Kike España is an urban researcher, architect and activist working at the intersection of critical urban studies, cultural infrastructures and urban struggles. He is currently a KHM Fellow at the Department of Art and Media Studies at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne and a researcher in the PROAGING project at the University of Málaga.Previously, he held a Juan de la Cierva Postdoctoral Fellowship at the School of Architecture of the University of Málaga, where his work focused on touristification, museification, housing inequalities and neighborhood struggles around the right to the city and the undercommons. Across his theoretical, empirical and practice-based work, he examines how touristified cities are produced through the entanglement of urban policy, cultural institutions, real-estate dynamics and everyday forms of dispossession, while also exploring neighborhood infrastructures, social centers and communizing practices as sites of resistance and urban invention.
He studied architecture at the University of Málaga and completed his MA and PhD in Architecture at the University of Seville. His doctoral dissertation, (El derecho a) inventar la ciudad (2021), was translated into German and published as the essay Die sanfte Stadt (transversal texts, 2021). Building on this work, he has developed a distinctive conceptual vocabulary around the “city of attractions,” “softness”, “incomplete complicity,” and, more recently, “communizing the city,” linking urban theory to artistic research, institutional critique and social-movement practices. His current research focuses on insurgent vicinities, neighborhood entanglements and urban cultural infrastructures in relation to touristification, housing crisis and communizing forms of sociality.
España is co-founder of Suburbia, an independent platform that brings together a bookshop, publishing practice, radical studies program and urban research initiatives, and he has long been involved in La Casa Invisible and other social and cultural movements in Málaga. His work moves across academic and extra-academic contexts, combining research, teaching, translation, organizing and infrastructure-building.
He has organized and contributed to international conferences, workshops and public programs on urban conflict, cultural policy and institutional experimentation, including the international conference Multiplicity in collaboration with Museo Reina Sofía and EIPCP, the 2024 INURA conference (Un)Attractive City in Málaga, and invited lectures at institutions such as ETH Zürich, TU Delft, the University of Essex, CIMAM and Museo Reina Sofía.
He has published more than twenty articles and book chapters in the fields of urban studies, contemporary art and institutional critique, including work on touristification, dispossession, museification and neighborhood commons. His publications include the article “Städte zu verkaufen: Prozesse der Enteignung und Praktiken der Wiederaneignung in Spanien” in sub\urban and chapters such as “Complicidad incompleta,” “The City of Attractions,” and “Die Stadt Kommunisieren.” He has also co-edited volumes including Overtourist City. Alongside his research, he has translated numerous articles and books on philosophy, urban theory and institutional critique, contributing to the circulation of critical thought across Spanish-, German- and English-speaking contexts.
