The development and transformation of the contemporary city depends on multiple factors, although its outcome almost always functions as a response to capitalist logic. The contemporary urban diagram of a network of focal points activated by new population movements towards the periphery based on an infrastructure of non-radial mobility allows us to speculate on a new paradigm of the city, which breaks with the traditional duality of centre and periphery and opens the way for more sustainable and inclusive ways of life that incorporate bodies, spaces and times linked to more-than-human imaginaries of care.
Taking the city of Madrid as a case study, this paper focuses on analysing the phenomenon of urban polycentrism, showing how the need and desire to inhabit leads diverse communities to appropriate new spaces of opportunity that through different colonisation tactics allow us to speculate on an urban future in which a sequence of population movements and spatial changes transform the neoliberal system of city growth.