Assembling the Multitude: Material Geographies of Social Movements from Oaxaca to Occupy

Arenas, Iván Darío Rojas

doi:10.1068/d19612

Cited by 11 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 30 publications

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“…The global future is for more and larger towns across currently regional and rural landscapes. Tuvendal and Elmqvist (2012: 225) argue that 'resilience is not a property of a location; it is the property of a system' and a non-normative process; but as we have seen in some of the articles in this Special Issue, the local is a promising site of action, whether for imagining new landscapes (Beilin et al, 2013a) or new stories (Goldstein et al, 2013) or restoring traditions (Barthel et al, 2013); or as noted elsewhere, for resistance, persistence and re-emergence of common spaces for democratic action (Arenas, 2014) -all qualities associated with resilience thinking.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Introduction: Governing for urban resilience

Beilin

Wilkinson

2015

Urban Studies

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There is urgency afoot to acknowledge the disconnection between ecological realities and the persistence of past ways of constructing the social, as if it is in isolation from the ecological. The urban is the common ground: an endlessly burgeoning, frequently contested home to spaces, institutions and people. 'Governing for urban resilience' brings together research that considers the meaningfulness and possibilities inherent in conceptualising and implementing social-ecological resilience as a process for radical social change and offering a lens for connecting these urban narratives. The urban is then acknowledged as a site of heightened complexity, harbouring diverse social and ecological realities and imaginative potential. The Special Issue challenges past ways of ordering and limiting the city, while building on more recent interpretations of it as interwoven processes associated with enhancing connectivity -whether ecosystems or social networks. Four themes emerge from the articles: locating action; using scale to interrogate and facilitate change; acknowledging the asymmetry of power relations in order to focus on social justice as critical to change; and incorporating local knowledge and the catalytic force of memory to assist that change. The papers have applied the ideas of resilience and social-ecological resilience to their existing urban research, asking, in the main, whether this lens assists us to know more about what has occurred in the case studies. Overall, the outcomes suggest the strengths and weaknesses of policies and projects and in some cases the potentially transformative processes that encourage a social-ecological resilience framing for future research.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Introduction: Governing for urban resilience

Beilin

Wilkinson

2015

Urban Studies

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“…The staging of post-neoliberal manifestations, revolts and unfinished transitions that, for the last decade have been shaping the urban political and economic landscapes in South America and Southern Europe, ignited a process of collective urban experimentation. A multifarious range of urban collectives (Arenas, 2014;Hardt and Negri, 2009;Sitrin, 2012;Zibechi, 2012) -emerging from the social debris of violently regenerated and pillaged urban fabrics -is increasingly relying on the fabrication of new spatialities to pierce and interrupt the ever-expanding '. .…”

Section: The Politics Of Constructionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…For a plethora of urban social movements like GIROS, urban politics unfolds through the construction of platforms that alter logics of exchange and circulation (Arenas, 2014). The dissemination of these physical infrastructures delimits a topological zone where practices, values and relations -regardless of their size or reach -are amplified.…”

Section: Urban Politics As the Construction Of De-commodified Platformsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The politics of construction: Towards a theory of material articulations

Minuchin

2016

Environ Plan D

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This paper seeks to position construction as a platform and practice for the articulation of a new type of urban politics. The argument is presented in four steps, and each supported by an analysis of the work of social movement Grupo Independiente Rosarino Organizado Solidariamente (GIROS) in Rosario. The first part describes how construction introduces prefiguration as a means of reconfiguring the spatialities and temporalities of urban politics. The second part presents an analysis of the processes of de-institutionalisation and de-commodification that emerge from the involvement of urban social movements with construction practices in peripheral settlements. I then illustrate how the politicisation of construction operates through a simultaneous recuperation of what is described as techno-popular knowledges and a disruption of hegemonic constructive epistemologies. Lastly, the paper introduces the notion of material articulation to examine how construction, as a prefigurative tactic, is used to formulate alternative urban political programmes. The part presents a brief conceptual history of the notion of articulation and argues for the need to deepen current trends that seek to expand its restrictive association with language and institutionalised politics. The paper concludes by addressing how material articulations are reconfiguring the content, agencies and spatialities of political action.

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“…The production o f territoriality by social movements has been little explored in the Anglophone literature, presenting a research lacuna that is particularly striking following the wave o f protest camps in 2011. While recent attention has been given to the importance o f materiality for the geographies o f occupation (Arenas, 2014;Vasudevan, 2014), there remains a need to examine the role o f territoriality.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Encountering Occupy London: Boundary Making and the Territoriality of Urban Activism

Halvorsen

2015

Environ Plan D

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In this paper I examine the practices of encountering o f Occupy London, and argue that they provide a means for rethinking the production o f territoriality. Specifically, I argue that boundary making not only involves hierarchical relations o f power-over but also the articulation o f bottom-up power-to. I first examine literature on boundary making, and propose encountering as a more appropriate vocabulary to represent this practice in the context of urban activism. I then conceptualise encountering as the articulation o f powerto, a moment in the production of territoriality from below, bringing together Holloway's dialectical understanding o f power and Lefebvre's writings on territorial autogestion and urban encounters. In the remainder o f the paper I examine practices o f encountering in Occupy London on the basis o f militant research with the movement that combined ethnography, interviews, and archive analysis. The paper focuses on the spaces of the General Assembly and the protest camp, exploring how encounters were productive of new social relations and highlighting key tensions. In particular I note the inevitable ephemerality o f activist encounters and tensions over institutionalising encounters, and I end by calling for greater attention to the power relations involved, warning against assumptions that encounters o f power-to necessarily lead to positive outcomes.

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Assembling the Multitude: Material Geographies of Social Movements from Oaxaca to Occupy

Cited by 11 publications

References 30 publications

Introduction: Governing for urban resilience

Introduction: Governing for urban resilience

The politics of construction: Towards a theory of material articulations

Encountering Occupy London: Boundary Making and the Territoriality of Urban Activism

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