ancient cities

these “green” and participatory movements developed
in the direction of party politics. The closed
structures of, for example, the West German political
system, pushed movement groups in the direction
of electoral coalitions and parties. More open
structures such as those of the United States, where
the federal government’s Great Society programs of
the 1960s had left behind a far-flung infrastructure
of community organizations, created pragmatic
neighborhood movements coalescing with ethnic
or progressive organizations in ways that remained
more distant from party politics.
The austerity politics of the 1980s initiated the
global shift toward neoliberal politics and brought
the “old” social issues back on the agenda: Growing
numbers of unemployed and poor people, a “new”
housing need, riots in housing estates, and new
waves of squattings changed the makeup of the
urban movements, while local governments—
confronted with intensifying fiscal constraints but
growing costs—explored innovative ways to solve
their problems. Increasingly they discovered the
potential of community-based organizations, while
movement groups became more interested in putting
their alternative practice onto more stable footing.
The relationship between urban movements and
local states led from opposition to cooperation, and
movements shifted from protest to program, urged
on by a variety of territorially oriented, holistic
programs for urban revitalization. Formerly confrontational
groups were thus encouraged to professionalize
and institutionalize their activities. This
distanced them from newly mobilizing groups operating
outside of these forms of routinized cooperation
within and against the state.
Fragmentation
In the course of the 1990s, the various forms of
movement activities became further differentiated
and increasingly distinct if not antagonistic.
Different kinds of movements—in defense of a
neighborhood, against the new competitive urban
policies, antipoverty and poor people’s movements,
as well as those involved in routinized
cooperation for local development—multiplied
during the 1990s but were isolated from, or competed
and fought with, each other. This intense
fragmentation may be explained in the context of
the decade’s upheavals. In fact, the collapse of East
Social Movements
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European socialism and thus the globalization of
capitalism went hand-in-hand with the triumph of
neoliberal politics in Western metropoles. Local
politics has become subject to the imperatives of
intraurban competition. The consequences of the
new urban development policies have been gentrification
and displacement, congestion, and often
the loss of public cultural and infrastructural amenities.
These consequences have triggered defensive
movements to protect threatened privileges or quality
of life, as well as politicized and militant struggles
over whose city it is supposed to be, as for
example in the waves of antigentrification struggles
that swept across New York, Paris, Amsterdam,
and Berlin.
The political and economic conditions of the
current decade seem to threaten established urban
movements even more. Since the dot–com crash of
2001, economic growth rates have stagnated;
where growth occurs, it is increasingly jobless. The
resulting sharper social divides are expressed in
intensifying sociospatial polarization. Restructuring
of social security systems has replaced welfare with
workfare orientations, “flexibilizing” and “activating”
the urban underclass, and influencing the
field in which urban movements operate. Many
former movement organizations now reproduce
themselves by implementing social and employment
programs or community development initiatives,
presumably as a way of combating social
exclusion. They have buried their dreams of the
“self-determined city,” or even liberated neighborhoods,
acknowledging the erosion of resistance
and limiting themselves to what seems feasible.
But new, vigorous impulses have come from the
antiglobalization activism of the late 1990s that no
longer privileges the global scale. Such activism
has turned toward cities as the scale where global
neoliberalism touches down and its negative effects
are felt. Networks that are part of this transnational
movement have been importing repertoires
and goals from global protests and increasingly
collaborate with local social justice alliances,
unions, and newly emerging labor and community
centers. A number of organizations have taken the
message of global justice to the local level and have
organized campaigns and demonstrations on issues
such as welfare cuts or the rights of migrants. In
many cities, media-savvy, organizationally conscious
activists are connecting a broad spectrum of