Abstract
AbstractThis article focuses on the role of traders and small businesses in urban social movements by exploring three examples of opposition to commercial displacement in London. While the work of Castells, Lefebvre and the wider field of urban social movement research has radically expanded the terrain of struggle beyond the workplace to take in a wide range of community and grassroots groups and concerns, little attention has been paid to the potential role of traders and small businesses, particularly in the global North. The article focuses specifically on the mobilization of traders and small businesses in response to the threat of commercial displacement which, as one of the ways in which surplus value is extracted from cities, is a potentially significant site of urban contestation. Drawing on the author's research and involvement with one metropolitan and two local ‘workspace struggles’ in London, the article demonstrates that commercial displacement may mobilize threatened traders and small businesses to play a role in broader urban social movements with wide‐ranging goals and concerns. Further research on workspace struggles has the potential to offer much‐needed insights for radical urban politics and possibilities for developing alternatives by challenging and working across divides between economy and society.
Highlights
This article explores the role of traders and small businesses in urban social movements, taking by way of example one metropolitan-wide and two local cases of opposition to commercial displacement in London. Lefebvre ([1968] 1996), Castells (1977; 1983) and later Harvey (2008; 2012) established the urban as a critical part of the production of capitalism, and as a significant site of struggle and for the realization of alternatives
While informal and street traders in the global South are generally in a much more precarious and dangerous situation, their experiences and achievements are helpful in drawing attention to the potential for marginalized and excluded traders and small businesses in the global North to play a role in wider urban social movements as well
Building on and contributing to the small but growing body of work exploring specific instances in which industrial firms (Raco and Tunney, 2010), market traders (González and Dawson, 2015; 2018) and migrant and ethnic minority retailers (Roman-Velazquez, 2014; Hall, 2015) in London have contested specific development schemes that threatened to displace them, this article explores the mobilization of traders and small businesses threatened with displacement at the metropolitan scale for the first time
Summary
This article explores the role of traders and small businesses in urban social movements, taking by way of example one metropolitan-wide and two local cases of opposition to commercial displacement in London. Lefebvre ([1968] 1996), Castells (1977; 1983) and later Harvey (2008; 2012) established the urban as a critical part of the production of capitalism, and as a significant site of struggle and for the realization of alternatives. Sociologists and other social movement researchers have raised concerns that the popularity of Castells’ notion of urban social movements and Lefebvre’s right to the city have led them to be unthinkingly and too applied, distracting attention from important questions about how cities incubate movements and struggles and from the wider field of social movement research (Pickvance, 2003; Nicholls, 2008; Uitermark et al, 2012) Whilst these debates about the potential and limits of urban movements continue, the work of Castells and Lefebvre definitively established the urban as a critical part of the production of capitalism, and as a significant site of anti-capitalist struggle and for the realization of alternatives. It is this imperative which makes the role of traders and small businesses in urban social movements such a potentially important and generative question
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