Cities and Social Movements: Theorizing beyond the Right to the City

Cities and social movements: theorizing beyond the right to the city Cities breed contention.Social movements usually express themselves in cities, but cities have nevertheless been seen merely as a backdrop, as the empty canvas on which social movement activity unfolds.We maintain that the city is constitutive of social movements.The defi ning features of cities-density, size, and diversity (Wirth, 1938)-provide the basic elements for contention to develop.Because cities are dense, they are likely to trigger confl icts over space.Because they are large, they have suffi cient numbers to sustain organizations of even small minorities.And because cities are diverse, they become the laboratories where new ties are forged and the battlegrounds where competing demands vie for domination.Contention thus emerges from the microinteractions between large numbers of diverse people living in close proximity.Social movements crystallize when people organize to collectively claim urban space, organize constituents, and express demands.Contention and movements emanate from cities but also stretch outwards as activists broker relations between local and their more geographically distant allies.The recent series of protests demonstrate how the urban is uniquely conducive of contention and reveals the linkages that connect contention between different locales (Salah Fami, 2009).All over the world, protesters occupied central areas, formed relations among themselves, and expressed their demands for equality and liberty.During the Arab revolutions, relational and cognitive connections permitted activists in Tripoli and Bahrain to imagine their struggles in very similar ways to those in Cairo, in spite of very different and uneven political opportunities, mobilization capacities, and cultures (Lopes de Souza and Lipietz, 2011).This movement then inspired protesters in Spain to take to the squares, which inspired Occupy Wall Street, which in turn spiraled into the global-yet geographically uneven (Uitermark and Nicholls, 2012)-Occupy movement.Cities not only breed contention; they also breed control.In their ongoing struggles to maintain order and power, local states and their partners develop strategies and techniques to direct the ebbs and fl ows of contentiousness constantly bubbling up from the urban grassroots.The city is a generative space of mobilizations and, because of this, it is also the frontline where states constantly create new governmental methods to protect and produce social and political order, including repression, surveillance, clientelism, corporatism, and participatory and citizenship initiatives.These techniques combine in different ways from one city to the next, making cities not only prime sites for contentious innovation but also the places where new ways of regulating, ordering, and controlling social life are invented.This collection of papers examines the dialectic of contention and control within cities.On the one hand, it identifi es when, how, and why cities breed contention.On the other hand, the papers explore when, how, and why governments and their partners regain control over urban space.The dialectic of control and contention is explored-in this introduction as well as in the various contributions to this theme issue-from a decidedly relational perspective (cf Emirbayer, 1997;Nicholls, 2008; 2009) that gives analytical priority to the mechanisms that make or break relations among and between challengers and elites.Such a relational perspective is very general and can incorporate a range of different views rooted in political economy, institutional analysis, or discourse analysis.Nevertheless, we argue that it is distinctive as it provides a different analytical emphasis than other frameworks for analyzing movements, especially the currently dominant way of analyzing movements in the 'right-to-the-city' framework.