In the early 2000s Madrid became a global city, as it is regarded by the specialized literature. In 2007, Madrid occupied the eighth position in the world with regards to the number of headquarters of large multinational corporations and the city´s stock market also became one of the most prominent in Europe. Following this line of international projection, Barajas airport was placed in the list of the world´s ten best (Observatorio Metropolitano, 2014). The new global position of the city required all sort of specialized services: corporate finances, consultancies, law offices, architecture and publicist firms. This cycle of economic growth occurred in conjunction with a highly neoliberal political agenda, which paradoxically came hand in hand with a wide range of developmental plans for the entire metropolitan area. As an outcome, Madrid´s population grew by more than a million inhabitants in only one decade, almost a million jobs were created and the geographic borders of the region expanded beyond the boundaries of the Autonomous Community.

In contrast to this optimistic account, extensively promulgated by the political class, the city´s development in the wake of this regulating fiction (Robbinson, 2002), has profoundly transformed and polarized Madrid´s social and productive structures as well as depleted its physical territory. To make matters worse, the financial and economic crises, which have heavily impacted the city and the entire country since 2008, have served to sharpen the adverse consequences of this program.

However, despite the serious risks of social fracture that the crisis involved, this hard conjuncture has opened up possibilities for a turnaround. The series of social mobilizations since the outbreak of the crisis, have efficiently contributed to put the model of the global city into question. Interestingly, the crisis has made room for a wide range of projects led by groups of citizens, who are strongly disputing the construction of the future of the city against the dominant market forces and the very top-down approaches of the local government. Examples such as temporary health-care centres, projects of co-housing, open schools, spaces of ecologic production and consumption related to urban orchards and gardens are among these citizenship initiatives that have been on the rise since then.

As such, Madrid stands today in the midst of important political and economic turbulences, in which its future seems to be stuck in tense suspension, due to the lack of clearly dominant models to guide the development of the city and the reactivation of its economy. Both approaches to the city´s development, one representing the dream of the global city and the other, in line with a more ordinary vision in terms of Robinson, appear in dispute in the actual urban setting, both claiming space to be implemented and tested.

In this essay, I will compare a series of projects that reflect this tension present in Madrid at the moment. The first array comprises a range of policies and projects under the name of the smart city, set in line with the persistent attempts by the local authorities to promote the business community and the tourism sector. The second corresponds to El Campo de la Cebada, a public square in La Latina, which has been ruled by the neighbours since 2011 on a temporary basis, and is currently attempting to create an ideario around the notion of the commons to serve as a conceptual tool to face its unstable future. In doing so, I will explore the visions and ideals underlying the concepts of the smart city and the city of the commons, present specifically in the aforementioned projects, that rather than ideal models for the city´s development, constitute concrete materializations of the two very distinct visions for the future of Madrid presented in this essay: the global and the ordinary.

The analytical categories will comprise the people involved and their role and position in the city, the narratives and representations that are being constructed in the imagination of the desired city that each of these projects represents, and the mains and resources utilized. My ultimate aim will be to sidestep the fruitless exercise of labelling cities with totalizing categories and instead, following Robinson´s claims to open up the imagination to new possible tomorrows, provide a reading of the different interests and desires overlapping in the present that might determine the near future of Madrid.

For this purpose, I will break this analysis into two main sections. The first will briefly expound the impacts that the globalization of Madrid has had in the city. In the second section, I will critically examine the notions of the smart city and the city of the commons as underpinning concepts of the projects mentioned above. Finally, I will conclude with a reflection on the different ways in which these conceptualizations are being produced and the different functions with which are being used.