of crises, anarchist geographies did not remain on the sidelines.
They built a radical critique of the institutions of power and, at the same time, sought to understand and accompany the concrete ways in which resistances produce territory.
Autonomous geographies, mutual aid networks, community experiences and other cartographies. It is not only a matter of questioning power relations, but also of understanding the practices through which resistances produce other ways of organizing space and collective life.
Anarchist geographies also questioned the ideas of scale and time that late capitalism presents as natural: the ordered scale from the local to the global, the linear time of progress and the permanent promise of a future that never quite arrives.
That is why they paid attention to subjectivities and forms of action that often appear far from the great stages of politics: in the neighbourhood, in an occupation, in a garden, in an assembly, in a support network.
That is where politics is being prefigured. And perhaps, above all, that is where other ways of inhabiting are being rehearsed.
Seven years after the revolt, with the right once again established on a global scale and the progressive horizon showing its limits, Chile was one of the epicentres of the revolt. It can also be a place to meet again, to discuss and to build geographical thought and practice from autonomy, solidarity and collective action. Not to turn October into a frozen memory, nor to wait for another exceptional conjuncture, but to ask ourselves what remains of that revolt and what we can do with what still remains open.
Who produces territory? Who has the power to name it? Who decides over it? Who defends it? And, perhaps even more importantly, who is producing, from now on, the territories that do not yet exist?
6th International Conference of Anarchist Geographies and Geographers.