The notion of ‘urban activism’ holds an ambiguous status in both the fields of social movements and urban studies. It usually conflates the meanings of ‘urban movements’ and all sorts of activist practices that take place in cities. ‘Urban movements’ is the conventional expression to capture sustained mobilisations and protests that challenge consolidated power structures in relation to the production and transformation of urban spaces. When these collective actions are neither lasting over time nor sufficiently challenging the rulers and managers over the territory, it seems convenient to just designate them broadly as ‘activism’. Therefore, we argue that urban activism occurs within specific organisations not much coordinated with others, and when it is focused on single-issue demands and campaigns with limited duration and capacity to alter the deep roots of urban politics. Activists are engaged participants in collective action as members of disparate groups who can turn into contributors to larger movements under certain circumstances. We elaborate on this distinction more accurately.
Urban activism and movements have undergone waves of transformation in the past few decades. Earlier research tends to focus on large scale nationally or even internationally orchestrated campaigns which were often elaborated and ‘institutionally-heavy’ with reliance on professional organisers and involved in situ participation of supporters. Yet this has been overshadowed by the emergence (or revival, according to some) of ‘new social movements’ since the 1970s which were often fragmented and ‘institutionally-thin’ with non-materialistic demands around issues like identity, gender, ecology or idealistic mottos like peace (Roth 2000). However, more recently, ‘old problems’ like employment, housing and urban planning returned to the scene. The contradictions created by late capitalism, the retreat of the welfare state, and the advancement of neoliberalism are believed to be the underlying driving forces. Shared concern on the impacts of global events like climate change, impacts caused by the global flows of capital have underpinned many protests over the recent decades (Hamel 2000). Isolated actions are also being linked to each other by resources and mediation from international NGOs and movement organisations. Hence, as Harvey (2008) postulates, even localised urban struggles have to be approached from a global scale as global financial capitals are dominating most urbanisation processes.
In contrast to the global north to which most of the studies on urban activism make reference, the form and process of struggles in the global south take very different shape despite sharing the same global threats, like the environmental crisis and the proliferation of financial powers (as well as local government acting as their agents or in collusion with them). High in the agendas of urban activism in the global south are collective consumption issues like clean water, basic shelter, actions against displacement and better conditions for street vendors. Such localised actions are cut off from the international movement networks and are little known outside of their action localities (Mayer 2009). Indeed, integration of the actions in cities in the global south with the specificity of the local sociopolitical environments is often more pivotal than their connection with global movement networks or international NGOs. Hence, local singularities remain as a crucial dimension in the study of urban activism and movements, despite their tensions with global scales or even the transnational diffusion of protest repertoires.
The shaping of the local specificity of urban activism goes beyond the immediate local context but is connected to the social, political and cultural environments at various levels—local, regional, national and even global. In this respect, as most empirical cases have been reported from the global north within the tandem formed by capitalism and liberal democracy, bias in the analysis appears to be inevitable. The assumptions that ‘civil rights are protected, the press is free, courts and legislatures are independent of the executive, and mechanisms for regular transfers of political power are institutionalized’ (Osa and Schock 2007) simply cannot be taken for granted for many countries in the global south. The recent erosion of those pillars in countries of the global north such as Russia and Hungary, or in developing countries (Turkey, Brazil, etc.), warns us about the constraints of national and local contexts for the expression of grass-roots claim-making.
Situations are even worse in transitional economies under semi-authoritarian rule, like China and Vietnam, in which ‘repression or the threat of repression is omnipresent … the risk of associating with regime opponents and advocating policies not sanctioned by authorities is costly, and resources that may be used to oppose the regime are difficult to acquire’ (Osa and Schock 2007, p. 124). Collective actions of protest are still being perceived as a threat to social stability and hence various forms of activism are censored by state-controlled conventional media or being filtered in the new online media (for instance, by the Great Firewall in China). Help or support from international networks may be also counterproductive because it attracts the attention of the state and ends up in even more extensive suppression.
Even in countries in which western-like liberal democracy is imitated or been newly set up (e.g. Central and Eastern Europe), political resources and channels of redress may have been monopolised by the elites and the media in addition to non-independent judiciaries. Equally notable are countries in North Asia. Despite their capitalist system is arguably well advanced, their developmental approach to economic growth put the role of the state in a dominant position which is further complicated by the interweave of social factions within closely knitted political interests.
Activism, Movements and Urban Politics: Theoretical Concerns
Academic definitions on urban movements rarely distinguish various forms of activism as their key components. We argue that although all forms of urban activism nurture urban movements, the latter generally imply more intense contentious politics than the former. Activism also refers to less coordination between disparate groups and less tendency to expand their social networks of alliance, support and action. We thus contend that the above are differences of degree more than essential distinct features. Movements cannot exist without activists, but many activist expressions are not able to shape larger movements. Overlaps may also occur between them and other forms of urban politics we cannot examine here (from political parties and elections to charities, sport clubs and hidden or dispersed forms of resistance to authority: Scott 1990).
The meaning of the ‘urban’ holds obvious spatial connotations. Local places and cities are the location for manifold protests but, for us, only those involving the configuration, production and transformation of spaces within a local scope (from neighbourhood sites to the metropolitan scale) should be considered ‘urban’. This stance also excludes spatial determinism because we take for granted that urban spaces are, mainly, the result of social (as well as political, economic and cultural) processes which make and reproduce a dominant mode of production and consumption (Harvey 1996, Ch. 9). However, as mentioned above, the transnational nature in many locally bounded urban struggles has often been neglected (Mayer and Boudreau 2012, p. 284). Many movements have to deal with the politics of scales when authorities operate rescaling processes of resources, policies and decision-making processes, which oblige activists to ‘multi-scalar strategies’ (Martínez 2018a; Nicholls et al. 2013, p. 9).
Based on these premises, we define ‘urban activism’ as the social practices of protest and claim-making about urban affairs within specific economic and political contexts—usually, in short, a capitalist society (Heatland and Goodwin 2013; Pickvance 1995, p. 198; Pruijt 2007). The more they persist and tackle the power structures of cities, the more they can scale up to the category of urban movements. Hence, when activism is fully channelled th...