ancient cities

740 Social Movements
creating space for more participatory democracy
and empowering local movements against neoliberalism
and imperialism. Urban movements in the
new growth regions of Asia, on the other hand,
have not (yet) been so vocal, and research applying
social movement theories elaborated within
Western contexts is limited.
Urban Activism
Though these theoretical approaches have been
developed mostly on the basis of urban conflict in
Western democracies, they fail to account for the
changing patterns and dynamics of urban activism.
Globalization and neoliberalism have reconfigured
cityscapes across the globe. The relatively homogenous
movements of the 1960s and 1970s that
were unified in broad coalitions against hegemonic
urban elites and their politics of Fordist development
have, over the course of the 1980s and
1990s, splintered into different types and directions,
creating a fundamentally restructured movement
terrain. Consistent, uniform movement
patterns have disappeared, and there is hardly a
consensus about interpretive frameworks and analytic
concepts for how to study them. Yet, the formation
of new collective identities and the
development and fragmentation of movement
strands have followed similar cycles, at least in the
so-called advanced metropoles, which may be due
to similarities in urban development patterns and
convergences in urban governance.
Social movements provoked by housing need
(e.g., the tenant strike movements in New York
City of the early 1900s), movements struggling for
alternative forms of housing (as the cooperative
movements in European countries), or movements
fighting the unequal distribution of urban services
or the political process creating it (as the North
American practice of community organizing) have
been around for a long time. Still, they were
mere sporadic precursors to contemporary urban
movements. It was not until the wave of squattings,
citizens initiatives, local public transit campaigns,
and the struggles for youth and community
centers in the wake of the 1960s movements that
a genuine field of urban conflict emerged where
collective actors began to challenge the dominant
ways of urban development and to demand a
“right to the city.”
First Wave of Urban Opposition
The first wave of urban opposition was triggered
by Fordist urban planning and the expansion of
infrastructures that accelerated the zoning of urban
space into residential, shopping, and industrial
areas and led to massive urban renewal. Whereas
in the United States these mostly defensive movements
were accompanied by militant ghetto rebellions,
European movements against renewal and
infrastructure projects often emerged from preexisting
citizen and local dignitaries’ associations. They
preferred professional “planning from below” strategies
but increasingly, especially where confronted
with technocratic local administrations, turned to
street protest and other militant repertoires.
Simultaneously with these moderate mobilizations
contesting the cultural norms of the institutions
of collective consumption—their price,
quality, and options to participate in their design—
more radical groups of the youth movement
emerged out of the antiauthoritarian 1960s and
fed into the urban scene. These groups sought,
both in their countercultural as well as their
power-oriented incarnations, to challenge the prevailing
societal order. And the New Left, after its
heyday in the late 1960s, discovered that class
struggle had shifted from the factory to the “sphere
of reproduction” and thus initiated projects to
support and radicalize social and neighborhood
struggles. Depending on the profile of the local
Left, and on the particular contours of local conflicts,
different types of movement milieus would
emerge in these struggles, often with dense networks
of self-managed centers and shops, alternative
and feminist collectives and autonomous
media. These provided the bases for a new political
actor who was able and ready to intervene in
urban development and politics.
While the governments of the industrialized
countries began to address the crisis of Fordism,
which had become manifest with the 1973–1974
recession, their measures increased the numbers of
those excluded from the blessings of Fordism. The
ranks of the urban opposition swelled as new and
old protest groups sought to find common denominators
in environmentally oriented or antigrowth
coalitions as well as in demands and projects for
participatory democracy. Depending on the degree
of openness of the political opportunity structures,