Multiplying resistance: The power of the urban in the age of national revanchism (original) (raw)
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2017
What do the recent urban resistance tactics around the world have in common? What are the roles of public space in these movements? What are the implications of urban resistance for the remaking of public space in the "age of shrinking democracy"? To what extent do these resistances move from anti- to alter-politics? City Unsilenced brings together a cross-disciplinary group of scholars and scholar-activists to examine the spaces, conditions, and processes in which neoliberal practices have profoundly impacted the everyday social, economic, and political life of citizens and communities around the globe. They explore the commonalities and specificities of urban resistance movements that respond to those impacts. They focus on how such movements make use of and transform the meanings and capacity of public space. They investigate their ramifications in the continued practices of renewing democracies. A broad collection of cases is presented and analyzed, including Movimento Passe Livre (Brazil), Google Bus Blockades San Francisco (USA), the Platform for Mortgage Affected People (PAH) (Spain), the Piqueteros Movement (Argentina), Umbrella Movement (Hong Kong), post-Occupy Gezi Park (Turkey), Sunflower Movement (Taiwan), Occupy Oakland (USA), Syntagma Square (Greece), Researchers for Fair Policing (New York), Urban Movement Congress (Poland), urban activism (Berlin), 1DMX (Mexico), Miyashita Park Tokyo (Japan), 15M Movement (Spain), and Train of Hope and protests against Academic Ball in Vienna (Austria). By better understanding the processes and implications of the recent urban resistances, City Unsilenced contributes to the ongoing debates concerning the role and significance of public space in the practice of lived democracy.
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Cities and social movements: theorizing beyond the right to the city Cities breed contention. Social movements usually express themselves in cities, but cities have nevertheless been seen merely as a backdrop, as the empty canvas on which social movement activity unfolds. We maintain that the city is constitutive of social movements. The defi ning features of cities-density, size, and diversity (Wirth, 1938)-provide the basic elements for contention to develop. Because cities are dense, they are likely to trigger confl icts over space. Because they are large, they have suffi cient numbers to sustain organizations of even small minorities. And because cities are diverse, they become the laboratories where new ties are forged and the battlegrounds where competing demands vie for domination. Contention thus emerges from the microinteractions between large numbers of diverse people living in close proximity. Social movements crystallize when people organize to collectively claim urban space, organize constituents, and express demands. Contention and movements emanate from cities but also stretch outwards as activists broker relations between local and their more geographically distant allies. The recent series of protests demonstrate how the urban is uniquely conducive of contention and reveals the linkages that connect contention between different locales ). All over the world, protesters occupied central areas, formed relations among themselves, and expressed their demands for equality and liberty. During the Arab revolutions, relational and cognitive connections permitted activists in Tripoli and Bahrain to imagine their struggles in very similar ways to those in Cairo, in spite of very different and uneven political opportunities, mobilization capacities, and cultures (Lopes de Souza and Lipietz, 2011). This movement then inspired protesters in Spain to take to the squares, which inspired Occupy Wall Street, which in turn spiraled into the global-yet geographically uneven (Uitermark and Nicholls, 2012)-Occupy movement.
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