Castells' definition, 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, reflects 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 identification of the conflict 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 anti-globalization 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. Copyright (c) 2006 The Authors. Journal Compilation (c) 2006 Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

Romantic Marxism: Love Is (Still) Not Enough@@@The City and the Grassroots: A Cross-Cultural Theory of Urban Social Movements.

Manuel Castells¿ The City and the Grassroots

What's left to do?*

/pdf/the-river-the-railroad-tracks-and-the-towers-how-residents-26o9cw60v3.pdf

The river, the railroad tracks, and the towers: How residents' worldview and use value transformed Wilton Manors into a diverse, gay-friendly, urban village

ABSTRACT While activists have effectively used the #blacklivesmatter hashtag to organize protests against police brutality and racism, this success has also drawn out many who use the hashtag to express their opposition. How do supporters of the Movement for Black Lives and their opponents coordinate on Twitter? Drawing on a corpus of 18.5 million tweets, this paper compares coordination among supporters and opponents of #blacklivesmatter in terms of relations and spatialities. We elaborate two different models of coordination: the swarm and the grassroots. Compared to their adversaries, supporters of #blacklivesmatter are more strongly rooted in places and embedded in local relations, suggesting that their online activism builds on grassroots communities. Opponents can be differentiated into two categories. One group consists of conservatives that are rooted in places but in a markedly different geography than supporters; they are more often located outside of major cities and outside of the coastal states. A second group of digitally networked extreme right opponents coordinates more in the fashion of a swarm: they synchronize without being rooted in places or embedded in local relations. These findings demonstrate that movements and countermovements benefit from the affordances of social media in different ways.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/14742837.2022.2031954?needAccess=true

The Swarm versus the Grassroots: places and networks of supporters and opponents of Black Lives Matter on Twitter

An abstract of the dissertation ofLeanne Claire Serbulo for the Doctor ofPhilosophy in Urban Studies presented May 9,2008. Title: "Whose streets? Our streets!" Urban social movements and the transformation ofeveryday life in Pacific Northwest cities, 1990-1999 This project returns to the questions that were once at the center of the urban studies debate over social movements. What are urban social movements, and what impacts do they leave on the cities where they occur? Urban protests in Portland, Oregon and Seattle, Washington are used as the foundation for exploring the following research questions: What urban social movements occurred in the Pacific Northwest during 1990s? What goals were these movements struggling for? What impacts did urban social movements have on daily life in Portland and Seattle? While this project has continuity with earlier attempts to identify, describe, and assess the role that urban social movements play in cities, it also represents a significant departure from the established ways ofunderstanding this phenomenon. Manuel Castells' (1983) theory on urban social movements considered local activism ineffectual, if it could not produce serious revolutionary change. A different portrait of urban social movements emerged in this project. Pacific Northwest urban protests challenged existing social relationships in neighborhoods, at work, in public services, in the construction and use ofurban space, and in the imagination ofthe city. These protests grew out of the everyday life experiences of their participants and sought to transform the patterns and relationships ofdaily life. Since urban social movements arise from everyday life, their impacts will be evident in a community's use of time, construction of space, development of social relationships, and sense ofpossibility. The ability ofurban social movements to radically alter the everyday lives of their participants and communities of interest is, in and of itself, significant. As these changes reverberate beyond the boundaries of these directly impacted communities, they have the potential to create broader citywide changes. It is these transformations that are the building blocks for the active construction ofour urban cultures, spaces, and communities.

/pdf/whose-streets-our-streets-urban-social-movements-and-the-2iwnmoljfw.pdf

Romantic Marxism: Love Is (Still) Not Enough@@@The City and the Grassroots: A Cross-Cultural Theory of Urban Social Movements.

Citations

Manuel Castells¿ The City and the Grassroots

What's left to do?*

The river, the railroad tracks, and the towers: How residents' worldview and use value transformed Wilton Manors into a diverse, gay-friendly, urban village

The Swarm versus the Grassroots: places and networks of supporters and opponents of Black Lives Matter on Twitter

"Whose streets? Our streets!" Urban Social Movements and the Transformation of Everyday Life in Pacific Northwest Cities, 1990-1999

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