Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts covered in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book addresses spaces and places in the history of anarchism under a transnational standpoint. It traces a wide historical outlook of the city as the place for anarchist experiments in self-government and as a generator of powerful revolutionary imaginaries. The book also presents a geographical approach to the distribution of Italian-speaking anarchist journal Cronaca Sovversiva all over the United States, in order to analyse the spatial patterns of distribution of transnational anarchist propaganda by applying the concept of 'social field'. It also analyses the effectiveness of social geography of Colin Ward, a thinker who is considered as one of the most important references for present-day anarchism, mainly in English-speaking countries. The book analyses the spatiality and 'insurrectionary architecture' of the 2013 'Brazilian Spring' as it occurred in Belo Horizonte, its relations with urban spaces and the general social aims of the movement.