CHAPTER SEVENTEEN MIDDLE CLASS RESISTANCE IN CONTEMPORARY URBAN INDIA: HOW " NEW " ARE THESE NEW SOCIAL MOVEMENTS (original) (raw)

Middle Class Activism in the City

In this module, students will learn about middle class-led activism in the city, especially with attention to the post-1990s period. You will also be introduced to the functioning of civil society and resident welfare associations (RWAs) in cities like Mumbai, Bangalore, Delhi, and Hyderabad. You will learn about different concepts related to civil society and political society, bourgeois environmentalism, and civic activism. You will also learn more about the relation of these concepts to middle class politics, and middle class mobilisation like the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) phenomenon.

Urban Social Movements

Theories of Urban Politics, 2009

Over the last several decades, many cities around the world have become the locale for national and international protests. Anti-Iraqi war demonstrations in Berlin, gatherings of mothers and grandmothers at the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires, student demonstrations in Beijing, and anti-globalisation demonstrations in Seattle were all locally staged protests that addressed much larger national and international issues. These demonstrations attracted attention, in part, because they involved a large number of people and took place in world capitals where many national and international political and economic institutions are located. What all these protests have in common is their concern for social and economic justice and for participatory democracy. They often target political and economic leaders on local, national and international levels. Finally, although protesters are increasingly concerned with global issues, they also are concerned with how they play out at the local level in terms of neighbourhood quality of life, access to jobs, economic opportunities, health status, and the ability to participate in political debate and decision-making. The world in which we live is becoming more global and urban. In 1950 only 29.8 percent of the world's population lived in cities. Today 47.2 percent of the world's population lives in urban areas, and by 2030, approximately 60 percent of the world's population is projected to live in urban areas (United Nations, 2002). As a result, urban issues can be expected to continue to dominate the agenda of social movement organisations. This chapter examines how urban social movements are formed, the political and social contexts within which they emerge, how movement issues are framed, and the impact of globalisation on local organising. I will offer some examples of urban social movements both locally and globally, and conclude by discussing future directions and challenges facing urban social movements. Understanding urban social movements The term urban social movement first appeared in 1970s in the work of Manuel Castells. His primary focus was on issues of power and conflict in the city (Castells, 1983). He examined various types of issues, including collective consumption and

Guardians of the Bourgeois City: Citizenship, Public Space, and Middle‐Class Activism in Mumbai1

City & Community, 2009

This article examines the new phenomenon of "citizens' groups" in contemporary Mumbai, India, whose activities are directed at making the city's public spaces more orderly. Recent scholarship on Mumbai's efforts to become a "global" city has pointed to the removal of poor populations as an instance of neoliberal governmentality as espoused by the Indian state following the "liberalization" of the economy in the early 1990s. However, in this case, it is these civil society organizations, not the state-whose functionaries in fact benefit from a certain element of unruliness on the streets-who are the agents of increased control over populations and of the rationalization of urban space. This article, based on fieldwork-based research, argues that the way in which citizens' groups exclude poor populations from the city is more complex than a straightforward deployment of neoliberalism, and is imbricated with transnational political economic arrangements in uneven and often inconsistent ways. In particular, this article explores how civic activists in these organizations envision their role in the city, and how their activism attempts to reconfigure the nature of citizenship. For instance, civic activists consider themselves to be the stewards of the city's streets and sidewalks, and wage their battles against what they consider unruly hawkers, a corrupt state, and a complacent middle-class public. Moreover, civic activists render street hawkers' political claims illegitimate by speaking on behalf of the abstract "citizen"of Mumbai, thus implying that hawkers' unions speak only on behalf of the vested interests of a single population. In this way, they mobilize a normative notion of civil society in order to exclude the vast segment of city residents who either sell or buy goods on the street. In doing so, the civic activists transform the discourse and practice of politics in the city, so that, ironically, while on one hand using the rhetoric of citizen participation, they in fact undermine the radically heterogeneous forms of democratic political participation the city offers.

Social Movements in Urban Society: The City as A Space of Politicization

Urban Geography, 2013

Recent anti-systemic social movements have illustrated the central role of cities in social movement mobilization. We not only highlight the characteristics of urban social relations that make cities fertile ground for mobilization, but also point to the disjunctures between the geographies and spatialities of social relations in the city, and the geographies and spatialities of many systemic processes. Struggles for a more just society must consider the broad geographies and spatialities of oppression, which we illustrate with a brief analysis of the Occupy movement. Finally, we introduce the next five articles in this special issue, all illustrating the importance of the geographies and spatialities of urban social struggle. [

Miller, B. and W. Nicholls (2013) “Social Movements in Urban Society: The City as A Space of Politicization”, Urban Geography , 34 (4): 452-473.

Recent anti-systemic social movements have illustrated the central role of cities in social movement mobilization. We not only highlight the characteristics of urban social relations that make cities fertile ground for mobilization, but also point to the disjunctures between the geographies and spatialities of social relations in the city, and the geographies and spatialities of many systemic processes. Struggles for a more just society must consider the broad geographies and spatialities of oppression, which we illustrate with a brief analysis of the Occupy movement. Finally, we introduce the next five articles in this special issue, all illustrating the importance of the geographies and spatialities of urban social struggle. [

Social Movements and the Urban Public Realm

This paper considers the possibilities opened up by the new social movements for the social transformation of politics beyond the unitary public sphere of the abstract state towards a public that incorporates plural identities and facilitates participation so that individuals achieve an actual citizen identity.