Urban Social Movements

Urban social movements (USMs) consist of individuals who share real or perceived inequality within a larger society and who engage in strategies and activities to achieve collective goals. The inequality may be social, cultural, political, or economic. The common objective of the movement is to achieve or prevent change. Members of USMs seek to elucidate and solve problems of housing, environment, municipal services, cost of living, transportation, jobs, security, redevelopment, and other issues of urban life.

At some point, those who participate in USMs have become impatient with existing institutions and mobilize with the aim of transforming their cities into better places to live and work. Participants come from all classes of society and are most active in political environments of participatory democracies. Less frequently, USMs are found in nondemocratic areas of the world such as the Middle East and China. The geographic scale of membership in USMs varies and may simultaneously be local, state, regional, national, international, and transnational. There is a nested organizational hierarchy in which local grassroots movements affiliate with larger regional or national organizations that are further affiliated with international or global USMs. For example, an individual may identify with several local USMs while simultaneously identifying with a national and transnational USM.

USMs have a long history, dating back at least two centuries to when citizens identified the need for improved health and safety conditions in cities. Although some USMs are long-lasting, others may be of shorter duration. The life cycle of a USM usually begins with mobilization around a common urban problem, followed by local actions and coordination with other movements. If the USM is long-lasting, it may formalize into associations, societies, or nongovernmental organizations. If the goals of the USM become institutionalized and meaningful change is achieved, the movement may cease to exist. Likewise, if USM participants become overly discouraged or violently repressed, the movement may cease to exist. Clearly, democratic civil societies are more conducive to USM development and sustainability than are oppressive authoritarian states.

Scholars debate whether USMs must be reactive or simply provide an innovative alternative way of doing things. Analyses of USMs cross disciplinary boundaries and occur in the private and public sectors, at universities, and at government agencies. Geographers provide a spatial perspective by mapping the uneven distributions of socioeconomic variables associated with USMs. They conduct fieldwork, analyze the changing morphology of cities, use census data to identify areas of potential USM development, consider the role of urban space in constructing social processes, and contribute to modern thinking and modeling of USMs. Research and insight into the development of USMs occurs in sociology, political science, anthropology, history, geography, and other[Page 524] fields such as American studies, ethnic studies, and gender studies. Some examples of themes around which USMs organize in the United States include environmental, nuclear, civil rights, disability rights, workers' rights, housing, redevelopment, globalization, free trade, black nationalism, race and ethnicity, gender, socialism, acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS), and abortion. Some movements are citywide, others are national in scale, and still others cross borders. For example, USMs may form solidarity with workers in other countries, form alliances for social justice among persons damaged by environmental contaminants in cities, forge collective pan-Amerindian identity to demand historical political rights, protest child labor and transnational “sweat shops,” and protest international sex trafficking among major cities. In each case, members of a movement share the experience and common identity of being denied rights, opportunities, or respect because of who they are.

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