leontidoy urban social movements

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2010 47: 1179Urban StudLila Leontidou

Cosmopolitan Activism in Southern EuropeUrban Social Movements in 'Weak' Civil Societies: The Right to the City and

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47(6) 1179–1203, May 2010

0042-0980 Print/1360-063X Online © 2010 Urban Studies Journal Limited

DOI: 10.1177/0042098009360239

Lila Leontidou is in the School of Humanities, Hellenic Open University, Greece. E-mail: [email protected].

Urban Social Movements in ‘Weak’ Civil Societies: The Right to the City and Cosmopolitan Activism in Southern EuropeLila Leontidou

[Paper first received, October 2008; in final form, September 2009]

Abstract

The transition from fast spontaneous urbanisation in southern Europe, with popular squatting as a form of civil disobedience, to ‘new social movements’ (NSMs) for democratic globalisation in cities, is taking place in the context of a broader transition. In the 20th century, there were unstable politics, civil wars and also still dictatorships in the south, which contributed in a north–south divide in Europe, engulfing civil societies, the welfare state, planning and grassroots mobilisations for a ‘right to the city’. This paper focuses on social transformation during the 21st century and points to three directions. First, it explores the nature of several NSMs as urban social movements (USMs) organised by loosely networked cosmopolitan collectivities, social centres and flâneur activists demanding a ‘right to the city’, and interprets this with reference to globalisation, democratisation and the Europeanisation of southern civil societies. Secondly, it unveils innovative forms of ‘urban’ mobilisations in the south, influencing the rest of the Europe: squatting in the past, social centres and the ESF (both starting in Italy) at present. Thirdly, it traces transformations of USMs between two centuries and argues about the deconstruction of the north–south divide in Europe with regard to movements and definitions of the ‘right to the city’. Mediterranean USMs have offered new insights and have broadened geographical imaginations in Europe.

them. In the past century, geopolitical distinc-tions included geographical dualisms: the west–east divide of Orientalism and cold-war

1. Introduction: On the ‘Right to the City’ in the ‘South’

Despite EU integration, post-modern Europe is a divided space, with diverse civil societ-ies and grassroots movements embedded in



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Europe, was coupled by a north–south divide of economic development. Both pervaded politics, dominated by the ‘iron curtain’ between west and east and unstable politics in the south. After civil wars, there were still dictatorships in southern Europe until the mid 1970s. Divisions were reflected in their ‘weak’ civil societies. The welfare state and urban planning in the north contrasted with informal economies and fast spontaneous urbanisation in the south, which created spatial dualisms in the cities. Popular squat-ting took place for a very long period in Mediterranean cities. Grassroots mobilisa-tions for a ‘right to the city’ were the expres-sion of different imaginations of urbanism and urban living by displaced populations, city-ward migrants, transient refugees and emigrants from the rural south on their way to the industrial cities of northern Europe.

Globalisation and Europeanisation after the 1980s and post-socialist transformation in the 1990s, deconstructed north–south dualisms and broadened geographical imagi-nations. The south saw democratisation, the strengthening of civil societies (Featherstone and Kazamias, 2001; Mouzelis, 2002) and changes in the composition of migration: southern Europe became a destination for international migrants rather than their origin (King and Black, 1997). These socio-political transitions manifested their impact on grassroots urban social movements (henceforth USMs). This paper attempts a systematic comparison between two different periods of mobilisation, the first spanning the 20th century and the second currently emerging,1 with an effort to interpret major transformations, especially from squatting to cosmopolitan social movements. Our emphasis will be on innovative forms of ‘urban’ mobilisations in the south in both periods, influencing the rest of Europe, and our effort will be to place them in a back-ground of important changes in the nature of Mediterranean civil societies.

A lot of discussion about definitions has always preceded articles on USMs, which are more specific than definitions of social move-ments (as in Routledge and Cumbers, 2009, p. 77). Definitions of USMs usually start from accepting or rejecting Castells (1977, 1983) and, more recently, building on Lefebvre (1968, 1996). Both authors have had a living experience of Mediterranean Europe. They would both generalise beyond it, but at this point we are only commenting on their theo-risations which are relevant for the analysis of south European cities.

Castells (1977, pp. 246–275) proposed a hierarchy of citizen action progressing from ‘participation’ to ‘protest’ and at the highest level to ‘USMs’, which he evaluates by their effects on broader society. This could connect with the hierarchy of class commitment from class awareness to class consciousness, from pragmatism through alternative to oppo-sitional cultures, as proposed by Raymond Williams (1973). Such progressions appear in Marx and are refined in pivotal works by Antonio Gramsci (Leontidou 1985, 1990, 1996). Castells saved the characterisation ‘USMs’ for those which brought about radical changes in political power, or caused radical transformation of the urban system and its meanings, or had specific outcomes in the political arena.2 This level was usually reached through the combination with various types of struggles, especially with the trade union movement.3 Castells’ definition of an USM was therefore rather normative (Pickvance, 2003; Mayer, 2009, p. 364).

Lefebvre has been also normative, in a way, because the ‘right to the city’ is essentially a slogan, in his words “a cry and a demand”.4 He introduced it in 1968, as the title of the book which he wrote for the 100th anniver-sary of the publication of Capital, just before the revolutionary outbreaks and critique of modern alienation in Paris, Prague, the rest of Europe and the US. His work was influential in several European countries for a long time



SOCIAL MOVEMENTS IN SOUTHERN EUROPE 1181

and was recently rediscovered in the UK, after the translations (Lefebvre, 1991, 1996). Several movements, conferences and charters have been named after the ‘right to the city’.5 So widespread a slogan has been also often co-opted by state institutions with respect to housing and mortgage regulation (Brenner et al., 2009; Mayer, 2009).

Recently, scholars starting from the ‘cry and the demand’, have taken the issue in differ-ent directions.6 Some have claimed that the ‘urban’ in Lefebvre reaches beyond the city towards society at large, or ‘la vie quotidienne’, or even that “the ‘urban’ is only a synecdoche and a metaphor, in Lefebvre” overextending to a society where the hierarchical distinc-tion between the ‘urban’ and the ‘rural’ has disappeared (Marcuse, 2009, p. 193). In fact, however, for Lefebvre “the urban refers to spa-tial form: the built environment and spatial relations” (Kipfer and Goonewardena, 2007, para. 24). Lefebvre raises the question, ‘who’ has the right to the city and its public spaces, including residence but also occupation and use for picketing, gathering, interfering or renewing. He also explores ‘how’ this right is legitimised or undermined, opening issues of social justice and the city (Mitchell, 2003; Harvey, 1973). In the following, we will relate the ‘urban’ as material culture to the right to inhabit, on the one hand, and the right to occupy and use public spaces, to gather and to protest, on the other.

Since Castells and Lefebvre, another main-stream approach has emerged, where social movements are included in research about governance and formal top–down decision-making structures. Present literature focuses on NGOs, the ‘third sector’, voluntary associa-tions and their movements, raising questions of their inclusion into state or local politics, or even EU politics (Ruzza, 2004). A new dis-course has emerged, with a heavy emphasis on organisation theory, ‘social capital’, ‘political opportunity structures’ (or processes, according to Montagna, 2006), ‘resource mobilisation’

and social movement organisations (SMOs). This usually marginalises ‘spontaneous’ USMs in favour of more organised forms, which by definition compose a ‘strong’ civil society. The whole discussion may act as a discursive filter, distorting our understanding of social pro-cesses by stressing competitiveness and social cohesion rather than conflictual cultures and oppositional social movements

Those who would reduce social movements to instrumental actors engaged in power struggles on a battlefield called a ‘political opportunity structure’ have made an ontological choice. They have chosen to see the world in terms of structures and processes which exist outside the meanings actors themselves attach to them. For them the world consists of causal connections between dependent and independent variables, not the struggles of real human beings meaningfully engaged in constructing their world in conflict and co-operation with others (Eyerman and Jamison, 1998, p. 162).

This echoes Antonio Gramsci’s (1971) empha-sis on spontaneity, E. P. Thompson’s (1963) analysis of the labour movement, Raymond Williams’ (1973) essays on the emergence of alternative cultures (Leontidou, 1985, 1990) and all relevant intellectual debates which respect ‘agency’ in its interaction with ‘structure’ (Giddens, 1991). In the literature on social movements, there is often criticism or rather rejection of “reformist, NGO-style ‘top–down approaches to resistance”.7 Within this tradition, our reservations against the recent trend at emphasising governance in the social movement literature stems not only from an appreciation of human agency, but also from its relevance to Mediterranean civil societies. Social movements seeking integra-tion into EU, state, local state and dominant structures cannot create alternative cultures in civil society.

We propose to reflect on rebellion and con-frontational politics through the observation of grassroots USMs presenting alternatives to



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cultures of modernity and indeed giving birth to oppositional cultures, as expected by a long line of intellectuals from Marx and Gramsci to Lefebvre and Castells. We will not consider movements interested in entering governance mechanisms, thus becoming recuperated by the dominant culture. We are rather interested in movements which

reinvent and reproduce traditions of protest and rebellion, ‘alternative cultures’, which live in the collective memory and which may influence and affect the emergence of future social movements (Eyerman and Jamison, 1998, p. 162).

The objective and the dream of ‘being realist—seeking the impossible’ of French May 1968, is echoed in today’s slogan of the ESF,8 ‘another world is possible’: a world of peace, equality, respect for diversity and social rights,9 includ-ing jobs, health care, housing, and the right to the city.

Part of the literature on USMs becomes rather parochial when it includes ephemeral local pressure groups for collective consump-tion: residents’ groups for infrastructure provision or pedestrianisation, or open public spaces or conversions of buildings or small interventions, or NIMBY types of protest and other similar oppositions to changes in the built environment (Kavoulakos, 2006). This fragmentation can be avoided if we remem-ber old-fashioned concepts such as ‘pressure groups’ and ‘lobbies’ (Mavrogordatos, 2001; Afouxenidis and Syrakoulis, 2008) and dis-tinguish them from social movements, which require broader following, longer duration and more articulated demands. USMs are worth the name if they help to articulate meaning and identity, leading to cultural transformation. In other words, following Gramsci (1971), it is a challenge

to distinguish between ‘organic’ historical movements, which are destined to penetrate deep into society and be relatively long-lasting,

from more ‘occasional, immediate, almost accidental movements’ (Hall, 1996, p. 422).

Pickvance’s (2003, p. 104) relative “isolation of writing on urban movements from writing on other types of social movement” still lasts.10 There is a parallel decline of interest in the labour movement and USMs in Europe today, which may be understandable, but can be also reflective: it may have a negative impact on the development of such movements. There are even fewer studies of southern Europe in social movement literature, if we exclude France. This important social move-ment country has its Mediterranean coasts, as well as some aspects of urban develop-ment comparable with southern Europe: the French centralistic state, bidonvilles around large cities in the 20th century, which made the Parisian banlieu comparable with certain southern European popular suburbs and, of course, a rich intellectual tradition on social movement theory. Generations have been inspired by Lefebvre’s Le Droit à la Ville and Castells’ concepts which were initially introduced in French and Spanish. We have also borrowed the figure of Baudelaire and Benjamin’s (1983) flâneur in this paper. France of course differs from southern Europe on several levels, including USMs. Alternative cultures in Iberia and in Greece have been sustained underground for a long period under dictatorships, while in France they erupted to the surface and changed the world. We will look at France from 1968 onwards, placing Nice 2000 as the first transnational mobilisation in the south, with an emphasis on democratic globalisation.11

The following two sections highlight the major shift in south European USMs: from squatting and civil disobedience (section 2) to cosmopolitan movements for democratic globalisation, the ESF and the WSF12 (section 3). In the two analytical parts that follow, research questions are posed and the transi-tion to ‘new social movements’ (henceforth




NSMs) is interpreted from different angles, step by step: section 4 discusses changes in southern civil societies since Gramsci and analyses specific shifts in grassroots move-ments and cosmopolitanism, placing them in entrepreneurial cities of neo-liberalism; and section 5 concludes with an analysis of the recent expansion of dimensions which define the ‘right to the city’ and the innovative role of the south therein.

2. Spontaneous Mobilisations of Civil Disobedience in 20th-century Mediterranean Cities

In 1968 and the years that followed, students and labouring people all over the Western world took to the streets to protest. Paris was the protagonist in Europe in the ‘French May’. Places of city barricades of the Paris Commune in 1871 came to life again in 1968.13 Besides student mobilisations for an alternative world, there were also protests for the right to the city, against rénova-tion–déportation (Lefebvre, 1968)—i.e. the resistance against relocation of residents by urban renewal developers, with Halles as one important example.

This rebellious atmosphere of the late 1960s found the two edges of southern Europe under dictatorial rule, which constituted a repressive version of centralistic states in the rest of the Mediterranean European area. This is enough in order to consider it as a region with ‘weak’ civil societies. However, even under dictatorships, the grassroots were stirring and there was underground upheaval, especially evident in the notorious bidonvilles (France), borgate, baracche, borghetti (Italy), afthereta (Greece), viviendas marginales, barracas (Spain), bairros clandestinos, bair-ros de lata (Portugal) (Leontidou, 1990, pp. 251–253): settlements of massive popular squatting14 on the urban peripheries. These were reproduced by fast urbanisation not caused by industrialisation. Mediterranean

cities have not gone through any industrial revolution. With the partial exception of northern Italy, which industrialised earlier, in the rest of southern Europe and the Middle East the process of urbanisation was not trig-gered by industrialisation. Cities grew because of poverty and insecurity in the countryside, informal work opportunities in the cities, as well as the Mediterranean culture of urbanism (Leontidou, 1990, 2001).

Modernity in southern Europe has been diluted in informal modes of living and work-ing, as a sort of pre-announcement of post-modernity (Leontidou, 1993a). The diverse class basis of the Mediterranean spontaneous popular squatter settlements on the outskirts of cities reversed the experience of northern suburbia, which was mostly middle-class. Southern suburbs were working-class or com-munities of informal-sector workers, most of them migrants. Self-help housing by popular initiative eased tensions of fast urbanisation, ‘solved’ the problem of homelessness and often eased unemployment, too (Leontidou, 1993b). Families rather than any welfare state relieved poverty informally, by income shar-ing, with the vulnerability of large population groups as a result. In the cityscape, the repro-duction of informal activities has been creat-ing a post-modern collage of mixed land use, long before post-modernism entered art and academic discourse (Leontidou, 1990, 1993a).

Squatting has constituted a massive USM, a popular initiative to claim urban space. In the case of Greece, the interwar period began with occupations of empty buildings by refugees in the larger cities. Land occupations followed and then the purchase of land and the contra-vention of building by-laws in constructing a home, a shack, brought the whole of southern Europe together. In this light, squatting in Greece, Italy, Spain and Portugal was indeed conflictual: a form of massive grassroots movement of civil disobedience. Migrants and workers bought plots where it was illegal to build, according to each country’s by-laws,



1184 LILA LEONTIDOU

but proceeded to disobey these rules and build shacks overnight. People ignored legislation about city building and thus contested state authority. This was tacitly tolerated by the state as a solution to the housing problem and a buffer against social unrest.

Lefebvre’s ‘right to the city’ was squarely affirmed by building a precarious home in violation of official norms. Here, the right to housing was “disassociated from the right to property and returned to the right to inhabit” (Mitchell, 2003, p. 20). During the three post-war decades, precarious popular owner-occu-pation in illegal self-built shacks ensured that poverty did not automatically lead to home-lessness and laid the material foundations for the start of family life: as income grew, shacks would improve into more solid popular hous-ing sprawling onto cheap suburban land, and were often used as a base for informal work (Leontidou, 1990, 1993b). Popular squatting thus led to the democratisation of public space with land and housing as use value and not exchange value, evident even in later years, when squatters became upwardly mobile. It led to the overall deconstruction of modernity and the urban land market through illegality, informality and self-help. Moreover, the ‘right to the city’ was claimed by subaltern illegality and civil disobedience, not only in residence, but also at work, by peddlers throughout the city for a very long period (Leontidou, 1990; Kothari, 2008).

Squatting involved a specific contradiction. It was a popular USM for shelter, a spontane-ous movement, in the sense given to this by Gramsci, in contrast with conscious leader-ship;15 however, although spontaneous, usually without the mediation of activists or local leaders, squatting at the same time was vulnerable to co-optation. Since the main objective was shelter rather than occupation as an act of protest,16 it was vulnerable to cli-entelist networks and was often undermined by dependence on politicians. Spontaneity

was thus riddled with contradictions, just as Gramsci anticipated. It was complex, with “multiple elements of ‘conscious leader-ship’ but no one of them ... predominant” (Gramsci, 1971, p. 196).17 It manifested popular ‘common sense’ and was often subversive: a ‘series of negations’ (Gramsci, 1971, pp. 196–197, 273), civil disobedience to official norms and self-alienation vis-à-vis authority.

At the same time, however, squatting bore the seeds of dependence in Mediterranean clientelist societies. Some settlements became a “fragmented, hostile and alienated world made up of individuals fighting each other for survival”, like Orcasitas (Castells, 1983, p. 246); in other cases, camaraderie emerged, as in Perama (Figure 1; see Leontidou, 1993b). Sometimes alienation was diluted after the emergence of an association, as in Orcasitas, or the creation of collectivities, as in Perama. Both communities of squatters, in Madrid and Athens respectively, were built mainly by construction workers (Castells, 1983, p. 243; Leontidou, 1990, pp. 156–161) and were increasingly radicalised as dictatorships were waning. The former developed in the context of the Citizen Movement in Madrid (Castells, 1983, pp. 212–288), which already under Franco came to demand democracy, amnesty and political freedom besides material rights. It then demanded civil rights in the form of grassroots participation in elected institu-tions of local governments. As for Perama, it was among the only illegal settlements in Athens where land (owned by the church) was squatted upon, and attracted radicals against evictions and demolition, as the Greek dictatorship was waning. Squatting thus bore the seeds of an alternative culture (Leontidou, 1985, 1990). Squatters presented pragmatic demands and actually did obtain a precari-ous home; but they also actively stated their ‘right to the city’, contesting the ambivalent modernity of southern Europe.




Popular participation in illegal building as a form of civil disobedience was underesti-mated by intellectuals and only exceptionally did it catch the attention of radicals, as in the case of Orcasitas (Castells, 1983, pp. 242–247), or Perama, for that matter (Leontidou, 1990, 1993b). However, it brought fears of social unrest to the dominant classes. So the transi-tion to a period of new urban development trajectories and NSMs, was pre-announced by the suppression of popular squatting, already during dictatorships (Leontidou, 1990, Leontidou et al., 2007). It has been stigmatised and decisively controlled by gov-ernment action. Gramsci’s interplay between force and consent was reconfirmed in most southern cities, by demolitions on the one hand and ‘legalisations’ on the other, or often by rehousing in large estates (Leontidou,

1990). Most of the Athens squatter settle-ments were ‘legalised’, but remained without any infrastructure for a long period thereaf-ter.18 By contrast, redevelopment was massive in Spain, especially around Barcelona and Madrid, including Orcasitas (Castells, 1983, p. 244). In Portugal, squatting has been massive and resilient in Lisbon (Beja Horta, 2006): shacks were always full, since new migrants and especially retornados from former African colonies crept in, as soon as some shacks were vacated through rehousing to public estates. Generally, popular squatting was suppressed and is now almost eradicated in southern Europe, except in Portugal.

However, illegalities continued, with a dif-ferent class basis. The outskirts and coastlines around most south European cities have been filled with more affluent villas often illegal,

Figure 1. Perama on the west of Athens, 2003.



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and speculative ventures, even hotels, as well as small enterprises and their workers, leading to urban sprawl (Couch et al., 2007). Land speculation for exchange and profit has come to displace use value in settlements outside the urban plan and middle classes have displaced workers and popular strata in peri-urban settlements, legal and illegal, while upper-class suburbia emerges, leading to new patterns of urban segregation (Arapoglou and Sayas 2009). Even worse, speculative pressures result in arson of forests for land use change, which often gets out of control, as on the Athens periphery in August 2009. Still, how-ever, activist squatters have reappeared. They spread from Italian social centres to the rest of Europe, as will be now discussed.

3. Cosmopolitan Movements, Loose Networking and Flâneur Activists

Research on NSMs is currently proliferating and, although USMs are underplayed within it (Mayer, 2000; Pickvance, 2003), still, city names are often used to refer to mobilisa-tions for democratic globalisation. ‘Seattle’ is a case in point, which is important, because it is thought that the demonstrations in Seattle against WTO19 have launched a series of cosmopolitan NSMs (Rauch et al., 2007, p. 141).20 Seattle is indeed pivotal for NSMs in the USA, because it attracted numerous collectivities21 in a huge demonstration against unfair trade and undemocratic globalisation in November 1999.

However, Europe had its own November a decade earlier, when the post-communist world emerged on the ruins of the Berlin wall. The tall barbed wire fence erected in August 1961, soon became a solid wall sealing the cold war; but it was demolished on 9 November 1989, in the context of a cosmopolitan and fluid social movement. Cultural events were staged in Berlin to celebrate this massive significant and symbolic action, and streams

of people flowed past the ruins for weeks, to get a hammer and hit the falling wall, in turn.

The 1990s thus emerged as a turning-point on the basis of two very different pivotal mobil-isations, starting with Berlin and ending with Seattle. Flâneur activists appeared in Berlin, flowing from cities and creating cosmopolitan NSMs. We have borrowed the concept from Benjamin (1983), who in turn borrowed it from Baudelaire and planted it in the heart of the Paris arcades. We have used it for the mobile citizens who travel to protest, following calls by cosmopolitan collectivities or any Social Forum (Leontidou, 2006). Benjamin has touched up the flâneur with the aura of the wanderer and the restless, roaming between spaces, mobile, unrooted as well as rooted, sometimes subal-tern and sometimes standing in-between élites and non-élites. This makes the flâneur prefer-able as a concept here, impersonating several “adjectival cosmopolitanisms” (Harvey, 2009, p. 114): the ‘rooted cosmopolitan’,22 a trans-national activist ‘rooted’ in local conditions and concerns (Tarrow, 2006, pp. 40–44) or the subaltern cosmopolitan.

However, the flâneur also accounts for uprooted cosmopolitans, like refugees or emi-grants rejecting authoritarianism or clientelism at home and leaving them behind to become ‘citizens of the world’ with diasporic identities between two states or localities. The flâneurs move in spatialities of convergence rather than totalities (Routledge and Cumbers, 2009, pp. 89–101), loose networking and overlap-ping participations in collectivities, as well as constant movement and hybridity. Their increasing presence leads to the deconstruction and indeed fusion of Castells’ (1996) ‘tribes’ and ‘flows’. The flâneur becomes a hybrid subject bridging the gap between local and global, as “broader spatial imaginaries become embedded in everyday action” (Routledge and Cumbers, 2009, p. 97). The dualism between patriotism and cosmopolitanism—both Greek concepts23—is thus deconstructed by the emer-gence of flâneur activists (Leontidou, 2006),




along with dual categories between élite vs non-élite, or classes vs masses or multitudes.24

After Berlin and Seattle, global mobilisations were staged in various cities.25 Wherever they met, activists and citizens massively claimed urban central spaces and their ‘right to the city’ in question. Southern Europe felt these cosmopolitan mobilisations as early as 2000 in Nice, against the European Summit that December, when 80 000 activists from 30 organisations from all over Europe called for more attention to social issues in EU treaties. Another memorable town in the same occa-sion was Ventimiglia, with sit-ins in protest against the obstruction of the Global Action Train from joining the Nice mobilisation (della Porta, 2008, p. 2). A year later, cosmopolitans met against the G8 Summit in Genoa, where for the first time an activist lost his life in street

fights. Except unfair trade, the Genoa meeting protested for peace and against US and NATO invasions (Rauch et al., 2007, p. 136).

The ESF emerged in Italy and its first con-ference was held in a Mediterranean city, Florence, in November 2002. In the same year, after cosmopolitan mobilisations in southern France and Italy, Spain took the lead, with 300 000 people protesting in Barcelona and then Seville on the occasion of EU summits in 2002 (della Porta, 2008, p. 3). After a series of other events in more northern locations, Madrid came to the foreground. The same city, which in the 1970s hosted the Citizen Movement brought to global attention by Castells, became from 2004 host to streams of flâneurs, starting from different corners of the world to protest against terrorism in the Atocha railway station (Figures 2 and 3;

Figure 2. Atocha visitors’ shadows in Madrid.



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see also Leontidou 2006). They spread ban-ners, flowers and candles against terrorism, demanding peace and multicultural solidarity (Figure 3). In Madrid, social demands related with the ‘right to the city’ figured as solidly embedded in new global mobilisations.

Such major shifts in USMs in the present millennium are listed in summary here, with a view to interpreting them in the next sections.• The cosmopolitanisation of movements

successfully mirrors globalisation, as grass-roots globalisation ‘from below’. Not only do flâneur activists move from city to city to protest against globalisation on the occasion of summit meetings. In Europe, these move-ments are now organised by collectivities with overlapping membership in loose networking among them, with the ESF and the WSF as umbrella organisations. Solidarity, reciproc-ity and alliance remain in new multiethnic global mobilisations, solidly embedded in

the digital society of cosmopolitan cities and cosmopolitan urbanism.• The major ‘binary’ change pointed out

by authors, is from the material character of the demands of 20th-century labour movements and USMs, to the non-material demands of NSMs for rights of participa-tion, peace and other non-material rights (Pickvance, 2003, p. 106).• Yet another ‘binary’ change, not stated

in the publications because apparently it only pertains to the south, is the shift of the balance within the ‘right to the city’: from the right to inhabit (as squatters) to the right to occupy and use public spaces, to gather and protest in city centres, where convergence spaces materialise (Routledge and Cumbers, 2009, pp. 89–101).• The ‘democratic’ spread of new technol-

ogy and informational cultures speeds up interaction by digital communication among

Figure 3. Peace banner in Atacha, Madrid.




flâneur actors, NGOs, voluntary associations or other collectivities and the organisation of political action. This is the most demo-cratic technological ‘revolution’ ever, with the cellular phone in the hands of everyone and the Internet for instant communication among citizens. Activists dispersed in remote locations interact in a digital environment, practising cyberactivism (Mitchell, 2003; Montagna, 2006; Hodkinson and Chatterton, 2006; Papadimitriou, 2006). The digital ‘revolution’ has caused the most fundamen-tal changes in social movements at the turn of the present millennium, providing them with discursive resources and instant interac-tion. It has changed the ways of unionising, by facilitating digital intensive interaction, solidarity and information sharing over a dis-tance. Activists can now inhabit virtual spaces and create spaces of convergence (Routledge, 2003). Broader spatial imaginaries are forged within the space of electronic media and the worldwide web.• The social class basis of southern USMs

has changed, from working-class communi-ties and internal migrants in the informal sector, to young unemployed, locals and international migrants at the lower levels of poverty, on the one hand, and new cosmo-politan actors on the other. In broad—or even global—loose social networks, flâneur activists may be more affluent or at least opportune actors than activists of the past. They are certainly more mobile, as cheap air travel facilitates their actions. Their diasporic identities reproduce cosmopolitanism in social movements and deconstruct dualisms such as élite/subaltern cosmopolitanism.• USMs have always also involved dis-

placed populations to a large extent. In the 20th century, urban squatting was reproduced in Mediterranean cities by internal migrants and in Portugal by retornados from colonies. In the new millennium, southern Europe has turned from being a source of emigrants to the north, to being an immigration desti-nation (King and Black, 1997). This major

change has affected the composition of USMs, with immigrants as the par excellence flâneurs (distinct from ‘rooted cosmopolitans’).• Besides global mobilisations, local

demands for the ‘right to the city’ often lead to violence. Paris saw the most recent culmina-tion of such insurrections in 2005, in the ban-lieu, especially by young second-generation immigrants along with native young residents. Soon after this, in the spring of 2006, these ignited uprisings in the central localities as in May 1968, the Sorbonne and Quartier Latin. Activists from throughout France demanded the ‘right to employment’ which, in the experi-ence of migrants and the unemployed merges with the ‘right to the city’ (Leontidou, 2006). Athens followed French cities in December 2008, with young activists smashing the city after an incident of police brutality.• New forms of USMs also emerge: social

centres first appeared in Italy long ago and have now spread in other European countries. These reproduce alternative discourses to neo-liberalism, as incubators of protest-planning, cosmopolitan mobilisations, information sharing and cyberactivism. Social Centres strengthen global loosely structured networks despite problems occasionally arising (Mudu, 2004; della Porta, 2008, pp. 12–14, 34).

Several democratic globalisation move-ments would be ‘urban’26 according to Castells’ (1977, 1983) definitions, because they relate with protest against new patterns of collective consumption in neo-liberal Europe, which are globally conditioned and affect ‘real income’ in cities (Harvey, 1973). Moreover, several NSMs are named after cities and are attracted by cities, are ‘urban’ with respect to location and occupation of inner cities as material ‘convergence spaces’ (Routledge, 2003). They often raise the demand for the ‘right to the city’: besides their concern with the democ-ratisation of G8, EU, World Bank, IMF, WTO and so on, they fight for the defence of public services and institutions (Leontidou, 2006; Portaliou, 2007; Mayer, 2009). Although the spokesperson of the Genoa Social Forum in



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2001 considered it as ‘non-place’ (Vittorio Agnoletto, quoted in della Porta, 2008, p. 11), the mobilisation was named after Genoa and it touched down and materialised in the city. The city is increasingly important for NSMs as their forms, demands and strategies broaden.

This emerges more intensively in Mediterranean cities. The new discourse of the ‘right to the city’ has been adopted especially by the ESF, created in Italy. The 1st ESF for democratic globalisation in Florence prepared a Charter for the ‘Right to the City’

An instrument intended as a contribution to the urban struggle and as an aid in the process of recognition of the right to the city in the international human rights system ... considering the principles of sustainability and social justice (quoted by Portaliou, 2007, p. 174).

The 2nd ESF prepared the European Social Charter, recognising the right to decent hous-ing and the occupation of empty buildings (della Porta, 2008, p. 30). Then the 4th ESF, held in Athens in May 2006, put forward urban demands formulated by collectivities meeting in a special cosmopolitan kiosk dedicated to the city, in the site of the confer-ence (Figure 4). Exhibitions, discussions and documents protesting against authority in the city and exclusion from urban life, were prepared here.

Finally, the ‘right to the city’ also involves the right to be heard, the right to public-ity and communication. Digital societies have changed the ways of publicity through extensive media involvement in an instant global coverage. This cosmopolitan urbanism attracts activists and collectivities because it

Figure 4. ‘City’ kiosk in Athens, hosting the 4th ESF in 2006.




offers visibility. It is in cities that their action can have the maximum impact. Even where journalism initially delegitimises social move-ments, case studies have indicated that sym-pathy often evolves with time and persistence may reverse any negative media framing of mobilisations (Rauch et al., 2007).27

These new USMs are not parochial, as the ‘globalisation’ discourse tended to present them (Hamel et al., 2000). They certainly differ in the different cities where they take place, and it is indeed a challenge to distin-guish between ‘organic’ and unimportant movements in any case (Gramsci, 1971; in Hall, 1996, p. 422). They may last for long periods and take place in spatially rooted but globally networked social centres, or they may erupt as uprisings on the occasion of global summits with rallies, happenings, street par-ties, reclaiming the streets in visible ways of demanding the ‘right to the city’ as the right for the occupation and use of urban public spaces. Even such ephemeral NSMs, however, may leave a lasting imprint on urban societies and be reinterpreted as important movements in the long run.

4. Civil Societies and USMs: From the Legacy of Gramsci to Cosmopolitanism and NGOs

While it lasted, south European squatting was an USM for shelter and collective consump-tion, as well as a movement of civil disobedi-ence, which often superseded demands in trade unionism (Castells, 1977). Given slow industrialisation and peripheral Fordism, labour unions were weak in Iberia and in Greece, especially under dictatorships. Yet even before and after this, democracy was rather formal. Greek society after the civil war of the 1940s was saturated in clientelist and later populist politics (Mavrogordatos, 2001; Kazakos, 2006; Afouxenidis and Alexakis, 2010). Civil societies more generally were weak in southern Europe. Centralistic states

and clientelist politics did not allow for the development of independent citizens’ groups, voluntaty associations, NGOs, collectivities or other intermediate organisations, which are usually considered as strengthening civil soci-eties by mediating between the state and the grassroots (Featherstone and Kazamias, 2001; Mouzelis, 2002; Afouxenidis and Alexakis, 2010). Trade unionism was also weak and class consciousness hardly developed, given oppression and state centralism. Spontaneous movements outside parties or conscious leadership—to use Gramsci’s (1971) con-cept—did emerge as a form of contestation to state dominance, but were isolated in this political context, as is usual in similar politi-cal opportunity structures (Routledge and Cumbers, 2009, pp. 97–98).

Antonio Gramsci’s contribution is enlight-ening for southern European civil society in general and the nature of Mediterranean USMs more particularly. Besides his concep-tions of civil society, hegemony and urbanism, we have relied on his concept of spontaneity to understand the city and influential move-ments emerging within weak civil societies (Leontidou, 1990, 1996). The reproduction of squatting highlights the contradiction between spontaneity and civil disobedience on the one hand and co-optation on the other. By exploring the interplay of force and consent, Gramsci illuminates the contain-ment and suppression of squatting, which coincided with watershed changes in both state and civil societies.

The fall of dictatorships in southern Europe was followed by the southern expan-sion of the EU—accession for Greece in 1981, for the Iberian countries in 1986. Fast Europeanisation transformed the south European city. After the signing of EU trea-ties culminating in the Schengen agreement, alternative imaginations of Europe started to challenge the limits of the conceptual apparatus inherited from the early 20th century, where society was confined within



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state borders and where modernity was the ‘privilege’ of the West. The digital revolution also strengthened southern civil societies. The concern with participatory democracy in the EU brought to being some flexible governance forms, organised or corporate groupings emerging between state and the market, based on NGOs or other collectivities.

The emergence of NGOs was one of the interesting effects of Europeanisation. They may have strengthened southern civil societies quite recently, but they do not necessarily tend to alternative cultures: NGOs may be part of the system, approaching governments with a view to funding or participation to safeguard ‘social cohesion’ and the containment of conflict. In Greece, NGOs emerged mainly to take advantage of EU directives and measures to that effect, and increased massively after 1997, after DAC membership (Afouxenidis and Syrakoulis, 2008). In fact, southern NGOs have emerged quite often by top–down decisions rather than grassroots pressure (Afouxenidis, 2004). Their frequent heavy dependence on and funding by the state, does not allow them to strengthen southern civil societies, as claimed by the ‘social capital’ perspective and relevant new discourses on ‘political opportunity structures’. NGOs often moderate the dynamism of conflictual social movements.28 In a way, strategies for control of USMs in the past, involving co-optation and bearing the seeds of dependence in clien-telist societies, are now often transferred to the top–down creation of NGOs—and not only in the south. It is interesting how the euro-word ‘subsidiarity’ was revived in Germany to legitimise co-optation (Kavoulakos 2006).

In any case, despite such particularities of NGOs and intermediate sectors, southern European civil societies are now maturing. At the grassroots, the innovative nature of the legacy of squatting carries through to its sub-sequent influence on the movements for the occupation of empty buildings on a European scale. In fact, the global influence of southern

social movements of civil disobedience since the interwar period, may have been underesti-mated. Social centres have originated in Italian cities, where juvenile social movements of the 1970s claimed the city and sought to improve their conditions in their Occupied Social Centres. A diachronic case study of Venice (Montagna, 2006) shows social centres evolv-ing from ‘tolerated ghettos’ to self-managed political centres of cultural production and often protest-planning, to autonomist and potentially cosmopolitan nodes in loose net-working (Mudu, 2004). They have developed broad spatial imaginaries as core incubators of alternative cultures, partly urban (by location) and partly non-place communication nodes (by digital interaction).

More social centres then emerged in Europe, including the UK more recently, after ‘squat cafés’ in the 1990s (Hodkinson and Chatterton, 2006). An Italian innova-tion has thus spread to other countries, creating social centres where transnational autonomist movements and local movements merge, overlap and coincide, and youths in remodelled unused buildings interact with others in the world. ‘Urban’ social movements emerge here, contesting urban competition, commodification and marketing by the very act of claiming unused spaces, occupying buildings and upgrading them (Mudu, 2004). They are not always welcomed by local soci-eties, because of concern for confrontational politics (Hodkinson and Chatterton 2006).

It is worthwhile to juxtapose the city as a site for such expressions as social centres, voluntary associations and possibly grassroots NGOs, with the city as a site for protests against neo-liberal globalisation when international institutions meet in town. These actions merge into each other. The WSF and the ESF involve a great variety of collectivities from social centres and other nodes all over the world in loose networking among them. They are open to overlapping membership and access to all, except racist groups—a fact that underlines the




impact of international migration on NSMs. ESF members place themselves on the Left, are interested in politics ‘from below’ and mistrust parties and institutional politics (della Porta, 2008). This corroborates our critique of the emphasis of current literature on ways of co-operation of social movements with formal institutions of politics ‘from above’.

Alternative geographical imaginations about globalisation and Europeanisation often inspire these activists. They become ‘critical Europeanists’.29 Criticising neo-liberal Europe does not preclude support to a social Europe and imaginations about a supranational democracy in the region. Alternative imagina-tions about the city are harder to discern, but increasingly linger within criticisms against neo-liberalism, which creates new types of cities, especially the entrepreneurial city, while the ‘global city’ is actually a rarity.30 The latter holds an ambivalent space within global ‘power geometries’ (Massey, 2005, p. 100), as a place to be challenged rather than defended.31 It constitutes the important ‘urban’ product of neo-liberal globalisation contested by social movements. With urban competition, a ‘non-place’ urban realm is emerging, wherein cities no longer really ‘belong’ exclusively to a nation-state, but locate themselves in international competitive structures or in transnational urban networks. Globalisation reproduces urban competition, which brings about the commodification of the city. ‘City marketing’ (Kearns and Philo, 1993) in post-modern Europe brings the cultural economy of cities centre-stage after losses in their industrial economy and offers it to a global market

Capitalist cities are not only arenas where commodification occurs; they are themselves intensively commodified (Brenner et al., 2009, p. 178).

The ‘right to the city’ expands over this ‘non-place’, beyond state borders, challenging this commodification created by neo-liberalism. The scale of the ‘urban’ has been enlarged by

globalisation and urban competition. The hinterland delimiting the ‘right to the city’ has been widened with urban sprawl (Couch et al., 2007) and even further, as it is affected by global transformation. In any entrepre-neurial city, urban livelihoods and the quality of life are shaped not only at the local, but also at the global, level (Craglia et al., 2004). Even local issues like rénovation–déportation, or demolitions of shacks, often constitute global interventions in the context of urban competition for the attraction of mega events and international capital, so that the adversary is delocalised. As local urban planning fades and is replaced by global architectural design in visible parts of the city, moreover, a demo-cratic deficit appears in post-modern urban-ism, the very urbanism which is supposed to create fragmented, informal, human-scale landscapes (Leontidou, 1993a). Neo-liberal globalisation causes the welfare state to shrink and urban governance to come under the control of public–private partnerships or private capital, opening up a new level of urban demands by NSMs.

South European cities have shifted smoothly to post-modern urbanism, which has always lingered in their landscapes of informality (Leontidou, 1993a). Due to their weak indus-trialisation, production is easily outstaged by consumption. As ‘theatres of memory’ (Crang and Travlou, 2001), Mediterranean cities have possessed a major comparative advantage in the rediscovery of heritage in urban competi-tion. Given the weakness of planning and the public sector (Leontidou 1990), urban devel-opment has shifted easily to privatisation, with occasional urban design and restoration. Southern entrepreneurial cities even influence northern cities to enhance their visibility by the ‘Mediterraneanisation’ of their landscapes (Leontidou, 2001; Couch et al., 2007). In this, they often fall into the trap of false authentic-ity in the context of global tourism. Even on occasion of the return of the Olympic games to their ‘cradle’, Greece, in 2004



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The Athenian urban majority accepted that the so-called Olympic culture can be sold to an obscure global community, whereas in fact it was this community ... that has sold it to the Athenian public (Afouxenidis, 2006, p. 292).

Yet urban residents have exerted weak resist-ance in bearing the financial burden for mega-events, urban sprawl and neo-liberal urban competition more generally (Leontidou et al. 2007). It was in the context of cosmopolitan movements that southern urban residents raised such issues, as well as objections to the further decline of any traces of a public sector, which was anyway small in southern Europe.

We have already stressed that the discourse on the ‘right to the city’ has been recalled in Florence and Athens by the ESF. It would take the discussion to great length if we ventured to interpret this heightened concern about urban demands in the context of the theory of Mediterranean urbanism (Leontidou, 2001; Couch et al., 2007). It is worth reflecting on this, however, given that the ESF was based in Italy and the discursive connection between demands opposing neo-liberalism and for the ‘right to the city’ was forged in Florence and Athens, as already pointed out. In the Athens kiosk for the cities (Figure 4), “convergence spaces [used to] articulate certain ‘collective visions’ (i.e. unifying values, organisational principles and positions)” (Routledge and Cumbers, 2009, p. 93) about the ‘right to the city’ and the criticism of the entrepreneurial city in the context of opposi-tion to neo-liberalism. A large terrain of urban demands emerged in the south.

The contestation of the neo-liberalisation of policies and urban renewal for the needs of global tourism and capital over and beyond the needs of urban inhabitants, actually exposes “accumulation by dispossession” (Harvey, 2009, p. 68), creating polarisation and disadvantaged, vulnerable populations (Hamel et al., 2000). Besides affecting ‘real income’ in cities (Harvey, 1973), it brings unemployment, poverty and homelessness back on the agenda, especially during the present

more-than-financial crisis (Marcuse, 2009, p. 188; Mayer, 2009). Urban neo-liberalism also threatens urban democracy and exposes the democratic deficit in cities which compete and exclude (Purcell, 2006). These issues are taken up by mobilisations for democratic glo-balisation, and also by local societies. Violent riots often disrupt urban life, as in Paris in the autumn of 2005 or Athens in December 2008. Angry resistance against the entrepreneurial city is of central relevance especially at present. “We won’t pay for your crisis”.

Although demands have been centred on employment, street politics and youth move-ments have been fighting for a ‘right to the city’, in the material sense. Moreover, the move-ments had a strong connection with place, originating in specific urban neighbourhoods. In Athens on 6 December 2008, the police killed a pupil in the vicinity of the National Technical University, in Exarcheia, where the youth resistance movement has always centred

Grigoropoulos was shot in the neighbourhood of the 1973 student uprisings; I don’t know whether the same vehemence would have been sparked if he was killed anywhere else

the composer D. Savopoulos reflected, in his Athens concert of 29 December 2009. In Paris, the 2005 movement started in the banlieu, which has been always restless, and was dis-seminated in the heart of the city, the Quartier Latin, where from July 1830 through 1848, 1871 and 1940, up to May 1968 and beyond, revolutions have erupted and barricades have been built (Leontidou, 2006). Today, in the same places, young activists express their outrage that public money is doled out to banks, automobile dealers and others who actually caused the crisis (Marcuse, 2009, p. 189). However, although demands are differ-ent, the spirit is the same and the urban core is equally important as the nucleus of urban social movements in Athens and Paris, then Greece and France, and then all of Europe or even the world.




Such mobilisations constitute a new guise of USMs merging with NSMs, and protest-ing against urban commodification and neo-liberalism in the entrepreneurial city, where urban regeneration rests on urban design and urban governance for global competition. They are simultaneously global and local movements, where the ‘global’ pole is put forward strongly by rallies for democratic globalisation, but also ‘urban’ demands on collective consumption as globally conditioned; and their ‘local’ pole is mediated by the city, but a city different from the past, as we hope to have shown by now. With the knowledge that causes of poverty and unequal development stem from the global system, the ESF since Florence has posed the ‘right to the city’ as one of the basic human rights.32

Migration waves also broaden the spaces of the ‘right to the city’. South European cities have turned from an origin to a des-tination of international migration and are directly experiencing the impact of diasporic identities and non-élite cosmo-politanism (Kothari, 2008). Migrants bring memories of their own cities into mobili-sations, as well as geographical imagina-tions beyond their present residence. They actually perceive in their everyday urban experience the global forces at work in shaping urban life quality: in order to safeguard their life standards, migrants have to protest against racism and pose the ‘right to the city’ as a human right. They have to protest against global violence, war and terrorist attacks on urban livelihoods in their city of residence, as well as their localities of origin, those shaping their diasporic identities.

Cities which have sent migrants and refugees to Europe, come to the forefront in demands for the ‘right to the city’ by trans-national social movements. Migrants’ dia-sporic identities affect the imaginations of local actors and citizens and penetrate their

movements. They protest against invasions and bombing by NATO, economic decisions by G8, WTO, IMF, the EU and other inter-ventionist international bodies acting ‘from above’ (Rauch et al., 2007, p. 136, della Porta, 2008). Indignation against extreme acts of violence and global terrorism wounding cit-ies, is added to demands for citizens’ rights against crime and violence in the locality. Like Madrid, with Atocha in the spotlight (Figures 2 and 3), many cities have trig-gered cosmopolitan social movements for the ‘right to the city’ ravaged by terrorism as a global force. Demonstrations against terrorism have occurred in places where it struck, from New York to Madrid, London and beyond, in the form of transnational mobilisations, peace marches, anti-war and anti-terrorist rallies.

Southern civil societies gradually matured. Though the term ‘global citizenship’ would be too ambitious to adopt, resistance to the globalisation of power is under way. There have been several pessimistic views about operations against civil unrest ‘from above’ going hand-in-hand with anti-terrorist strategies, especially where youth anger disrupts urban life and smashes up the city. In fact, southern USMs often resist tromophobia, as evidenced in the destruc-tion of surveillance cameras in streets and squares—as in the case of Athens after the 2004 Olympics with the intervention of mobilised young citizens—and of course in anti-war demonstrations protesting on NATO and USA interventions in the Middle East and beyond, with the banner of the ‘war against terror’.33 Global terrorism is thought to nurture repressive governments. However, as civil societies mature, amid ambigui-ties, contradictions and parochialisms, the passage from local civil disobedience and patriotism to cosmopolitanism and the suc-cess of countering economic globalisation by globalising the movement, gives birth to optimism.



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5. Conclusion: Transformations and Innovative Legacies of Mediterranean Ambivalent Modernities

Since Castells’ and Lefebvre’s influential books, definitions of USMs have changed incorporating broader global imaginaries. They have balanced out dualisms between the local and the global levels, visible and invisible adversaries, material and virtual spaces of convergence, concrete constraints and immaterial limitations, material obstacles and dematerialised global interventions for human rights and protest against violence, war and terrorist attacks on urban livelihoods. The transformations discussed and further developments during today’s crisis are widen-ing the sphere of the ‘right to the city’. In this, our analysis has highlighted an important shift diachronically in cities of southern Europe: from demands for the right to inhabit—the right to private space—to demands for the right to gather, perform in, occupy and use public space: the democratisation of public space. We have argued in this paper that, throughout the 20th century, squatting was a movement of civil disobedience reproduced around Mediterranean cities as a claim of

the right to inhabit, reaffirming spontaneity in the context of clientelist civil societies, at times suppressed by dictatorships. The 21st century involved transformations towards cosmopolitanism. In the south, spontaneous urbanisation has faded as popular squat-ting was suppressed and as Europeanisation brought to the foreground NGOs, voluntary associations and other collectivities which, despite all reservations about their top–down emergence, strengthened southern ‘weak’ civil societies with an ‘intermediate’ sector (Featherstone and Kazamias, 2001; Mouzelis, 2002; Afouxenidis, 2004). Moreover, bottom–up institutions like social centres emerged and voiced demands for a ‘right to the city’. These often became members of larger collectivities, like the ESF and the WSF, and have sent their flâneur activists to many cities of the world. These transformations are summarised in Table 1 for USMs in southern Europe.

The tendential balance is toppled today, as shown in the table, but without the disappear-ance of 20th-century social groups and classes, or of forms of struggle. Gramsci’s (1971)

emphasis on ‘relations’ and ‘unstable balance’ reminds us that social forces which lose out in any particular historical period do not thereby

Table 1. Binary transformations in Mediterranean USMs

20th century 21st century

Weak civil societies (partly, dictatorships) Maturing civil societies and EuropeanisationS. Europe as origin of migrants to North S. Europe as destination of global migrationInternal migrants and emigrants International migrantsClass societies, trade unionism, Ethnic and class societies, collectivities, multitudes, social networks NGOs, flâneur activists, Internet groupsMaterial demands Immaterial, dematerialised, global demandsCivil disobedience USMs Cosmopolitan activism USMsSquatting Social Centres, ESF, WSFThe right to inhabit—urban private space The right to occupy or use urban public spaceCommunication in localities and networks Digital communication in virtual spaces and solidarity networksPatriotism, places Cosmopolitanism, convergence spacesSpatial fixity, ‘tribes’ Cosmopolitan mobilisations, ‘flows’




disappear from the terrain of struggle; nor is struggle in such circumstances suspended (Hall, 1996, pp. 422–423).

Hybrid forms are reproduced and past struc-tures are always flickering.

It can be also concluded from the table, that the north–south divide is fading in Europe with regard to movements and definitions of the ‘right to the city’. The second column of the table is relevant to northern cities as well. In this convergence, Mediterranean USMs have played an innovative role, despite the ‘weakness’ of southern civil soci-eties, at least in the past century. Influences on the north supersede the top–down level of ‘Mediterraneanisation’ of entrepreneurial cities (Leontidou, 2001) and the vital mix of uses in landscapes of post-modernity, in place of modernist zoning (Leontidou, 1993a). They expand to northern USMs. The occupation of empty buildings or land and the reclaiming of space from private ownership may go back to the 14th century, but only southern cities saw such massive squatting as early as in the interwar period. Land occupations expressed a demand for the right to inhabit by the homeless and popular squatting constituted an alterna-tive act of civil disobedience. Influences on Europe and in fact the world started with urban squatting and were brought forward to the new millennium with the occupied social centres, as well as the emergence of the ESF, both in Italy. Social centres then spread elsewhere in Europe and the world as incubators of cyberactivism, diasporic iden-tities and cosmopolitan networking (Mudu, 2004; Hodkinson and Chatterton, 2006). As for the ESF, originating in Florence, besides reproducing the global justice movement, it also revitalises the ‘right to the city’ in concrete ways discussed earlier (Figure 4). These innovations by southern cities have stamped collective documents and spatial imaginaries of USMs.

In the EU, societies are no longer confined within state borders. They are transformed with increased mobility. Massive WSF and ESF rallies meet regularly in different cities, claiming their space in order to protest and demand democratic globalisation, peace and development, but also the right to the city as a human right. Losses of rights in “accu-mulation by dispossession” (Harvey, 2009, pp. 68–74) renew and transform demands for the ‘right to the city’, along with the class basis of USMs. Cities rise as protagonists in cosmopolitan movements challenging neo-liberal globalisation and lend their names to every global mobilisation.

USMs gradually contribute in overall social change. Tarrow concludes that

Transnational activism ... is more like a series of waves that lap on an international beach, retreating repeatedly into domestic seas but leaving incremental changes on the shore (Tarrow, 2006, p. 219).

All research demonstrates the invigoration which global activism exerts on social move-ment actors, techniques and discourses, the acceleration of cross-border links and innovation in contesting and democratising globalisation.

The innovative legacy of USMs in the south is reflected in all of these developments and deconstructs the north–south divide in Europe, as well as a multitude of dualisms. It broadens geographical imaginations in Europe. Greek, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese cities, as well as those of France, have influ-enced top–down ‘Mediterraneanisation’ of northern European urban landscapes, but have also invented subaltern strategies from squatting to social centres and cosmopolitan loose networks of solidarity and information sharing, particularly the ESF. These initiatives reproduce the democratisation of urban space and leave a lasting trace on alternative imagi-nations of Europe and its urban landscapes.



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Notes

1. This periodisation is also proposed by several authors not exclusively for the south, such as Mayer (2000), who examines changes in European social movements, and Negri (2008) who refers to this as the defeat of social movements of the Fordist age and the passage to post-Fordist social and political movements. In this paper, we do not prioritise Fordism, because of its weakness in the Mediterranean and also because USMs by definition concern collective consumption (Castells, 1977).

2. Castells (1977, pp. 360–375) defined movements by their outcome. He would require mobilisations to have an effect in urban politics in order to classify them as USMs. However, he himself admitted later that this was not the only important aspect (Castells, 1983, pp. 280–281, see also Pickvance, 2003, p. 103).

3. As in Italy (della Seta, 1978) or in Chile (Castells, 1977, pp. 360–375).

4. “In the face of this pseudo-right, the right to the city is like a cry and a demand” (Lefebvre, 1996, p. 158). It first appeared as the title to his book (Lefebvre, 1968), part of which (the chapter on the Right to the City in Lefebvre’s book with the same title) was published in English (Lefebvre, 1996, pp. 147–159). In this chapter, he contrasts it to the rights to nature and the countryside. He then expanded on the ‘right to the city’ in a later book (Lefebvre, 1991).

5. Alliances in the US, Europe (for example, ESF (European Social Forum charter 2007, Zagreb, etc.) and Brazil. The ESF has often put forward urban demands (see 3rd section). The World Charter includes paragraph 11 on ‘The right to the city’ (de Souza, 2006; Leontidou, 2006; Portaliou, 2007; Mayer, 2009). And the 2010 session of the World Urban Forum has adopted the slogan as its theme: “Right to the City: Bridging the Urban Divide”. It will be held in March 2010 in Rio (see: http://www.unhabitat.org/content.asp?cid=6490andcatid=584andtypeid=24andsubMenuId=0; accessed 4 September 2009).

6. See: Mitchell, 2003; Purcell, 2003, 2006; as well as all articles in City, 10(3); and Brenner et al., 2009.

7. Electronic intervention by Townes (1999), cited by Featherstone (2008). See also Routledge (2003).

8. European Social Forum, henceforth ESF, an annual cosmopolitan conference for democratic globalisation, which emerged in Italy and was first held in November 2002 in Florence.

9. Declaration of the First ESF in Florence quoted in della Porta 2008, p. 12.

10. Among 33 chapters included in a rather recent Social Movements Reader (Goodwin and Jasper, 2003), there is none on USMs. There are entries for the anti-globalisation, anti-nuclear, civil rights, peace, feminist, student, farmworkers, Christian, gay and other radical movements, but not a single entry for the urban movement, or mobilisations for the ‘right to the city’, for that matter. Only two articles are remotely relevant, concerning the movement of environmentalism, and only one single entry focuses on the labour movement, which, remarkably, discusses its decline.

11. Not anti-globalisation, as seen most often; see Rauch et al. (2007, p. 142), who argue against naming a movement by what it is against, and Routledge and Cumbers (2009, pp. 7, 15). Global justice movement or movement for democratic globalisation or alter-globalisation are alternative names.

12. World Social Forum, henceforth WSF, a cosmopolitan annual meeting based in Brazil, first held in 25–30 January 2001 in Porto Alegre.

13. It is impossible here to look so far back, but it is interesting to recall the places where barricades were erected in Paris (Hobsbawm, 1968; see also Lefebvre, 1968; Castells, 1983; Harvey, 2003; Leontidou, 2006). The pivotal role of French cities, as well as French intellectuals, in the emergence of the map of global grassroots mobilisations, was most visible in May 1968 and more recently; but it also goes back in history. USMs can be traced to 18th-century Paris, when political action often used to take the form of actively claiming urban space (Lefebvre, 1968; Harvey, 2003).

14. It was actually semi-squatting, because most migrants bought the land, where it was illegal to build, and proceeded to construct their home in violation of planning by-laws. This




did not involve disrespect to the institution of landownership (Leontidou, 1990; Leontidou et al., 2007).

15. Gramsci 1971; see Leontidou, 1990, 1996.16. Pruijt (2003) distinguishes squatting for shelter

from commitment to squatting as an end, which is an act of protest or resistance. His comparative study of New York and Amsterdam leads to the conclusion that squatters in the former case became vulnerable to offers of housing in order to abandon squatting.

17. See also Guha (1983, pp. 10, 19–20, 28) and Leontidou (1990) for this and the following points.

18. Not only in Perama and similar settlements built on steep hills (Figure 1), which made it virtually impossible to provide infrastructure, but in most squatter settlements, ‘legalisation’ did not mean infrastructure provision.

19. World Trade Organisation, created in 1995.20. This was not the first, although it was a pivotal

global mobilisation. Routledge and Cumbers (2009, pp. 8–15) trace the antecedents of the global movement of resistance to neo-liberalism since the 1980s.

21. Collectivities as diverse as the Sierra Club, the United Steelworkers of America, the Ruckus Society, the Mobilisation for Global Justice and others (Rauch et al., 2007).

22. This popular concept was first coined by Cohen (1992), but further explored much more recently, by Tarrow (2006), who presents an interesting typology with the several facets of this figure, highlighted in his analysis of the six processes of transnational contention; Featherstone (2008, p. 127), contrasting it with nationalisms and critical of Negri’s ‘multitude’; Kothari (2008), stressing subaltern cosmopolitanism as a survival strategy and the deconstruction of the cosmopolitan–parochial divide among peddlers in Barcelona; and Harvey (2009, pp. 113–118), who also analyses the reconciliation of local differences with universal principles in ‘adjectival cosmopolitanisms’.

23. Etymologically, the cosmopolitan is the citizen (politis) of the world (cosmos), while the patriot is a person attached to the home country (patris). Both words are not to be found in all languages (for ‘cosmopolitan’, see Jeffrey and

McFarlane, 2008). Transnationalism is not to be used interchangeably with cosmopolitanism, which involves mediation and negotiation of difference (see also Kothari, 2008, p. 501). Most authors on cosmopolitanism stress its fusion with patriotism, despite Purcell’s (2006) objections, that the ‘right to the city’ is highly susceptible to the ‘local trap’, because the local scale is assumed to be more democratic. See also Massey’s (2005, pp. 100–102) interesting discussion of these issues within the wider power geometries of the global. The fusion between the two is also demonstrated by Kothari (2008) for the case of peddlers in a Mediterranean city, Barcelona.

24. Hardt and Negri (2004) are criticised by Featherstone (2008, pp. 122–125), but in fact it is valid that multitudes do not unite into centralised groups: they remain different and independent but interact in a network structure (Afouxenidis, 2006). Solidarities in networks are often cross-cut by antagonisms (Routledge, 2008) and do not obliterate heterogeneity in the ‘multitudes’ since Seattle and other global mobilisations.

25. Rauch et al. (2007, p. 136): the WSF has convened in Porto Alegre in 2002, 2003 and 2005, although in Mumbai in 2004 and in three cities in 2006, when the polycentric idea was cultivated: Bamako, Caracas and Karachi (Featherstone, 2008, p. 141). The ESF met in a different city each time.

26. And several movements are ‘rural’, such as the Zapatistas and the Chiapas movements (Routledge, 2003).

27. The importance of media framing—i.e. patterns by which “symbol-handlers routinely organise discourse” (Gitlin, 1980, p. 7)— consists in offering visibility.

28. This is not necessarily negative, as demonstrated by participatory budgeting in Latin America (de Souza 2006). Several EU examples can be found in Ruzza (2004).

29. In a recent research project, ESF members were not found to be eurosceptics, but ‘critical Europeanists’: they denounce the democratic deficit and seek the grassroots in EU restructuring, “a Europeanisation from below” (della Porta, 2008, p. 37). They consider public debate as the European



1200 LILA LEONTIDOU

public sphere. In fact, opposition to neo-liberalism and its constitutionalisation by the European Constitutional Treaty, does not mean opposition to the political integration of Europe: EU treaties are criticised for marginalising the social sphere, giving NATO a role in EU policy, putting obstacles to the free movement of people, introducing several neo-liberal measures, counteracting democracy and equal rights (third ESF, cited by Della-Porta, 2008, pp. 32–33).

30. Neo-liberal strategies for visibility and the quest for centrality materialise in the entrepreneurial city and its efforts to attract global tourism and, through it, other entrepreneurial interest. Strategies include the attraction of global mega events, the reinvention of tradition, as well as innovative architectural design and iconic buildings (Jensen-Butler et al., Gospodini, 2009; Kaika and Thielen, 2006; Leontidou et al., 2007).

31. Routledge and Cumbers (2009, pp. 95–96) refer to other such places. The ‘global city’ indeed bears peculiar characteristics. I would think that residents of the rest of the cities should rather be sheltered from global dominance, as their social movements actually demand. One could reverse Purcell’s (2003) argument and legitimate protest by any outside collectivities against global city economic (and occasionally political) intervention in the world, rather than legitimating the global citizen/citoyen rights, to intervene in affairs of citizens of the rest of the world.

32. For reservations about ‘human rights’ as defined today, see Mitchell (2003, pp. 25–27).

33. We have not prioritised 11 September 2001 in this paper. If it has been a turning-point affecting urban governance and cultures, it basically concerns American societies and tromophobia sustained in them. It has disrupted global mobilisations, but only temporarily (Routledge, 2003, p. 347; Rauch et al., 2007, pp. 138–139). Even if to an extent the 11 September turning-point affected European USMs, we have to clarify that ‘tromophobia’ was by no means universal. It has affected the Mediterranean only as a compulsion and obligatory protection during mega events such as the 2004 Athens Olympics, where large

amounts were spent on security (Gospodini, 2009; Gold and Gold, 2007; Leontidou et al., 2007). Resistance against tromophobia has also erupted even in Anglo-Saxon societies: in London, after the terrorist bombings in public transport—buses and tube—on 7 July 2005, terrorists failed to keep people off the streets. After the bombings, the Mayor of London, as well as its citizens at large, remained cool and firm in their optimism against terrorists (Massey, 2007).

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