Urban Social Movements Research Articles

Community action, counter-professionals and radical planning in the UK

This paper reconsiders the roles of ‘counter-professionals’ (Goodman 1972) in urban social movements, focusing on the generation of students, activists and planners involved in the UK’s community action movement from the late-1960s. The paper therefore provides the first historical account of the ways community action stimulated the development of a distinctive counter-tradition of radical planning in the UK, inspiring experimentation with new, activist roles amongst a generation of young professionals who sought to support community-based movements seeking to challenge the post-war state, develop new models of participatory planning and lay the foundations for a more democratic society. Drawing on oral history interviews with key figures and archival materials from their personal records coupled with analysis of Community Action magazine (1972–1990), we track how many of those involved developed careers ‘working the spaces of power’ in and against various state projects (Newman 2012). The paper explores three key, interconnected dimensions of our participants’ experiences that we argue are central to counter-professional practice and the politics of radical planning: their relations with the state; their relations with community-based movements and organisations; and thirdly, the ways these relations shaped the political horizons of community action. Our empirical work concludes by accounting for the relative decline of community action in the 1980s. Through reconsideration of the UK context, the paper contributes to debates about the politics of radical planning and the roles of activist-professionals within urban social movements. It concludes with reflection on the seemingly constrained conditions of possibility for counter-professional practices today and the wider lessons of the community action moment for attempts to build collective alternatives, in, against and beyond the neoliberal state. By reconsidering the role of radical planners in community action in the UK we hope the paper can inspire further debate about the contributions future generations of counter-professionals might make to ongoing movements for urban justice, both in the UK and internationally.

The Expanding Carceral Geography of Sweden and Counter-politics of Care

Abstract This essay explores the entanglement of racial capitalism, carceral geographies, and counter-politics of care within the sociopolitical landscape of Sweden. It analyzes the government's response to gang violence in 2023, which mobilized the figure of a “racial threat” in advocating for the creation of “security zones” and militarized interventions. This approach, rooted in a so-called caring racism, argues for the protection of the welfare state by excluding and expelling racialized others. Understanding capitalism as requiring inequality, sustained by racism, Sweden's expansion of carceral geographies must arguably be read through a racial capitalism lens—where policing and border regimes are necessary to produce and control surplus populations. Through ethnographic engagements and social media interactions, the essay examines how marginalized communities navigate economies of dispossession, focusing on the resistance mounted by urban social justice movements against austerity measures and repressive policies—for a counter-politics of care rooted in abolitionism. Situating these developments within a broader political economy framework, the essay underscores the role of carceral geographies in perpetuating capitalist exploitation and authoritarian rule, while calling for a reevaluation of care as a site of resis- tance against state-sanctioned violence, offering insights into avenues for radical change amid growing precarity and injustice.

Urban Anti-Eviction Social Movement

This research aims to explain the phenomenon of the Anti-Eviction Movement in Makassar as a case that represents the formation of civil society in East Indonesian city. Using the case study method, this research focuses on aspects related to the struggle for the right to the city and the right to a safe place to live from the threat of eviction based on primary and secondary data. The primary data comes from interviews with participants of the bara-barayya alliance movement in Makassar City conducted from January 2023 to July 2023. In the interviews, the researcher concentrated on how the bara-barayya alliance movement expressed their struggle to claim the right to the city and a safe home from the threat of eviction. Data analysis was conducted through interview analysis to obtain accurate data and describe and explain the data explicitly. The findings in this study show that the feeling of threat among urban residents who face the threat of eviction creates resistance through the anti-eviction movement to claim their right to shelter and housing and the struggle to reclaim their right to the city. This study argues the crucial and urgent importance of understanding urban anti-eviction social movements in various cities to prevent evictions in Indonesia. Mainly to construct the effectiveness of social activism. Keywords: Activism, Anti-Eviction, Urban Social Movement, Makassar, Indonesia

South Africa’s Housing Financialisation Crises and Social Resistance

The world’s most unequal country suffers from various housing crises, especially when it comes to excessive reliance upon a private sector prone to market failures, especially affordability. State housing finance strategy during the transition from apartheid to democracy relied upon augmentation of formal banking finance so as to promote home ownership. But as macro-economic conditions changed in the late 1980s, the resulting mass defaults on individual families’ home mortgage bonds led not only to foreclosures by a (white) state, but (black) working-class resistance organised by the country’s leading urban social movement, known as the ‘bond boycott.’ Even after democracy, a worsening housing backlog coincided with resurgence of household debt crises in the wake of the 2008 global financial meltdown. That generated a new housing finance strategy led by Mastercard and a local fintech firm (supported by the World Bank): collateralisation of welfare grants which in turn allowed debit orders for repayment of microfinance (typically used for minor home improvements). Again, social resistance played an important role, as the strategy caused even worse personal debt crises, and a welfare NGO’s successful fight to close Mastercard’s partner. But beyond periodic revolts of these sorts, a durable housing finance policy has remained elusive.

PREFIGURING PRAGMATICALLY? Prefigurative Politics and the Constellation of People Power Strategies for Winning Affordable Housing in Cape Town

AbstractThis article contributes to ongoing discussions about the practice of prefigurative politics by urban social movements, and the relationship between prefiguration and other political practices. We argue that urban social movements can deploy prefigurative power in combination with other political strategies with which it is often contrasted and opposed. To demonstrate, we explore Cape Town's Reclaim the City movement that occupied several inner‐city buildings to create affordable housing for low‐wage Black communities—prefiguring the kind of affordable housing that they were demanding. They developed this strategy iteratively after having tried to play by the rules through litigation and mobilize through protest. When those approaches failed to shift decision makers, they tried to prefigure their goal for housing through occupation. Prefiguration offered distinctive strategic advantages: it helped demonstrate that affordable housing was possible and provided direct relief for people facing housing stress. These advantages not only engaged new participants but contributed to new affordable housing commitments from the City of Cape Town and the courts. We show how movement participants understood their prefigurative occupation as part of a constellation of people power strategies and suggest that this points towards the potential for prefiguration to be deployed pragmatically as well as ideologically by urban social movements.

Urban social movements as extended class actors: struggles over reproduction in Buenos Aires, New York City and Hamburg

Along with a resurgence in urban social movements (USMs) since the Global Financial Crisis in 2007–08 has come renewed interest in what form(s) of social struggle these movements represent. This is because USMs cannot be straightforwardly explained by the contradiction between capital and labour, as they happened outside the workplace. With the aim of conceptualising USMs, a comparative and empirical case study was conducted on urban development and protest in New York City, Buenos Aires and Hamburg. Approaches ranging from spatial theory to urban sociology and political economy informed the theoretical framework. The study was empirically based on 47 interviews with activists, as well as the observation of participants at protest events and document analysis (both of publications by urban protest initiatives and urban development statistics). Emerging similarities regarding the relational and cognitive structures of investigated protests suggest that contemporary USMs are collective actors counteracting urban dispossession and are thus linked to the capitalist mode of accumulation. Therefore, the article argues for an understanding of USMs as extended class struggles over social reproduction in the city. This terminology is intended not only to highlight that USMs are expressions of the crisis of social reproduction in cities, but also to categorise the characteristic features of USMs – which represent struggles for the use value of a city. USMs can, moreover, contribute to social change, especially if they are able to provide alternative means of social reproduction through the appropriation of urban space.

The right to the city and the front of the affected residents of the Una Basin: an analysis of virtual mobilization and communication strategies

The right to the city aims to guarantee human dignity through access to the city and its services, seeking democratic management of the territory. This concept was born in social movements and then embraced by the academic community, which does not mean that one knowledge is superior to the other. With this in mind, this article reflects on and analyses the virtual forms of mobilization and communication of the urban social movement Frente dos Moradores Prejudicados da Bacia do Una, seeking to understand its way of communicating and analysing how it can help in the struggle to guarantee the right to the city.

Who is the city for? Urban social movements in the city of João Pessoa/PB

Resumo Este trabalho objetiva analisar as ações e articulações dos grupos de ativistas “Minha Jampa” e “João Pessoa que Queremos”, que reivindicaram participação na gestão e estratégias de planejamento urbano na cidade de João Pessoa/PB. Para responder a problemática – Como essas redes de ativismos compreendem a cidade? – foram analisadas referências teórico-metodológicas para entender a passagem das interpretações sobre os movimentos sociais e como se desencadeou o processo de concepção dos ativistas urbanos articulados em rede e suas novas realidades. Usando a pesquisa qualitativa, observou-se que as ações coletivas revelaram questões interligadas sobre direito à cidade, na medida em que buscaram exercer algum controle social nas políticas públicas urbanas, principalmente de mobilidade urbana, visto a debilidade das instâncias oficiais de gestão democrática nesse controle. Além do monitoramento na condução de práticas de governo, os grupos de ativistas articulados em rede realizaram investigações e análises críticas sobre os projetos e mudanças nas leis urbanísticas e ambientais que podem ameaçar os direitos na e à cidade. Foi possível constatar que a ação desses grupos propõe novas abordagens e ferramentas para fomentar a participação social ampla, na direção de constituição de uma comunidade política, que constroem coletivamente a cidade para todas as pessoas.

On subaltern urban historiography: Locating Nona Fernández’s Mapocho between decolonization and urban social movements

This article makes a triple intervention into discussions about the relationship between subaltern collective memory, urban historiography and urban social movements. First, and more theoretically, I argue that grassroots urban social movements require a corresponding history to unite people into a collective urban social agent. In short, there are no urban social movements without a shared urban history to bring them together. The cultural struggle over defining a city’s urban meaning is waged not only by material political fights, but also over how we represent the past of our cities. Second, I argue that ruling urban classes circulate and popularize their own urban history in order to disrupt autonomous grassroots urban history formation. Third, and lastly, said historiographical struggle manifests itself in how we represent the pasts of Indigenous peoples in the cities of the Americas. I make this argument through a critical reading of Nona Fernández’s representation of the Indigenous past of Santiago de Chile in her 2002 novel Mapocho.

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

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.

Urban social movements and local state capacity

Studies of social movements generally focus on the mechanisms through which movements affect the political will of states. Much of this research, in turn, implicitly assumes that the state has the capacity to realize the decisions adopted as a result of movement action. Focusing on local governments in young democracies, this article examines whether and how state capacities contribute to movement-initiated policy change and associated delivery in the sphere of housing and land use. It analyzes contrasting cases of local state capacities using a paired “most-similar” comparison of two megacities of the Global South, each of which underwent transitions to democracy in the past three decades: São Paulo, Brazil, and Johannesburg, South Africa. In São Paulo, state capacities facilitated policy success. These capacities were developed through interactions between movements and key bureaucratic allies. In Johannesburg, by contrast, the local bureaucracy became both impervious to movement pressure and unable to counter strategies by business elites to weaken efforts at policy reform. State capacity in this case hindered reforms. As a result, in São Paulo, sequential, reinforcing feedback loops of city-wide movement mobilization and formal policy reforms took shape. In Johannesburg, lack of openness of the state to civil society led grassroots movement organizations to refrain from city-wide policy reform efforts and to increasingly organize their activity at the neighborhood and street levels.

Gendered identities in portuguese anti-austerity mobilisation

The austerity policies implemented following the financial crisis of 2008 in Portugal led to high contention in the public sphere. New, mostly young, and urban social movements took central stage in organising it, often articulated with traditional actors (labour unions or left-wing political parties). These movements presented a very unified image and message to the public, the media, and the institutions whose policies they opposed, based on a shared interpretation of social justice. These coalitions included feminist and LGBTQIA+ organisations, with a story of past activism which is said to have been pushed aside so they could cooperate in the priority anti-austerity arena. This paper questions whether these identities were indeed side-lined, relying on content analysis of materials made available online by those organisations to argue that feminist and LGBTQIA+ protesters framed their mobilisation through a gendered interpretation of the events and consequences of austerity, closely related to their previous values, beliefs, and incentives to participate in social activism.

The insurgent smart city: How a social movement created an alternative imaginary of the smart city

ABSTRACT Urban scholars have critiqued smart cities for their association with neoliberal governance, narrow focus on quantifiable aspects of urban systems, and failure to incorporate citizens’ needs or aspirations. The “smart city” remains a contested concept and as such is subject to reappropriation. Here, I analyze the case of an urban social movement, the 2019–2020 Hong Kong Anti-ELAB protests, as an alternative, “insurgent smart city.” Following from an earlier network analysis of Telegram channels used during the protests, I show how the communications system underpinning much of the protest action simultaneously enabled coordination while also remaining open to grassroots decision-making and innovations of new protest formats as the movement responded to countertactics of the state and police. Telegram channels linked neighborhood-based organizing to the citywide movement. These actions not only emulated but also inverted top-down visions of a total urban information system underpinning many smart city projects. Framing the Hong Kong Anti-ELAB protests as an insurgent smart city offers an alternative sociotechnical imaginary of what smart cities could be, and raises possibilities for an “insurgent digital citizenship” as an alternative to both state and platform-mediated forms of digital citizenship.

Economic and racial justice coalitions and the rise of progressive cities

ABSTRACT Resurgent movements against inequality have returned the topic of progressive cities to the urban politics agenda. This paper documents the growth of economic and racial justice (ERJ) coalitions and assesses the key role they play in progressive politics. Where a growing body of research uses a racial capital analysis of inequality to lodge normative critiques about the problems facing cities, ERJ coalitions use racial capital analysis as a practical tool for expanding coalitions, linking allied causes and creating a political agenda larger than the sum of its constituent parts. Drawing on an inventory of participating organizations and representative campaigns, and a comparison of ERJ coalitions in Chicago and Denver, we show that ERJ coalitions (1) integrate analysis, discourse and action on economic and racial inequality in ways that strengthen both causes; (2) work through territorial and scalar networks that extend the power of urban social movements; and (3) use language and analysis of structural racism to expand activism to structural issues previously immune to urban activism, including fiscal austerity, state policy and environmental racism.

Theorizing Urban Movements in Pierre Bourdieu’s Terms—the Example of Warsaw, Poland

For more than a decade, the importance of urban social movements has been systematically increasing in the Polish public sphere. However, available theories of social movements cannot account for the variety of forms of urban mobilization or for the ideological differences between organizations. The aim of this paper is to demonstrate the relevance of Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of social class for research on urban movements. Using the concepts of “capital” and “habitus,” the paper explores the social vision and process of the emergence of two activist organizations in Warsaw, Poland. The study is based on qualitative research conducted from 2016 to 2019, which included an analysis of secondary resources and individual in-depth interviews with members from each organization. Bourdieu’s theory of social class facilitates consideration of different aspects of the functioning of urban social movements, including the role of resources and competences, ideological divisions, and chances of success. The theory also provides an explanation for the importance of class within urban social movements. The article shows that, even though the demands of social movements appear to be values-led, in fact, they are based on the class interests of their members.

Autoconstrução e produção da cidade: outra genealogia dos estudos de infraestruturas urbanas

ABSTRACT This article examines the so-called “infrastructural turnaround” in urban studies of the past two decades from the theories and timelines of the urbanization of Brazilian cities. Our objective is to bring to international debate on the ethnography of infrastructures a comprehensive view of theoretical discussions developed in Brazil over the past fifty years. The first section examines the first ethnographies of Rio de Janeiro’s favelas in the late 1960s, including the intellectual relations among scholars and the attention given to house construction and the provision of urban services. The next section presents the figure of community agents of social housing policies and infrastructure upgrade programs. We conclude by reading the work of community agents in the light of AbdouMaliq Simone’s notion of “people as infrastructure”. Community agents render legible the techno-politics and the labor and technical logic, thereby blurring the boundaries between the State, the market and urban social movements..

The contribution of reform coalitions to inclusion and equity: lessons from urban social movements

ABSTRACT Coalitional politics is being used by multiple urban social movements – and agencies that support their work – to address the scale and nature of disadvantage in towns and cities of the Global South. To advance our understanding about how coalitions might form and function effectively, this paper introduces and analyses four diverse exemplars that illustrate the approaches used. We find that coalitions have the potential to improve the relational capital of disadvantaged residents, increasing the legitimacy of their claims, advancing their interests and leading to pro-poor reforms. Coalitions enhance existing political opportunities and potentially improve the political opportunity structure. However, context matters, particularly the nature and extent of local democracy, and coalitions must operate in a space that is circumscribed and contested.

Authoritarian populism, neo-fascism and 2022 national elections: Agrarian implications from the advance of the extreme right in Brazil / Populismo autoritário, neofascismo e eleições nacionais de 2022: implicaçõesagrárias em consequência do avanço da extrema direita no Brasil / Populismo autoritario, neofascismo y elecciones nacionales de 2022:implicaciones agrarias del avance de la extrema derecha en Brasil

Bolsonaro was elected in 2018 with a very conservative political agenda, promising neoliberal economic measures, and opposing to minority’s rights. Bolsonaro has been well-known as a right-wing and authoritarian politician and his government is recognised as extreme right, conservative, and/or neo-fascist, with important setbacks in public policies. The ‘bolsonarismo’ shall be defeated, but the electoral process will not be easy, with fake news. The open threats to democracy are leading to alliances of democratic and popular political forces, including agrarian and urban social movements. This article reflects critically about Bolsonaro administration, particularly the dismantling of public policies, reflecting about the political actions of the agrarian movements in the 2022 electoral process.

Socio-Spatial Inequalities, and Local Struggles for the Right to the City and to Nature—Cases of Urban Green Parks in Athens

In this paper we hypothesize that the practices that prevailed during the pandemic period in relation to the right to parks were related to traditional urban discriminatory policies that need to be changed. We also argue that, in some cases, the residents themselves treated the parks as common living spaces by protecting them from neoliberal grabbing policies that deprive residents of greenery and infringe on the right to the city and to nature. With this in mind, we proceeded with research on the city of Athens. We investigated two urban green parks, the first was “Lofos Philopappou”, which is one of the most important parks in the city, as it is one of the largest green spaces in the city center and includes some of the most important ancient monuments. The second park was “Antonis Tritsis”, which is the largest park in Athens Metropolitan Area and one of the few high green spaces in the western suburbs. In the framework of this study, we investigated the attitudes and the actions of visitors and groups regarding these parks, the urban social movements, and local struggles and initiatives that are active in the public green parks, together with participation through the commons. We also investigated management policies and attempts to privatize them. The research methods that were used were participant observation in the studied parks, semi-structured interviews with people or groups that used the public urban green parks on a regular basis, noting the narratives they produced, and questionnaires given to visitors who actively used the urban parks. In conclusion, policies implemented within public parks were found to prevent the integration of public green spaces in the daily lives of residents and the active participation of residents in decisions concerning the green extensions of their neighborhoods. In this way, a part of society is deprived of the ability to maintain continuous contact with nature and green parks.

Popular Economies In, Against, and Through the Platform

AbstractBehind the conjunctural growth of popular economies in Brazilian cities lies a set of entangled disputes over urban density with important political consequences. While popular economic agents are repressed by local governments, informal work hired through digital platforms grows exponentially and engenders new precarious forms of assembling labour relations in, and extracting value from, global South cities. The contrasts and indirect relations between digital platforms and popular economic agents are important in understanding the growth of platforms, which hinges on accessing low‐wage workers whose attempts to make an independent living are otherwise prohibited. This dynamic has resulted in the political mobilisation of popular economy agents and their alliances with urban social movements. Through this paper, I examine how their networking and particular disputes for a right to the city hold potential for the emergence of other economies.