Margit Mayer

The Terrain of Urban Social Movements in the Age of Neoliberalism

This presentation looks at contemporary contestations of urban governance that challenge its participation in the neoliberal project. As neoliberal restructuring strategies have reconfigured local states across the various western welfare regimes, a variety of social movements have responded by addressing and challenging neoliberal urban policies and their consequences. However, these policies and their consequences have transformed not only the forms and spaces of urban governance, but have also transformed social movement terrains, breaking up familiar patterns and creating new frontiers and cleavages of contestation. The urban movement literature has barely begun to take note of these transformations (Pickvance, 2003).  
By placing the analysis of the major fault lines, along which these contemporary urban contestations take place, within the framework of ongoing neoliberal restructuring, this presentation seeks to identify the novel features, the particular strengths as well as dilemmas of the new kinds of contestations. It draws on original as well as secondary research on urban movements especially in the U.S. and Germany over the last decade, which reveals that many of the elements from the cycles of urban protest familiar since the 1960s have disappeared with the demise of radical squatting and anti-gentrification movements, alternative movement infrastructures appear eroded, and the "neighborhood rebellions" of blighted areas have been surpassed by revitalization and stabilization efforts involving former grassroots activists as economic developers or community managers. Neoliberalism has in many ways created a more hostile environment for progressive urban movements, forcing them and their advocates and supporters to regroup and rethink.

References

  • Pickvance, C. 2003: From urban social movements to urban movements: a review and introduction to a symposium on urban movements. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 27/1: 102-109.

Margit Mayer is Professor of Political Science at the Department of Politics at the John F. Kennedy Institute, Freie Universität Berlin. Recent publications: with V. Eick, B. Grell, J. Sambale: Nonprofit-Organisationen und die Transformation lokaler Beschäftigungspolitik. Münster: Westfälisches Dampfboot, 2004; with Hamel P., Lustiger-Thaler, H. (eds.): Urban Movements in a Globalising World. London: Routledge, 2000.

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