The urbanisation of justice movements? Possibilities and constraints for the city as a space of contentious struggle

Abstract

Have urban areas become strategic sites for the formation of justice movements? A justice movement is conceptualised as geographically extensive mobilisations that achieve a degree of territorial fixity at different spatial scales. It is proposed that a number of factors can encourage organisations implicated in this movement to make the urban arena a key front in their struggle to achieve justice. These factors include the intensification of urban inequalities, increased political opportunities resulting from the devolution of state capacities to sub‐national levels of government and new actors interested in pursuing innovative strategies and tactics. This hypothesis is tested through a comparison of movements in three different cities: Los Angeles, USA; Rotterdam, Holland; and Toulouse, France. The findings show that, despite the fact that new actors have begun to mobilise in these three cities around justice issues, they have experienced different degrees of territorialisation. The divergent outcomes are explained by the particular state–civil society power relations found in each of the cities. Thus, the paper concludes that, though the factors in our hypothesis may encourage actors to initiate urban justice movements, the degree of their territorialisation ultimately depends on local state–civil society power relations.