Cities, Public Space and Citizenship. Some Contemporary Mediterranean Urban Social Movements (original) (raw)

Cities, and mainly their central squares1 have been very relevant in the explosion of the so called Arab spring, one spring that has very rapidly become a grey fall, when not a terrible winter, with too much blood, sweat and tears. But Cities, as the main stage of all kind of social movements, continue alive in a very resilient way under so many different conditions; they have always been connected to the birth and to the explanation of social conflicts and changes. Since the beginning of the 1970’s has been created as a study object the concept of Urban social movements by the French sociologists, especially by the Spanish Manuel Castells (b. in 1942). Castells discussed with his former teacher Henry Lefébvre (1901-1991) the role of space on the social events and he has evolved to the analysis on the impact of the new technologies of communication in the origins of the new mobilizations (Castells, 1972, 1983, 2012; Harvey, 2012).