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

Debates and DevelopmentsDebate

Volume 30.1 March 2006 2026 International Journal of Urban and Regional Research

Manuel Castells The City and the Grassroots

MARGIT MAYER

Abstract
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.

No work has been as influential as The City and the Grassroots in defining urban social
movement research. Its definition 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 influence
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 definition Castells synthesized ten
years of his own field research and an enormous spectrum of cross-national writing on
urban mobilizations, which, though not focused simply on the 1960s and 1970s,
reflected 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 definition, 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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Debates and Developments 203

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 influential 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 flexible action repertoires, fighting 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 offices to dramatize the effects of the social cuts
and of the new workfare orientation of social policies.
Both of these trends are currently reconfiguring 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-gentrification 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 conflicts 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 community-
oriented as well as city-wide and regionally/globally linked movements, while coming
under the influence 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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2006 The Author. Journal Compilation 2006 Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
204 Debate

informational mode. In fact, his very definition of USMs, which implied that they must
have alternative visions resonating with radical leftist interests, is no longer helpful,
since such a definition would not leave much for USM research to study.5 However,
urban movements continue to emerge and thrive, the structural conditions for conflicts
over the meaning of the city have hardly disappeared, and studies of urban politics and
social movements indicate that such conflicts and mobilizations around them are
frequent (cf. Hamel et al., 2000). If anything, there is an intensified connection between
social community and particular places. What has been transformed, though, is the
political and socio-spatial environment which has reconfigured the fault lines that
furnish both opportunities and constraints for social movements.
While reviewers criticized Castells early on for ignoring the urban movements
contextual influence 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 defining 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 fiscal 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 define 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 identified the conflict 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
finally, 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 significance 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 nation-
state, 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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Debates and Developments 205

Every theoretical model is shaped by the specific 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 influence 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 faith-
based 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 specific social, feminist
or ethnic programs, many urban movement organizations find 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 identified 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 field 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 specific 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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206 Debate

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Rsum
Quand, dans The City and the Grassroots, Castells dfinit 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
lidentification des lignes de conflit 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.