Urban Social Movements Research Articles

Claiming Urban Form for Liveability: An Analysis of Urban Social Movements in Istanbul

All dimensions of liveability, from economic to social, are directly related to urban space and its production process. However, the production of urban space, with its forms and functions, is always situated in the con flicting domain of (spatial) political economy. Conventional space production processes that favour dominant classes and produce space regarding exchange value are frequently contested with the social reaction of dominated classes defending use values and liveability. In this vein, Urban Social Movements (USMs) seem one of the key instruments for the social production of urban space with be er liveability conditions. From this perspective, the study aims to investigate USMs' space transforming capacity by focusing on the case of Istanbul. A five-step spatial analysis is conducted, assuming that USMs are closely related to the characteristics of urban development projects. In these steps (i) the location of the urban development projects and USMs; (ii) existing land use in the project areas; (iii) scale of the projects, (iv) organization level of USMs; and (v) relationships of four USM-related projects within the urban fabric are analysed. Findings of the study reveal that centrality plays a vital role in both development projects and related USMs and aff ects the programme, scale, and organization level. Considering liveability conditions, faced with aggressive capitalist behaviour supported by local and central state apparatus, USMs can realize their space transforming potential only by protecting existing programmes and urban fabric.

Sex, Drugs, and Fashion in 1970s Madrid by Francisco Fernández de Alba

Reviewed by: Sex, Drugs, and Fashion in 1970s Madrid by Francisco Fernández de Alba Sarah Thomas Keywords Spanish Cultural Studies, Cultural History, Madrid, 1970s, Tardofranquismo, Transition To Democracy, Mass Media, Urban Studies, Sex, Sexuality, Gender, Drug Use, Heroin, Fashion, Identity, Consumerism, Modernity, Democratization, Francisco Fernández De Alba, Sarah Thomas fernández de alba, francisco. Sex, Drugs, and Fashion in 1970s Madrid. U of Toronto P, 2020. 192 pp. Peninsular studies have lately seen renewed interest in and reevaluation of the end of the Franco dictatorship (tardofranquismo) and the country’s transition to democracy. Francisco Fernández de Alba’s contribution to this debate, Sex, Drugs, and Fashion in 1970s Madrid, offers an exciting and rigorous approach, framing its study within the confines of the long 1970s (roughly 1966–1982) and the city of Madrid, while gesturing beyond both. The product of extensive research in several archives, the book shows how Spain in the seventies was far from simply a repressed dictatorial nation, but rather, a place of rapidly changing Zeitgeist and social mores, where an important “re-structuring of feeling” (9) was underway. In this context, Fernández de Alba illuminates how several interrelated factors—mass media, consumer capitalism, and international cultural trends—fostered new forms of self-fashioning and inspired democratizing practices in a complex and contradictory decade. The book begins with an introduction that sets the scene: no longer the Spain of autarky and isolation, it depicts a place where “deep cultural changes were already afoot” (3) as early as 1970, when Televisión Española broadcast [End Page 647] the Tele-Club Campo-Pop competition, for bands from towns with fewer than 10,000 inhabitants. This opening example demonstrates how tardofranquismo was a time of surprising (often carefully calibrated) contradictions, with youth from the rural periphery performing rock songs in miniskirts on national television. Although typical of the regime’s middle-class appeasement via superficial relaxation of social mores, Fernández de Alba shows that Campo-Pop also indicated how young people were already embracing the more liberal culture and values they saw emerging elsewhere. The introduction demonstrates how international cultural products accessible through mass media—music, fashion, and critical works by authors like Susan Sontag or Henri Lefebvre—were key in shaping the period’s emerging mentalities and practices. This cultural shift did not exclusively emerge from outside, however, but also through local efforts of cooperatives, neighborhood associations, and other cultural agents whose radical democratizing views were a vital ingredient of the new collective sensibility. Organizations such as these come to the fore in chapter one, an engrossing account of the period’s radical urbanism. It skillfully narrates a fascinating history of calls for a more inclusive, accessible capital. Bookended by Mayor Enrique Tierno Galván’s 1979 inaugural speech, it shows how his novel pluralist approach was informed by ideas long brewing in neighborhood associations and architectural debates throughout the seventies. The influence of avant-garde urban planning is carefully traced through lucid analyses of figures like architect Antonio Fernández Alba and documents like the 1970 special issue of Cuadernos para el Diálogo, “Urbanismo y sociedad en España” or the Communist Party’s 1977 comprehensive plan Madrid para la democracia: la propuesta de los comunistas, both building toward 1985’s revolutionary Plan General, where “the right to fully inhabit and alter the city was to be implemented, both at the grassroots level with the input of social actors and citizens, and from the top to shape priorities and provide a totalizing vision” (35). Alongside these architectural debates and paradigm shifts, key conceptualizations of the alternative city also emerged from urban social movements (to use the formulation of Manuel Castells, another touchstone of the chapter). Several through-lines are established here that will echo throughout the book: the uneasy relationships between new cultural practices and capitalism; the reception and adaptation of cultural materials from outside Spain to its unique context; and how the 1970s laid the groundwork for the explosive freedoms of the Movida. Although ultimately the culminating 1985 [End Page 648] Plan General did not have its radical goals fully realized, Fernández de Alba notes that it did something...

Working-class suburban housing, homeownership and urban social movements during Francoism in Barcelona, 1939–1975

ABSTRACT The issue of homeownership in the working-class peripheries of post-war Europe has received little attention in planning history. The main reason is probably that public housing built at the time of massive operations of constructing Modernist housing estates in Western and Eastern Blocs adopted tenancy as the predominant form of tenure in almost all cases. In the context of widespread growth of urban homeownership during the second half of the twentieth century in European countries, this paper addresses the singularities of ownership in Francoist Spain. In this case, the main peculiarity is that the working classes that flocked to inhabit the new outskirts were the main protagonists of the intense process of the spread in homeownership. First, the article discusses the ideological roots of the spread of homeownership in Spain as a singular phenomenon. Second, the spectacular growth of homeownership in the peripheral working-class districts of Barcelona and in the municipalities of its metropolitan area is analysed. Then, the paper considers the relationships observed between ownership in the new peripheries and the development of powerful urban movements. A final epilogue places such movements in the Western European context.

‘Creative City’ R.I.P.?

‘Creative City’ R.I.P.?

From the square to the shopping mall: new social media, state surveillance, and the evolving geographies of urban protest

ABSTRACT Despite the rise of social media as a major factor in protests since the early 2010s, scholars have documented the continued importance of urban space and “place-based networks” for social movements. However, the 2019–2020 Hong Kong Anti-ELAB protests saw a shift from occupying symbolic public space to a more variegated use of urban spaces in the city. Combining network analysis of Telegram channels and georeferencing of protest events, this study shows how new digital media platforms such as Telegram enabled a diverse array of protest activities, as well as a shift from formal centrally located civic spaces to a wider range of everyday spaces including malls, offices, and industrial buildings. This study also asks why this occurred, situating the shifting geography of protests as a response to several factors: new social media technologies, strengthening of state surveillance of physical and digital space, and collective learning from the perceived failures of past movements. The implications of these shifts for the future of urban social movements and the “public sphere” are discussed.

Urban Social Movement Strategies in Times of Crisis: Evidence from the Movements for Housing in São Paulo

This research note seeks to update our understanding of the factors that influence shifts in social movement strategies. In light of the COVID-19 pandemic, I assess the role of crisis in whether and how social movements reshape their strategies and perhaps redefine their fight for the right to the city. Though previous research has shown the importance of political opportunities and ideology for social movement strategies, we need to reassess these variables and the direction of change in times of crisis. Using the case of the Union of Housing Movements in São Paulo, I find that though the tactics of the movement responded to a conflictual relationship at the federal level and a need to meet immediate needs of members, the ideology of the movement provided the structure for continuing to engage in inclusionary governance strategies and renewed energy for transformational change.

From the streets to the town halls: Municipalist platforms in the post-Yugoslav space

In the last decade, urban social movements that emerged in the Yugoslav successor states decided to form political platforms to enter the institutional arena, often after years of mobilisation for the right to the city. Their aim was to seize power at the local level, trying to provide an answer to the crisis of representative democracy and to oppose the process of centralisation of power. These platforms ran for elections in Zagreb (Croatia) and Belgrade (Serbia), to reclaim local autonomy on societal, environmental, economic and political matters. Based on ethnographic work, document analysis and a series of in-depth interviews with activists, this article explores the trajectories of two platforms, ‘Zagreb Is Ours’ ( Zagreb je naš) in Zagreb, Croatia, and ‘We Won’t Let Belgrade D(r)own’ ( Ne davimo Beograd) in Belgrade, Serbia. It analyses the factors accounting for the choice of urban activists to embrace new municipalist ideas as strategic ideological and political positioning of their electoral platforms, arguing that the reasons are twofold: the embeddedness into regional and transnational activist networks, which facilitated the process of diffusion of new municipalist ideas across Europe and locally, and the resonance of new municipalism with socialist Yugoslavia’s decentralised system of self-management and direct democracy, an historical experience that the platforms’ initiators partially reappraised.

Knowledge Practices Within and Beyond Sharing and Commoning Urban Initiatives

In the context of neoliberal cities, with growing levels of housing commodification and space competition, sharing and commoning urban initiatives within the larger framework of urban social movements are shaping tactics of contestation. To what extent they represent sustainable efforts to urban commons governance remains largely unexplored. This article aims therefore to contribute to better understand how practices of solidarity can be maintained beyond their first productive phase and to explore the engagement of social movement and initiatives actors in the production and maintenance of shared spatial resources. To do that, we focus on knowledge practices as a key factor to ensure sustainability of actions within and beyond urban initiatives that engage with and practice sharing and space-commoning. Drawing on figurational sociology, we consider individuals involved in these urban initiatives as embedded in multiple social settings and networks of collaboration and interdependence, in which transactions such as resources, ideas and information take place giving way to collective action, new modes of participation and urban transformation. Within this conceptual framework, we explore how urban initiatives networks produce and transfer their knowledge (1) within their own internal set-up, (2) to private and public institutions (e.g., administration and political actors) and (3) to other civil society organizations. To do so, we draw on qualitative research conducted in three German cities, Kassel, Stuttgart, and Berlin on the topics of sharing and commoning practices in the field of housing and public space. By looking at the practices by which knowledge—required for action and networking—is co-/re-produced and exchanged, we identify those that constrain or enable sharing and commoning strategies on the long-term and have therefore a larger potential for sustaining efforts of urban commons governance.

Residents' collective strategies of resistance in Global South cities' informal settlements: Space, scale and knowledge

This paper examines the strategies of resistance articulated by residents of informal settlements response to urban exclusion. Building upon resistance and urban social movements literature the paper is informed by the case of the Villa Rodrigo Bueno in Buenos Aires, a self-constructed villa miseria, and its residents' stories of resistance to attempts of evictions and upgrading programs. In the paper we show how resistance is mobilized, first through its simultaneous disconnection, due to its remoteness and isolation; and reconnection to local and global supportive networks. While disconnection facilitated self-construction, densification and the blooming of informal entrepreneurship; reconnection through relational and multiscalar sites enabled unexpected encounters with distant actors that contributed to resist evictions. Second, the long-term learning and development of self-knowledge (i.e. construction, or housing law), embedded in the remoteness of the informal settlement, contributed to shift expertise from city officers to residents; redefining the role of informal residents into active citizens and experts in policy making, and turning informal settlements into settings of wider social change.

Marketplace cultures for social change? New social movements and consumer culture theory

ABSTRACT Although culturally oriented consumer research has examined the impact of consumer movements and consumer activism on lifestyle and group consumption, the interrelationships between consumer culture theory and new social movements has remained unexplored. Contrasting and critically discussing the activities and aims of consumer and new social movements, this study indicates that new social movements have both a subtle and direct impact upon the central theoretical pillars of Consumer Culture Theory. Exploring two urban social movements, as mini-case studies, this paper shows and critically discusses how protesters’ activities shaped a) spaces of marketplace cultures, b) consumer ideology and c) the macro-institutions that influence consumption. The findings can prompt scholars to rethink and re-imagine CCT through the prism of politics and collective demands for social change.

A Literature Review on Post-Modern Era Urban Social Movements

Tarihsel süreç içerisinde siyasal, ekonomik, kültürel ve teknolojik alanlarda meydana gelen dönüşümler, her alanda olduğu gibi kentsel toplumsal hareketlerin şekillenmesinde de etkili olmuştur. Bu değişimin yaşanmasında ekonomik, siyasal, kültürel ve ideolojik etkenler olduğu kadar değişen haberleşme ağları da önemli rol oynamıştır. Bireylerin mobil iletişim araçları ve sosyal medya aracılığıyla daha kolay iletişime geçebilmeleri onların sosyal hareketliliğini de artırmıştır. Bunun neticesinde eski sınıf temelli toplumsal hareketlerin yerini küreselleşme ile birlikte post-modern temelli kentsel toplumsal hareketler almıştır. Başka bir deyişle, işçi sınıfı hareketleri ile özdeşleşmiş olan toplumsal hareketler artık çevre, özgürlük ve barış hareketleri gibi evrensel değerler etrafında şekillenmeye başlamıştır. Post-modern dönem ile birlikte bilgi iletişim teknolojilerinde yaşanan gelişmeler ışığında toplumsal hareketlerin örgütlenme ve eylem biçimleri değişmiştir. Artık internet ve mobil iletişim araçları aracılığıyla eylemler ulusal sınırları aşarak kolektif bir yapıda çözüm önerileri üretilmesine olanak sağlamıştır.

Urban social movements

The discussions permeate the municipal emancipation of Icoaraci, the current administrative district of Belém, capital of the state of Pará, and gain prominence due to its historical context, where there are several attempts that propel in this same direction, district emancipation. In this sense, the purpose of this work is to try to understand the discourses that promoted these movements, in order to examine the regionalist issue employed in them, together with the icoaraciense indemnity process. For this, a bibliographical and documentary research was carried out, also starting with digital media. There is a strong influence of the power groups present in the region, which end up shaping the regionalist and emancipationist discourse, selling them to the rest of the population.

Suburban commons: the rise of suburban social movements and new urban commons in marginalized neighbourhoods in Stockholm

ABSTRACT The Swedish universal welfare state has transformed since the 1990s into a mixed welfare model with increasing deregulation, recommodification, and reverse distribution from the public to the private sector where capital and influence have concentrated. In major cities such as Stockholm, this has resulted in a polarization where groups in the city centre and residential areas have accumulated wealth and resources while groups in marginalized suburbs and neighbourhoods have faced increasing social exclusion and marginalization. Public sector social work has long focused on individual case work, whereas this development calls for increasing community work initiatives. In this article, we analyse the rise of urban social movements mobilizing for inclusion, influence, and social justice as important aspects of contemporary community work in the Swedish urban periphery. Through analysis of semi-structured interviews with community workers and activists as well as media articles, reports, and web-based materials, the results show how the mobilization of the organization Megafonen has contributed to the development of new social institutions and urban commons.

Goals, obstacles and focus of heritage preservation activists in Ukrainian cities

Preservation of historic heritage is a prevalent question in urban social movements in Ukraine. This article focuses on heritage preservation activists’ experiences, including both movements to preserve specific historic sites and monuments, and movements against destruction of the historic environment more generally. We begin by conceptualizing key concepts of heritage preservation movement and offering a background of heritage preservation in a post-soviet setting. This overview is followed by a summary of research findings based on eleven semi-structured interviews with heritage protection activists in major Ukrainian cities. Their activity can be classified firstly based on the strategy of impact (top-down or bottomup); secondly, on the type of historic monuments that they want to preserve (classical architecture, modern (Soviet) architecture and small architectural forms); thirdly, on the territorial scale of their activity (local, municipal or regional); and finally, on their activities (cultural and artistic, political, media and awarenessraising, community-building, etc.).Challenges, identified by activists in their work, were classified as external (related to structural and contextual difficulties), and internal (individual challenges and group dynamics, related to lack of time, resources and institutional knowledge). More generally, the heritage preservation movement in Ukraine is identified by activists as fragmented, reactive, and marked by high institutionalization of grassroots activities and their cooptation. Activists are reflexive of their role in historic preservation and present themselves as the voice of the general public. They identify their impact as creating public resonance, a wide network of passive allies, institutional (as well as internal management) experience for activist initiatives. At the same time, however, they have little faith in the possibility of achieving broader strategic goals. Thus, despite their impact and efficiency in defending specific historic sites, activists are unable to preserve historic heritage in Ukrainian cities on their own. Potential future research includes conducting interviews not only with activists of large cities, but also of smaller towns, as well as using a multi-method approach and supplementing interviews with content-analysis of activists’ public statements, as well as taking into consideration the voices of other interested agents in the heritage preservation movement.

The right to urban public space and aesthetic dissensus for democratic citizenship

In the last three decades, across the world, there have emerged mass movements, uprisings and revolts targeting neo-liberal global capitalism and its radical reorganization of urban hierarchies. As a result, cities have become the central stage for sociopolitical struggles. While the scholarship on new social movements has recognized the aesthetic potential of political organizing since the beginning of the anti-globalization movement in 1999, new approaches are needed to understand the aesthetic dissensus of contemporary activism within the urban space. This article theorizes aesthetics as a potentially radicalizing force in proposing a democratic citizenship in the city. Indebted to the theories of Henri Lefebvre, David Harvey, James Holston, Mark Purcell and Jacques Rancière, it discusses the new synthesis of political and aesthetic forms, action and experience in urban social movement praxis. Taking Gezi Park resistance in Turkey (2013) as a case study, it seeks to understand the relationship of activist aesthetics to changing practices and conceptions of citizenship.

Social movements and class struggle: Against unequal urban transformations from the neighborhood

ABSTRACT Processes of capital accumulation continue to play an important role in today’s cities around the world. The spatialization of neoliberal policies and projects generates its own contradictions, as well as resistances, in the form of urban social movements that can be interpreted and analyzed under the consideration of their constitution as social classes. The neighborhood of Poblenou, in Barcelona, has been the subject of attention and urban transformation for decades. This article, as a result of a long ethnographic research approach to these dynamics, is focused on the involvement of those groups that struggle against specific forms of dispossession in this particular urban environment of the Catalan capital.

Kontexty výskumu kultúrno-kreatívnych centier na Slovensku

Cultural and creative centres are a relatively new phenomenon in the urban environment of Slovakia. Local and state politicians, as well as experts, often automatically link their functioning with the popular urban development concept of creative cities, focusing on the fields of creative economy and creative industries and emphasizing the economic effect of these centres. My qualitative research of the cultural and creative centre Nová Cvernovka in Bratislava showed the thematic diversity of such places in Slovakia and their significant impact on the topics of urban social movements, civic activism, transactional activism, and eventization. Thus, cultural and creative centres are fertile ground (also) for qualitative research in the social sciences. For this reason, a more precise definition of the term and clarification of this scientific concept are needed. The aim of the presented empirical study is to contribute to the definition of cultural and creative centres in Slovakia and to draw attention to several possible areas of their impact on the urban and social environment.

Participation and Alternative Economic Practice: Discourses, Identities and Imaginaries of Change

In the context of economies referred to as diverse or different, Alternative Economic Practices (AEP) are actions that, alternative to capitalism in varying degrees, aim to fulfil people's basic needs. The Great Recession of 2008 gives a new incentive to their theoretical and empirical analysis as a result of the new meaning given to alternative economic and political spaces, particularly in an area hit hard by the crisis – Southern Europe. This paper examines an aspect hardly represented in academic literature: the profile of the social basis of alterna-tive economic practices and its operational significance. By means of the frameworks provided by institutional economic geography and contributions made by the theo-ry on urban social movements as well as social mobilisation, it explores the characteristics of the social basis of Spanish AEP using that which prior studies highlighted from the profile of the participants in Greek practices as a point of comparison and reference. We suggest that the contextual conditions determine the attributes of the key actors and the strategies to challenge the existing social institutions and structures and mobilise the social forces to support collective projects that contradict the dominant relations. The result is that of nominally identi-cal AEP, belonging to a common alternative repertoire yet composed of social bases with clearly distinct pro-files. This means that both are built upon different values, discourses, motivations and identities, leading to their varied geographical significance and potential to transform.

An Analysis of Urban Initiatives in Cairo: Locality, Everyday Politics and Relational Space in Cairo’s Unplanned Neighbourhoods

Abstract This article focuses on urban activism and social movements that emerged in Cairo between 2011 and 2014 and argues that in unplanned areas these initiatives shape patterns of agency and social encounter. This contribution therefore investigates the transformative potential activated by the encounters between women of different social background in a small association (ǧamā‘iyya) in the unplanned area of Ezbet al-Haggana, in the north-east periphery of Cairo. Through analytical categories such as the “everyday politics”, “informality”, “relational space” and “capacity to aspire”, the article analyses how the everyday interactions, even within apparently non-politicized actions, reveal features of social change and mobility. The materials presented have been collected during a three-year research period conducted between 2012 and 2015. The fieldwork included 10 semi-structured interviews with local activists and institutional actors as well as an ethnographic account, which will be reported in the text.

Occupying Paulista: Housing activism, the new right and the politics of public space during the Brazilian crisis

Brazilian society has frequently been described as polarized during the country’s recent political and economic crisis. In 2018, a wave of opposition to the centre-left Workers’ Party culminated in the election of Jair Bolsonaro, a right-wing populist who portrays the political left as a malevolent force in Brazilian society. In this paper I explore this polarization through drawing on ethnographic research with the Homeless Workers’ Movement ( Movimento de Trablhadores Sem-Teto, MTST), a large urban social movement that develops settlements on underutilized land in the city, and a prominent civil society opponent of Bolsonaro. More specifically, I examine a key site of socio-spatial tension in São Paulo, Paulista Avenue, as a new political right came to predominate on the city’s main thoroughfare during the campaign to impeach the Workers’ Party President, Dilma Rousseff. I show how the perceived intolerance of the mobilized right helped to establish new normative codes that regulated the political symbolism which could be displayed in public spaces. Lastly, I consider how the vilification of the MTST in particular and the political left in general by the new right is embedded in broader structures of stigmatization.