Margit Mayer
1947
German political scientist who studies urban movements: how they emerge, what they win and when they end up absorbed by what they fought.
Mayer has followed squats, housing movements and urban protests in Europe and the United States for decades. Her contribution is less celebratory than usual: she also documents how administrations absorb those initiatives and turn them into participation programmes with no real power to decide.
She described how the creative-city discourse recruited the alternative movements themselves as urban branding. What began as a critique of neoliberal urbanism ended up, in many cases, as its advertising pitch.
On Margit Mayer in this archive
- Public space
Interstitial Spaces: Resistance and Urban Creativity
The politics of interstitial space refers to the use and transformation of urban areas that have been abandoned,…
Margit Mayer 2 min read - Public space
Margit Mayer and the Struggle for the Right to the City
Margit Mayer, a German scholar, has been a key figure in the study of urban social movements and their struggle for…
Henri Lefebvre 2 min read - Public space
Urban Social Movements: Struggles for Justice and Equity
Urban social movements have emerged as key responses to the economic and social transformations shaping…
Manuel Castells 1 min read
