Margit Mayer

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.

A German political scientist, professor of political science at the Free University of Berlin until 2011 and then a researcher at the Center for Metropolitan Studies, Mayer has spent four decades studying urban social movements, from the West Berlin squats of the 1980s to the rent mobilisations of the last decade. Her work connects movement theory with urban political economy: she shows how the shift from Fordism to neoliberalism changed what movements demand and how the state co-opts or represses them.

She co-edited with Neil Brenner and Peter Marcuse Cities for People, Not for Profit (2012), the volume that gathered critical urban theory around the right to the city, and with Catharina and Håkan Thörn Urban Uprisings (2016), on European urban revolts after 2008. Her influence shows in Berlin, where research on housing movements accompanied the 2021 referendum to expropriate the big landlords, and in the critique of the creative city, which she reproaches for using movements as scenery.

Mayer has also been a critical reader of the right to the city slogan. In a 2009 article she traced how Lefebvre's call moved from the struggles of the 1960s into municipal charters and United Nations documents, and warned that, stretched that far, it may stop pointing at anyone: a right that everyone signs up to, from the council to the developer, loses its capacity for conflict. Her proposal is to ask again, case by case, whose right and against whom.