Urban people power strategies in a connected world: exploring the patterns of practice, exchange, translation and learning

Abstract

Urban social movements, alliances and organisations use a range of strategies to contest injustice and inequality by making urban authority accountable to the ‘power of the people’. While there is irrepressible diversity in the strategies used to build and enact people power across global urban contexts, movement participants rarely start from scratch in developing these strategies. There are patterns of contestation that resonate and circulate between urban movements. This article outlines an approach to analysing the patterning, diffusion and translation of commonly used urban people power strategies in and between cities. To track these strategies, we mapped hundreds of examples of urban people power, conducted field research across a range of cities, and co-designed findings and frameworks at a two week gathering of urban activists from a diverse group of cities. We identified five strategies of people power that are commonly repeated across different urban contexts—playing by the rules, mobilising, organising, prefiguring, and running for office. We outline the key characteristics of these different strategies, and discuss the different channels and forms of diffusion that facilitate their exchange across diverse urban contexts. All forms of diffusion involve the hard work of translation and learning, but this work takes different forms for different strategies. We find that where people power takes on a more visible and modular form it is more able to spread through weak ties and digital channels. However, where people power practices are more practice-based and harder to see, strong ties and personal relationships are often needed to spread the strategy. This is illustrated with a case study of the diffusion and translation of an organising strategy between housing activists in Cape Town and Barcelona. Our research and modelling of people power strategies and diffusion is offered as a contribution to on-going work of movement translation.