Session details
Organizer(s)
Philipp Reick (Aarhus University), Christian Wicke (Utrecht University) and Mikkel Thelle (Aarhus University)
Keywords
Urban Social Movements, Urban Struggle, Urban Contention
Abstract
Historians have recently turned their attention to the numerous urban struggles that erupted in the aftermath of the rebellious 1960s. In doing so, they offered important insights into the emergence of urban social movements. In particular, they showed that urban experiences, urban aesthetics, and urban space became central concerns for a young generation of social movements that began to forge new collective identities. From the set-up of community centers to the fight for architectural preservation to squatting, these movements, historians argue, developed strategies that epitomize a significant shift to post-material values and ideals. Yet by focusing on the second half of the twentieth century, historical research has given the impression that urban social movements somehow appeared out of the blue. The history of urban mobilization, in other words, lacks dramatically in historical depth. Against this backdrop, our session looks into similarities and differences as well as continuities and discontinuities in the history of urban struggle from the “age of revolutions” to the late twentieth century. In so doing, the panel challenges the dichotomy of “old” and “new” social movements. Papers in this panel reflect on structural context–social, political, economic, and cultural–as this shall assist us in rethinking this dichotomy. Apart from establishing “objective” connections visible in urban movement practices, ideologies, and representations of urban problems over time, this session also invites discussions over the “subjective” connections, i.e., particularly in the form of memory and historical references among urban movement activists. This shall facilitate the narration of a trans-generational history of urban movements that goes beyond the “old” and “new” dichotomy. Finally, the panel engages with practices of struggle, including analyses of the corporeal or spatial nature of contestation.
Papers
Inequality, Ethnic Conflict and Clashes between Power Factions as Drivers of Social Protest: Urban Riots in Early 19th Century Spain
Author(s)
José María Cardesín Díaz (University of A Coruna)
Keywords
Inequality, Xenophobia, Urban Riot
Abstract
In early 19th Century Spanish cities, the combined effects of economic crisis, poor crops, recurrent epidemics and war generated a deep social and political crisis. Urban riots became more and more frequent: a situation that went worse with the outbreak of the Peninsular War.
A classic explanation of these riots, from a neo-Marxist point of view such as that developed by E.P. Thompson or James Scott, would point to either conditions of inequality in wealth, income and protection against starvation, or hard pressures exerted by the state apparatus, particularly by armies in the field. Moreover, if we were to turn to Hobsbawm, we could also invoke the social warfare that underlay many xenophobic attacks (particularly anti-French). An alternative explanation would be the neo-Weberian approach developed by Charles Tilly, where these riots did constitute the core of the classical repertoire of contentious politics in that period which was prior to the development of parliamentary democracies, at least when governmental capacity was low.
The research project I coordinate –“Social Protest and Collective Violence in Urban Spain”- aims to explore a third way, and focus on the analysis of the contradictions that were rooted in the social structure and recent history of each city, as they were affected by common pressures of regional or national scope. This project, that’s been funded by the Spanish Ministry of Universities, aims to carry out the comparative analysis of one hundred riots that occurred in the early years of the 19th century in 50 cities and towns that were spread across Spain and Portugal. Moreover, in at least 20 of these urban centres, we intend to map the itinerary that these riots followed through the city, and how they were connected to economic, social or ethnic divisions in the urban fabric.
A dozen researchers from different Spanish and foreign universities do participate in the project. We’ve adopted an interdisciplinary perspective, that is based on the collaboration of historians, sociologists and urban planners. How to prevent polyphony from degenerating into cacophony? We propose to map and visualize the results of our research on a platform using QGIS.
The 1907 Buenos Aires Rent Strike and the Role of Women in the Making of an Urban Grassroots Movement
Author(s)
Lucas Poy (Instituto de Historia Argentina y Americana Dr. Emilio Ravignani (Universidad de Buenos Aires - CONICET))
Keywords
Rent Strike, Argentina, Urban Movements
Abstract
The goal of this paper is to assess an early experience of urban social mobilization in a cosmopolitan and radical metropolis of the ‘Global South’ in the beginning of the 20th century: the 1907 Buenos Aires rent strike. 112 years ago, a spirit of struggle and activism spread among the impoverished working-class tenants of several multicultural neighborhoods, when thousands of tenants, many of them migrants, acted together in order to put an end to the voracious and predatory rule of landlords. They had to face attacks from the media and the state and they had to build on their experiences of resistance in order to develop the necessary organizational resources to accomplish their goals. Drawing upon a variety of secondary and primary sources, this paper develops a study of the rent strike and provides an overview of the peculiarities of urban development and working-class formation in those early years of the 20th century, of the motley population that filled its tenement houses, and of the repertoire of actions developed by striking tenants. It focuses mostly on the role played by women, undoubtedly the main actors of these strikes, and goes on to argue that this predominant presence of women in tenement buildings and street actions is critical to understand the hesitant and passive role of the leadership of trade unions. Indeed, previous studies have recognized the unwillingness of trade unions to take decisive intervention in such a massive and radicalized movement. I consider that no minor part of the explanation lies in the female dominance of the movement's leadership, something that was difficult for male-dominated unions to assimilate.
Urban Social Movements in Barcelona Working-class Suburbs: a Diachronic Comparison, 1914-1975
Author(s)
José Luis Oyón (Polytechnic University of Catalonia) and Manel Guardia (Polytechnic University of Catalonia)
Keywords
Urban Movements, Housing Conditions, Home ownership
Abstract
The examination in the longue durée of urban movements in working-class Barcelona shows the absolute mutation in the objectives and forms of urban struggles. The comparison of Francoist urban movements with the interwar situation is indeed very illustrative. The great summer 1931 rent strike against the insufferable amount of the housing rents, or the 1951 trams strike because of the sudden rise in the price tickets (the principal ways of expressing discontent over the serious prejudice they supposed in the family income) were seen in the 1960s and 1970s as something of the past as mode of urban protest of working-class families.
Housing conditions and risings real wages will give way in the 60s to struggles´ goals and forms of protest absolutely different. One of the key issues not examined by the historiography of urban movements is the role played by home ownership in its development and in its content. One hypothesis to verify would be whether there is a relationship between the involvement of specific individuals in the working-class neighbourhoods movements and the high home ownership rates, specially in the space of the new suburbs. Home ownership (more or less precarious and insecure in its beginnings, still imperfect later the public housing estates were built), stabilized and rooted a large number of working families to their neighbourhoods for many years, thus establishing one of the main bases to create authentic communities articulated by dense stable networks of kinship, immigration, friendship and sociability. Those communities would end up setting up a powerful neighbourhood movement which was also responsible of the fall of three Barcelona majors at the end of Franco Dictatorship.
The Urbanism of Urban Movements: Historical Vicissitudes of Movements and Cities in Brazil
Author(s)
Jeroen Stevens (KU Leuven)
Keywords
Urban Social Movements, Urbanism, Urban Studies
Abstract
This contribution develops a historical analysis of urbanization and urban movement mobilizations in Brazil as they simultaneously unfolded throughout the 20th century. This way, it aims to shed light on the complex interaction between the material and socio-political transformation of the city on the one hand, and the particular role of urban movements in such transformation on the other hand. The paper will look into the historical emergence of some of Brazil’s principal social movements such as the Landless Movement and Homeless Movement and sound out how their formation and mobilization was closely related to distinct urban developments that swept across the Brazilian territory. What notorious form of urbanism consequently emerges from the involvement of urban movements in the historical formation and transformation of the Latin-American metropolis? The city will herein be foregrounded not as the passive or neutral background of social movement practices, but as the principal site and subject at the core of movements’ activist agenda. The paper stems from multiple years of close engagement and extensive participant observation with and within social movements in Brazil. It draws from a combination of ethnographic fieldwork findings, typo-morphological urban analysis and archival material.
Transport Policy under the Pressure of the Street: The 1971 Transport Price Protests in Dortmund
Author(s)
Hans H. Bass (City University of Bremen)
Keywords
Social Protest, Urban Transport, Youth Rebellion
Abstract
The 1971 transport price protests in one of the largest cities in Germany can be interpreted in four different ways: as a consumer protest about a „fair“ price for local mobility as a basic need in a functionally segregated city; as a confrontation of organized communism with the state authorities of the Bonn Republic; as a provincial echo of the worldwide youth rebellion of 1968; and as an argument over ecologically sound urban transport systems. The paper analyzes political actors in these riots and their ideas on transport policy.