Asef Bayat: Everyday Urban Activism and the Insurgent City

Everyday urban activism is the subject of the work of Asef Bayat, an Iranian sociologist based in the United States and professor at the University of Illinois, who has shown how the urban poor of the Middle East and North Africa change their reality without parties, unions or demonstrations, through quiet practices that occupy space and overflow the law. His book Life as Politics: How Ordinary People Change the Middle East (2010) gathers two decades of research in Tehran and Cairo and offers the concepts with which the insurgent city of the Global South is read today: the quiet encroachment of the ordinary, nonmovements and street politics.

The quiet encroachment of the ordinary

The quiet encroachment of the ordinary is his central idea. Migrants who raise houses overnight on public land, vendors who take over pavements, families who tap into the electricity grid, young people who appropriate parks: each act is individual, discreet and without ideological project, but millions of them added together transform the city and force the state to negotiate. Bayat studied it in the peripheries of Tehran before and after the 1979 revolution and in Cairo's informal settlements, and showed that this encroachment achieves what protests do not: land, services and presence in the city for those with no other way.

Nonmovements: collective action without organisation

From there comes the concept of nonmovements: collective actions by non-collective actors, who share practices without organising or recognising themselves as a group. The urban poor, women gaining public space in restrictive societies, young people building a life of their own under authoritarian regimes form nonmovements whose strength lies in dispersion: there are no leaders to arrest and no headquarters to close. Bayat distinguishes them from classic social movements and holds that under repression they are the main form of social change, even if their horizon is survival rather than revolution.

Street politics and urban revolts

Street politics is the third piece. In Street Politics (1997) Bayat showed that the street, the pavement, the market, the square, is where nonmovements become visible and where the state confronts them, and that urban revolts break out when quiet encroachment is threatened: a demolition campaign, a raid on vendors, a rise in the price of bread. That reading anticipated the Arab Spring of 2011, which Bayat later analysed in Revolution without Revolutionaries (2017) as uprisings powerful in the street but without a project for the day after, partly because they grew out of nonmovements without organisation.

Bayat against Holston: two insurgent cities

Bayat's insurgent city differs from that of other authors. Against James Holston, who studied the insurgent citizenship of Brazilian peripheries organised in associations, Bayat stresses action without organisation; against the celebration of informality as resistance, he insists that its protagonists want normality, not rebellion, and that politics is born of necessity. His critics object that quiet encroachment rarely changes structures and can be co-opted by clientelism. Bayat replies that his task is to explain how poor cities actually change, not how they should.

For urban studies, Bayat's work forces us to look where there are no banners: at the gradual occupation of a lot, at the stall that returns to the pavement every morning, at the young woman crossing a square alone. There, he argues, much of the form and politics of Southern cities is decided, and a planning that does not recognise it will keep demolishing in the morning what the city builds at night.