Urban Uprisings

"This volume brings together some of the most insightful contributions on an essential theme, at the source of urban social change. Indispensable reading for students, activists and local administrators." (Manuel Castells, University of California, Berkeley, USA) "An excellent collection. Not only does the focus on European protests fill a gap in the social movement literature, but the case studies are informed by the authors' considerable theoretical erudition. Just as important, they cast a broad net, giving due attention to the more inchoate forms of protest that have often been neglected by social movement scholars. " (Frances Fox Piven, Graduate School of the City University of New York, USA) "We live in an age of urban unrest. Urban Uprisings explains why this matters to what cities are and why we must understand uprisings better if we are to comprehend the nature of power in the contemporary city. This important book makes it clear that the city itself - the urban landscape as the concretization of the injustice of the present neoliberal order - is shaped and reshaped through explosive struggle, struggle that (inchoate as it may sometimes be) is precisely the means by which any real right to the city may be glimpsed and grasped." (Don Mitchell, Syracuse University, USA)

Processes of neoliberalisation have caused deeply segregated urban landscapes defined by deepening social inequality, rising unemployment, racism, securitization of urban spaces and welfare state withdrawal, particularly from poor peripheral areas, where tensions between marginalized youth and police often manifest in public spaces.This book analyses the waves of protests, from spontaneous uprisings to well-organized forms of collective action, which have shaken European cities over the last decade. It shows how analysing these protests in connection with the structural context of neoliberal urbanism and its crises is more productive than standard explanations. Processes of neoliberalisation have caused deeply segregated urban landscapes defined by deepening social inequality, rising unemployment, racism, securitization of urban spaces and welfare state withdrawal, particularly from poor peripheral areas, where tensions between marginalized youth and police often manifest in public spaces. Challenging a conventional distinction made in research on protest, the book integrates a structural analysis of processes of large scale urban transformation with analyses of the relationship between 'riots' and social movement action in nine countries: France, Greece, England, Germany, Spain, Poland, Denmark, Sweden and Turkey.