Urban Social Movements: Castells, Harvey and Mayer Explained

Urban social movements are the collective organisations that fight to change living conditions in the city, housing, services, public space, transport, and to decide who governs it, and since the 1970s they have been one of the central objects of critical urban studies. Three authors fixed their analysis: Manuel Castells, who in The City and the Grassroots (1983) built the first comparative theory of these movements; David Harvey, who in Rebel Cities (2012) placed them in the struggle over the urban surplus; and Margit Mayer, who has followed for four decades their evolution in Northern cities, from squatting to resistance against austerity.

Manuel Castells: three goals of urban movements

Castells started from a critique of his own structural Marxism in The Urban Question (1972). After studying the Paris Commune, the Glasgow rent strike of 1915, the Madrid neighbourhood movement of the 1970s, San Francisco's gay community and land occupations in Latin America, he concluded that urban movements pursue three goals: improving collective consumption, housing, facilities, services; defending the identity and culture of the neighbourhood or community; and winning political autonomy from the state. When they articulate all three, he argues, they change the meaning of the city; when they pursue only one, they are absorbed by the system.

David Harvey: the dispute over the urban surplus

Harvey supplies the political economy. Urban movements, in his reading, contest control of the surplus that urbanization produces and that capital captures through rent, development and finance. That is why struggles over housing, against evictions and gentrification, or over public space are class struggles even though they do not happen in the factory, and why twenty-first-century anti-capitalist struggle must be organised in the territory. His analysis of the squares of 2011, from Occupy to the London riots, stresses the strength and fragility of mobilisations that occupy the city without institutions to sustain them.

Margit Mayer: from squatting to resistance against austerity

Mayer, a political scientist at the Free University of Berlin, has documented the phases of urban movements in Europe and the United States. The movements of the 1970s and 1980s, squats, social centres, neighbourhood struggles, won housing and facilities and were partly institutionalised. The 1990s brought professionalisation in NGOs and participation in neoliberal governance, with the risk of co-optation. And since 2008, austerity has produced a new wave: mortgage victims' platforms, tenants' unions, right to the city movements and urban commons that combine resistance with building alternatives. Her volume Cities for People, Not for Profit (2012), with Brenner and Marcuse, gathers that agenda.

Tensions and balance: neighbourhood and city, autonomy and institution

All three agree on the tensions that run through movements. Between defending the neighbourhood and the politics of the city, because a local movement can win its square and lose the urban battle. Between autonomy and institutionalisation, because negotiating with the state produces results and drains strength. And between identity and class, because the most effective movements have united tenants, migrants, women and workers around common demands. Castells added a warning Mayer confirms: urban movements rarely take power, but they change what power has to do.

The balance of four decades is that urban social movements have been the main source of justice in cities: Brazil's City Statute, rent regulations, participatory budgets, defended parks and prevented demolitions bear their signature. Castells, Harvey and Mayer teach us to read them not as noise but as urban politics in its most direct form, and to ask, before every conflict, what the organised city wants and what those who govern it are willing to concede.