Encountering Occupy London: Boundary Making and the Territoriality of Urban Activism

Abstract

In this paper I examine the practices of encountering of Occupy London, and argue that they provide a means for rethinking the production of territoriality. Specifically, I argue that boundary making not only involves hierarchical relations of power-over but also the articulation of bottom-up power-to. I first examine literature on boundary making, and propose encountering as a more appropriate vocabulary to represent this practice in the context of urban activism. I then conceptualise encountering as the articulation of power-to, a moment in the production of territoriality from below, bringing together Holloway's dialectical understanding of power and Lefebvre's writings on territorial autogestion and urban encounters. In the remainder of the paper I examine practices of encountering in Occupy London on the basis of militant research with the movement that combined ethnography, interviews, and archive analysis. The paper focuses on the spaces of the General Assembly and the protest camp, exploring how encounters were productive of new social relations and highlighting key tensions. In particular I note the inevitable ephemerality of activist encounters and tensions over institutionalising encounters, and I end by calling for greater attention to the power relations involved, warning against assumptions that encounters of power-to necessarily lead to positive outcomes.