One of this book's goals is to evaluate the complex ways that Madrid has served as the political, economic, and cultural capital of the Global South from the end of the Franco dictatorship to the present. The other is to examine the city as lived experience, where citizens contest capital's push to shape urban space in its own image through activities of the imagination.

Scholars, investigative journalists, political activists, and a filmmaker combine to document the vast array of Madrid's grassroots movements.