Autonomy in the city?

Abstract

This paper is about the emergence of social centres and their role in both the development of autonomous politics and the growing urban resistance movement in the UK to the corporate takeover, enclosure and alienation of everyday life. In European terms, social centres are not new and, as Montagna in this issue demonstrates, have played a particularly important role in the political and cultural world of Italy's autonomist scene. Previously marginal in British radical movements, since the eruption of global anti‐capitalism in the late 1990s, the number of occupied or legalized social centres and other autonomous spaces in the UK has been on the increase, playing crucial roles in confrontational politics from reclaiming public space to mass mobilizations such as the G8 summit at Gleneagles. This paper, written by action researchers heavily implicated in the social centre movement, critically examines the experience of social centres so far and offers some thoughts on their future development.