Blackwell Publishing IncMalden, USAIJURInternational Journal of Urban and Regional Research0309-1317Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2006March 20063012026Original

Debates and DevelopmentsDebate

Articles

Volume 30.1

March 2006

2026 International Journal of Urban and Regional Research

Manuel Castells The City and the Grassroots

MARGIT MAYER

Abstract
Castells denition, developed in The City and the Grassroots, of urban social movements as movements which combine struggles over collective consumption with those for community culture and political self-determination, reects the dynamics of movements in the 1960s and 1970s which have since undergone a series of transformations. In spite of these transformations and fragmentations, Castells analysis remains relevant to contemporary studies of urban movements. One of its legacies is the identication of the conict lines along which, still today, the major urban contestations take place, even though most of the individual movements no longer converge in one multi-class actor intent on urban social change. The issue of collective consumption is more topical than ever in the current conjuncture, as public infrastructure and services are curtailed, and as local as well as supra-national manifestations of the antiglobalization movement are zeroing in on the neoliberalization of the public sector. Also, Castells highlighting of the contesting of state power has proved prophetic, not only in the continued presence of autonomous strands in the varied protests against commercialization, privatization, surveillance and exclusion, but also because it implies a sharp critique of the limitation of the civic engagement discourse currently in vogue.

No work has been as inuential as The City and the Grassroots in dening urban social movement research. Its denition of urban social movements (USMs) has shaped how subsequent generations of urban scholars and not merely in western countries have perceived their object of study: urban-orientated mobilizations that inuence structural social change and transform the urban meanings (Castells, 1983: 305). While this is a far less loaded concept than his earlier, Marxist-structuralist one (1972; 1973; 1977), Castells still only categorizes as social those urban movements which combine struggles for improved collective consumption with struggles for community culture as well as for political self-determination. With this denition Castells synthesized ten years of his own eld research and an enormous spectrum of cross-national writing on urban mobilizations, which, though not focused simply on the 1960s and 1970s, reected that eras atmosphere of social change, and brought it to bear on the territorial organization of social life in the vision of an alternative city (ibid.: 326). While unable to transform society (ibid.: 329), urban social movements, in this denition, do transform urban meanings, i.e. they undermine the societal hierarchies which structure urban life and create, instead, a city organized on the basis of use values, autonomous local cultures and decentralized participatory democracy (ibid.: 31920). While many urban movements of the 1960s and 1970s may indeed have shared this three-level activism along the fronts of collective consumption, cultural identity and local politics (thus qualifying as social movements),1 since then urban mobilizations have expanded, differentiated and fragmented in so many different ways and directions
1 First and foremost, though, it was the Citizens Movement of Madrid that typified this type of movement and probably served as the case from which Castells generalized and extrapolated by fulfilling four conditions: adhering to the just-mentioned trinity of goals; showing self-consciousness of its role as an urban social movement (rather than a class or ethnic movement), and making use of, but remaining autonomous from, the media, professionals and political parties (Castells, 1983: 322).

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that they may be synthesized along comparable lines only at the price of losing most of them, and probably failing to capture their characteristics, their dynamic and their role in contemporary society. What then is the legacy of this inuential analysis and how might it be relevant to contemporary studies of urban movements? Urban movements have gone through a series of cycles that have transformed their goals, strategies, organizational structures and action repertoires,2 resulting in a contemporary movement landscape shaped by two powerful trends: 1 A large part of community-based organizing and alternative projects has become subsumed within the so-called third sector, as cutbacks, devolution and publicprivate partnerships have led urban elites to identify and instrumentalize the activation potential of (sub)local civil society groups. Comprehensive and integrative programs are now involving social movement organizations as stakeholders in addressing the problems of social exclusion, welfare dependency, neighborhood decline, crime, etc. Making use of territorial identity and the capacity-building competence of movement groups, state programs in a wide range of policy areas now partner with movement organizations even as the latter seek to implement their own visions of a social economy, empowerment, sustainable neighborhoods, etc. 2 At the same time, more and more sections of the urban movement scene are becoming subsumed under the new anti-globalization movements, as opportunities for exchange between local and transnational movements have been created by the protest events of Seattle, Genoa and Florence as well as the Social Forums at Porto Alegre, Mumbai and Paris, and as the local chapters of the anti-globalization networks3 increasingly take the global campaign against the GATS into the cities and focus on the local effects of global neoliberal restructuring (cf. Khler and Wissen, 2003). In these campaigns against privatization and welfare state dismantling, they form broad local coalitions involving (and reinvigorating) older and disparate movement groups as well as non-movement partners such as unions, churches, welfare associations, etc. Like the globally active NGOs, they use exible action repertoires, ghting both inside the negotiation rooms and in the streets, applying pragmatic as well as militant strategies, but always being media-savvy and professional. The recent campaigns in German cities against the privatization of public utilities, which made use of demonstrations as well as referenda and lobbying,4 are examples of this approach, as are the happenings staged in welfare ofces to dramatize the effects of the social cuts and of the new workfare orientation of social policies. Both of these trends are currently reconguring the fragmented urban movement topography which the 1990s left behind: where widely disparate movements of homeowners, of poor and homeless people, their advocacy organizations, CBOs, autonomous and anti-racist groups as well as anti-gentrication and Reclaim the Streets movements were mobilizing next to and occasionally against each other; where progressive and democratic movements became less dominant than they were in the 1970s and 1980s, since right-wing and parochial mobilizations have become just as prevalent; and where conicts and divisions between, e.g., radical squatters and community development organizations have multiplied. This checkered array of oppositional as well as pragmatic, of progressive as well as reactionary, of communityoriented as well as city-wide and regionally/globally linked movements, while coming under the inuence of converging urban policies and of diffusion processes between urban social movements on a global level, can no longer be synthesized as challenges to a mode of development, which is how Castells saw them: challenges initially to the industrial mode of development and, in The City and the Grassroots, challenges to the
2 For more detail on these phases see Mayer (1999; 2006). 3 For example, in Germany Social Forum groups have formed in 28 cities, and local chapters of Attac exist in more than 200 cities. 4 And succeeded in preventing the leasing off of the Frankfurt City subway system and the sell-off of public infrastructure in many other cities.
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informational mode. In fact, his very denition of USMs, which implied that they must have alternative visions resonating with radical leftist interests, is no longer helpful, since such a denition would not leave much for USM research to study.5 However, urban movements continue to emerge and thrive, the structural conditions for conicts over the meaning of the city have hardly disappeared, and studies of urban politics and social movements indicate that such conicts and mobilizations around them are frequent (cf. Hamel et al., 2000). If anything, there is an intensied connection between social community and particular places. What has been transformed, though, is the political and socio-spatial environment which has recongured the fault lines that furnish both opportunities and constraints for social movements. While reviewers criticized Castells early on for ignoring the urban movements contextual inuence and dwelling almost exclusively on their characteristics (cf. Molotch, 1984; Pickvance, 1984; 1985; Zukin, 1987), his later recantation (cf. footnote 5), while highlighting globalization as a dening context, threw the baby out with the bath water, not only in failing to spell out the concrete implications of the new global context for urban politics (triggering intra-urban competition and scal crisis, which have constrained the leverage of municipal politics, limiting most city governments to choosing entrepreneurial strategies, privatization of their assets, shrinking and contracting out their social services [cf. Brenner and Theodore, 2002], and thus removing, in effect, the traditional political opponent for urban social movements), but also in abandoning the conceptual effort to dene and analyze urban social movements, which constitutes the lasting contribution of The City and the Grassroots. One of the lasting legacies of this work is that it has identied the conict lines along which, even today, the major urban contestations take place, though most of the individual movements no longer converge in one multi-class actor intent on urban social change. First, the issue of collective consumption is more topical than ever in the current conjuncture, as public infrastructure and services are being severely curtailed, and as local as well as supra-national manifestations of the anti-globalization movement are zeroing in on the privatization and (neo)liberalization of the public sector. Similarly, Castells highlighting of the contesting of state power has proved prophetic, not only in the continued strong presence of autonomous strands in the varied protests against commercialization, privatization, surveillance and exclusion, which Inner City Action or Reclaim the Streets events keep demonstrating as they challenge the rules and norms of business as usual (cf. Rada, 1997; Grell et al., 1998; Stahre, 2004), but also because it implies a sharp critique of the limitation of the currently fashionable civic engagement discourse, which subsumes social movements within a homogeneous civil society sphere opposite the state without recognizing that, without social movements, no challenge will emerge from civil society able to shake the institutions of the state through which norms are enforced, values preached and property preserved (Castells, 1983: 294). And nally, Castells conceiving of minority mobilizations, movements of sexual orientation and womens community organizing within the framework of USM not only captured emerging trends that later became central organizing foci, but also directed analytical effort to the signicance of cultural issues for understanding the trajectory of the movements. All of these motives have remained crucially relevant to urban social movements, even while the context has dramatically transformed due to globalization and neoliberal restructuring, producing new battle zones around privatization, retrenchment and social polarization.
5 This is in fact the conclusion Castells came to in The Rise of the Network Society (1996: 376428), where he contends that cities no longer produce successful movements because, in todays globalized space of flows, places no longer serve as a basis for social power. Local movements are inexorably undermined or outmaneuvered by larger forces of development. Because this new spatial process, the space of flows, is becoming the dominant manifestation of power and function in our societies (ibid.: 378), and because such a process is also seen to erode the power of the nationstate, social movements that rely on their relationship to local places and to the state are much less likely to emerge or thrive.
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Every theoretical model is shaped by the specic historical moment within which it emerges. If we account for the limitations and exaggerations of the model put forth by The City and the Grassroots by attributing them to the particular characteristics of high Fordism, and build, instead, on the strength and reach of analytical insight developed on the basis of the cross-cultural, empirically grounded research, this work is still highly relevant for contemporary USM research. During the early phase of urban social movements, the relationship between them and the state apparatus was far more antagonistic and clear-cut; there was a high degree of ideological coherence amongst the different strands of the movement and its levels of institutionalization and professionalization were low. Consequently, the inuence of the political system on the movements did not appear as a relevant research question. Furthermore, both politics and social science regarded the sphere of civil society as a non-political sphere of free association, distinct from the challenges to social movements presented by state policies and state institutions. But ever since neoliberal policies ceased to ignore civil society, and especially since they began to pay attention to the zones of social marginalization and to activate and integrate civil society stakeholders into a variety of development and labor market policies, the political opportunity structures for urban movements have fundamentally changed. Local governments, whose political leverage and competence has diminished and who therefore have vanished as direct antagonists for the urban movements, now play the role of steering partnerships and furthering civic engagement: they are contracting with third sector and community-based or faithbased organizations, thus embedding parts of the local movement scene within activating structures and spatially oriented programs, for example, to address poverty and welfare dependency, to integrate migrants or to harness (multi)cultural solidarities. While many of the demands for participation that were on the agenda of the earlier movements are now realized in publicprivate partnerships, community boards and round tables (all of which include civil society stakeholders at the table), and while many of the earlier substantive demands are now serviced by specic social, feminist or ethnic programs, many urban movement organizations nd themselves with their resources drying up and their alternative infrastructures eroding, their movement spaces and niche economies threatened, and their erstwhile goals channeled into feasible program activities. New mobilizing impulses and new coalition building impetus have, however, been derived from the (re)localization of issues which anti-globalization movements have identied on other scales, putting old social justice topics (unemployment, poverty, workfare, security or surveillance) back on the agenda. How to make sense of this contemporary contradictory eld of urban movements? The problem is no longer that we see urban movements as limited by their localism, or real social transformation as depending on the success of larger or more central movements such as working-class, feminist or environmental, or national or global movements. In tackling the questions posed by todays USM research how to explain the specic incidence, forms, relations and effects of mobilizations challenging, in new and old ways, the meaning the city we still have much to learn from the grounded, cross-cultural analysis and the conceptual effort Castells put in 23 years ago. Of course we will no longer paint the movements into corners external to the political system, nor read too much utopianism into their motivations or exaggerate their effects these were interpretations induced by the historical moment of high Fordism. But if we combine analysis of their internal dynamics (their action repertoires, organizational structures, ideological frames, etc.) with that of their context (the structural contingencies, economic and political environments, relation to other movements and political parties) while paying attention to how the contemporary conjuncture shapes our own research agenda and analytical models, we might move closer towards developing a persuasive theory of urban social movements.
Margit Mayer (mayer@zedat.fu-berlin.de), Freie Universitt Berlin, John F. Kennedy Institut, Lansstrae 79, 14195 Berlin, Germany.
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References
Brenner, N. and N. Theodore (eds.) (2002) Spaces of neoliberalism. Urban restructuring in North America and Western Europe. Blackwell, Oxford. Castells, M. (1972) La question urbaine. Maspero, Paris. (1973) Luttes urbaines et pouvoir politique. Maspero, Paris. (1977) The urban question. A Marxist approach. Edward Arnold, London. (1983) The city and the grassroots: a cross-cultural theory of urban social movements. Edward Arnold, London. (1996) The rise of the network society. Blackwell, Oxford. Grell, B., J. Sambale and D. Veith (1998) Inner! City! Action! crowd control, interdictory space and the ght for socio-spatial justice. In INURA (ed.), Possible urban worlds, Birkhuser, Basel. Hamel, P., H. Lustiger-Thaler and M. Mayer (eds.) (2000) Urban movements in a globalising world. Routledge, London. Khler, B. and M. Wissen (2003) Glocalizing protest: urban conicts and the global social movements. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 27.4, 94251. Mayer, M. (1999) Urban movements and urban theory in the late-20th-century city. In R. A. Beauregard and S. Body-Gendrot (eds.), The urban moment, Sage, Thousand Oaks. Mayer, M. (2006) Stdtische soziale Bewegungen [Urban social movements]. In D. Rucht and R. Roth (eds.), Handbuch sozialer Bewegungen, Campus, Frankfurt. Molotch, H. (1984) Romantic Marxism: love is (still) not enough. Contemporary Sociology 13.2 (March), 14143. Pickvance, C. (1984) Review of The city and the grassroots. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 8.4, 588 91. (1985) The rise and fall of urban movements and the role of comparative analysis. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 3, 3153. Rada, U. (1997) Die City ist nicht fr alle da [The city is not there for everyone]. Tageszeitung 31 May. Stahre, U. (2004) City in change: globalization, local politics and urban movements in contemporary Stockholm. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 28.1, 6885. Zukin, S. (1987) Review of The city and the grassroots. American Journal of Sociology 93.2 (September), 45962.

Rsum
Quand, dans The City and the Grassroots, Castells dnit les mouvements sociaux urbains comme des mouvements combinant luttes pour une consommation collective et combats en faveur dune culture communautaire et de lautodtermination politique, il traduit la dynamique des mouvements dans les annes 196070. Malgr la succession de transformations et de fragmentations que ceux-ci ont connue depuis, lanalyse de Castells reste applicable aux tudes contemporaines des mouvements sociaux. Demeure lidentication des lignes de conit auxquelles, aujourdhui encore, les principales contestations urbaines se rfrent, mme si les mouvements respectifs ne convergent gnralement plus en un seul acteur multi-classe attentif au changement social urbain. La question de la consommation collective est on ne peut plus dactualit dans la conjoncture actuelle, tant donn que linfrastructure et les services publics sont atrophis et que les manifestations, tant locales que supra-nationales, du mouvement anti-mondialisation se concentrent sur la nolibralisation du secteur public. De mme, la contestation du pouvoir de ltat mise en avant par Castells sest rvle prophtique, non seulement par la prsence continuelle de courants autonomes dans les diverses oppositions la commercialisation, la privatisation, la surveillance et lexclusion, mais aussi parce quelle implique une vive critique lgard de la limitation du discours sur lengagement civique, en vogue actuellement.

International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 30.1 2006 The Author. Journal Compilation 2006 Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishing Ltd.