Margit Mayer and the Struggle for the Right to the City

Margit Mayer is the German political scientist, professor emerita at the Free University of Berlin, who has followed for four decades the struggle of urban social movements for the right to the city and who has best explained how neoliberal urbanism transforms those movements, co-opts them and forces them to reinvent themselves. Her thesis, developed in articles such as The Right to the City in the Context of Shifting Mottos of Urban Social Movements (2009) and in the volume Cities for People, Not for Profit (2012), with Neil Brenner and Peter Marcuse, is that the movements resisting gentrification and the commodification of space are not background noise but the force that has produced the fairest policies of cities, and that their effectiveness depends on not being absorbed by the agendas they fight.

Three phases: squats, professionalisation and the wave after 2008

Mayer reconstructs three phases. In the 1970s and 1980s, the squats, social centres and neighbourhood struggles of Berlin, Amsterdam or Zurich won housing, facilities and neighbourhood rehabilitation, and were partly institutionalised through careful renewal programmes. In the 1990s, professionalisation in NGOs and participation in local governance turned many movements into service managers, at the risk of losing their capacity for conflict. And since the crisis of 2008, austerity and financialisation have produced a new wave, from tenants' unions to anti-eviction platforms and housing referendums, combining resistance with the construction of alternatives.

Shifting mottos: how neoliberalism co-opts movements

Her most cited contribution is the analysis of shifting mottos. Mayer shows that neoliberal urbanism has incorporated the vocabulary of the movements: the creative city recruits the artists and squatters who revitalised neighbourhoods to sell them as a brand, participation becomes consultation without power, sustainability and resilience become agendas asking communities to absorb crises they did not cause. Against that co-optation, Lefebvre's right to the city, taken up by Harvey, offers movements a motto that cannot be absorbed without changing who decides over land, housing and the urban surplus, which is why they adopted it from Hamburg to São Paulo.

Berlin: from Kreuzberg to Tempelhof and the 2021 expropriation vote

Berlin is her laboratory. Mayer has followed the city from the Kreuzberg squats of the 1980s through the mass sale of public housing in the 2000s, the resistance to megaprojects such as Mediaspree in 2008, the referendum that saved Tempelhof airport as a park in 2014 and the Deutsche Wohnen und Co enteignen initiative, which in 2021 won 56 percent of votes for expropriating large landlords. That trajectory shows, in her reading, how a movement moves from defending particular houses to contesting the model of the city, and how an electoral victory does not guarantee implementation if the government does not take it on.

Influence, criticism and the capacity for conflict

Her framework converses with Castells, Harvey, Brenner and Marcuse, and has influenced studies of municipalism, urban commons and housing movements in Europe and Latin America. Critics note that the emphasis on co-optation may underestimate the achievements of institutionalisation, which has produced real housing and services; Mayer replies that the question is not institution or street but preserving the capacity for conflict within negotiation, and that the most effective movements have combined both.

Margit Mayer's lesson is that the right to the city is won movement by movement and lost motto by motto: every time a demand becomes a brand, movements must find the next one that cannot be sold. For planning, her work recalls that the policies of affordable housing, public space and real participation that now seem reasonable were imposed by those who squatted, marched and voted, and that without them the city for people becomes once again the city for profit.