ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the unconscious of the urban everyday life and the ways in which it shaped and was embedded in the most marginalized and least supervised spaces-those of self-constructed shantytowns. In order to assess the distinct contribution of those communities to the new social movements that emerged in Spain it is important to examine first the ways in which individuals engaged in deprivation-based squatting came to think of themselves as a community. The chapter shows how squatting (as an ongoing daily process) can extend the scope of appropriated space from the private to the intermediate level, thereby creating new communitarian counter-spaces where new subjectivities are formed. The lack of running water, privacy and personal space undermined people's sense of respectability and at times even of humanity. An analysis of the formation of community life and of communal spaces within a barrio such as Orcasitas must take into consideration aspects relating to the issue of gender.
