The exploration of the histories and theories of radical space constitutes the new long-term research agenda of Álvaro Sevilla-Buitrago, author of Against the Commons: A Radical History of Urban Planning. While that earlier work examined the evolution of spatial policies as instruments to erase and subdue subaltern realms of self-reproduction, this project traces a genealogy of experiences that mobilize space as a source of power, emancipation, and collective flourishing, whether through autonomous initiative or in collaboration with trained planners and designers. Combining a history-from-below approach with critical theory, Sevilla-Buitrago investigates the dialectical relation connecting the trajectories of capitalist urbanization to the emergence of new grassroots movements and the formation of radical and insurgent planning traditions.

Global in scope and spanning several centuries, the research foregrounds the constitutive entanglement of autonomous spaces with fundamental dimensions of social reproduction, including the organization of shelter and provisioning systems, sites of collective encounter and interaction, and geographies of resistance and solidarity. It seeks to understand the aspirations, contradictions, mistakes, and achievements of insurgent collectives and progressive planners as they attempt to materialize concrete utopias against a context that is often adverse, if not openly hostile. Radical spaces are thus conceived not as isolated activist enclaves or practices of subsistence, but as relational and potentially scalable, initiatives that engage and reshape their environments through ethically charged territorial strategies oriented toward more democratic forms of coexistence and cooperation.