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Ida Susser: Covid, police brutality and race: are ongoing French mobilizations breaking through the class boundaries?

On May 31, 2020, the US exploded in protest to address the super-exploitation of racism, which has uniquely scarred its history. This was followed by international demonstrations, including massive demonstrations in Paris against police brutality, a common theme of the Gilets Jaunes, a protest starting in November 2018 that I was studying. However, this time the Paris protests included the Gilets Jaunes but focused specifically on the brutality against youth and people of color. In these important new developments, we have seen an international mobilization which may now be breaking down, or breaking through, some of the fragmentations of the working class between so-called but no longer stable working classes, the imagined middle classes also at risk of instability, and the super-exploited subjects divided by racism, sexism, colonialism, citizenship and other forms of historical subordinations.

Here I consider long-term research among street protests in France in relation to the post-Covid outrage against police brutality. Austerity policies should be seen not simply as a consequence of the Great Recession in the wake of the financial crisis but rather as the latest most destructive stage of a neoliberal assault that began worldwide in the 1970s. My ongoing research in France suggests that the  mass demonstrations which began with the French Occupy movement Nuit Debout (see Susser  2016, 2017) in 2016 and continued through a variety of strikes among students, transportation workers and others until the Gilets Jaunes demonstrations of fall 2018, and finally the massive pension demonstrations of 2019/2020, represent an effort to rebalance the pendulum in the struggles against the ever more virulent neoliberal assault. These are, in the end, international processes. I suggest that the kinds of demonstrations which were emerging powerfully in France before Covid-19, are now beginning to take place in the US and elsewhere. The disastrous inequalities that were massively exposed in the unequal fatalities and economic distress caused by the pandemic (see Focaalblog: Kalb 2020, Nonini 2020) have precipitated protests that can be seen as part of an ongoing formative process.

Long-term neoliberal assault, international dimensions

Long-term neoliberal assault has precipitated the widespread destruction of a particular kind of state (Smith 2011) as well as the restructuring of global power and networks  (Nonini and Susser 2020). The industrial state underwrote the corporate world by subsidizing the education, health and stability of a large proportion of workers. Twentieth century workers’ struggles established the particular forms of social reproduction originally reified in the welfare state. The idea, for example, of ‘a fair day’s wage’ encompassed the costs of the patriarchal, heterosexual family for the reproduction of men with their wives and children. However, the stable working class emerged alongside and in interaction with lower and precarious standards of reproduction for minorities, migrants and other historically subordinate groups and women, as well as the uneven development of (post) colonialism. In other words, industrial capitalism included a super-exploited working class, marked by race and gender, citizenship rights and in many cases, indigeneity (Carrier and Kalb 2015; Kasmir and Carbonella 2014; Fraser and Jaeggi 2019, Steur 2015). These groups were the subjects of distinctive historically-defined processes of inequality and they were generally excluded, especially in the United States, from the benefits of the welfare state and the class compromise.

The massive assaults of neoliberalism of the past 50 years destroyed the lives of displaced industrial workers and further devastated minority, immigrant and native communities. Under Covid-19, both in France and more drastically the US, these losses, long manifested in differential mortality rates, among others, have become immediate life and death issues.

Image 1: French Riot Police at Gilets Jaunes protests in Paris (Photo: Ida Susser, May 2019)

A new working poor of displaced industrial workers compounding the super-exploitation of historically subordinated groups has been recognized in the United States and Europe since the 1990s (Susser 1996). In the shifting global power configurations, contemporary nation-states no longer protect the stability of the traditional working class. The emergence of different forms of social movements can be seen as an attempt to redress the assault on customary living conditions, life cycle security and aspirations. I would suggest that this is also an attempt to redefine workers to include the previously neglected minorities as well as new family and identity configurations. New forms of worker protection will have to consider new forms of relationships within families and new kinds of work/leisure routines to address issues that some categorize as identity politics (such as feminism and LBGT rights).  

From Nuit Debout to Gilets Jaunes

After Nuit Debout, 2016-17 in France, which was largely a big city, youth led, leftist Occupy movement, the next major mobilization was that of the Gilets Jaunes (2018-2019).  The Gilets Jaunes were recognized as a new phenomenon as they came from the urban peripheries of Paris and throughout the provinces. Not regarded as cosmopolitan they included many teachers, nurses, social workers as well as truck drivers, chefs, construction workers and service workers in general. Many Gilets Jaunes were middle aged and some were thought to be right wing.

Although perhaps not representative, it should be noted that the woman who sent out the first call to protest the new fuel tax implemented by President Emmanuel Macron was an educator of color from the urban periphery of Paris. In addition, contrary to stereotype and the government portrayal of the demonstrations, Gilets Jaunes insisted that they did not object to environmental concerns. They objected to a measure that targeted for extra tax the fuel that poor people in the urban peripheries were dependent on for their daily commutes. Protests were organized in collaboration with climate activists to demonstrate their common concerns and the support of the Gilets Jaunes for the environment. A frequent chant and sign stated; we care about “the end of the month and the end of the world”.

The first email call to protest the fuel tax was put out in September 2018 but by November, when the Gilets Jaunes began to block the highways and roundabouts and gather in thousands in the streets of Paris, they were objecting to much more than the fuel tax. They were concerned with the degradations of public services, the privatization of health care and their own daily challenges as well as what they saw as the decay of democracy. These protestersfrom the urban periphery frequently described the lack of investment in public transportation outside Paris and the declining support for provincial services as illustrating the “stealing of the state.” (Susser 2020). People regarded public services as a right and saw the services as belonging to the state as paid for by their tax money and therefore belonging to them. When the state privatized a service, it was seen as ‘stealing the public money.’ The destruction of the state is manifest not only in the privatization and dismantlement of public services, but also in the crisis of daily life, the family, education, health care, the aged, the handicapped (highly visible at protests on crutches and in wheelchairs) and the students, who feel they are “losing their futures,” as one protester said to me.

Continued Gilets Jaunes resistance

Until the pension strike, which began in September 2019, the Gilets Jaunes were the most powerful, and most supported of a variety of movements that had emerged in France since the austerity policies imposed in the wake of the financial crisis. They linked many of the uprisings and strikes from different sectors (such as railroads, teachers and health workers) and the smaller uprisings among hospital aides or the sans-papiers as well as the climate change activists and left-wing organizations. Not concentrated in the workplace although participating in many disparate strikes, the Gilets Jaunes invented new methods, such as the occupation of the ronds-points, the building of cabanas and the freeing of toll booths. In these ways, the Gilets Jaunes were attempting to forge a new set of resistances and generating the support of the public from the banlieues to the provinces. The movement was both enraged and resilient: Enraged at the loss of community and public and social services over time, and resilient in the commoning efforts to create a new community (Susser 2020). The Gilets Jaunes, made up of working-class people on the urban periphery, including many pensioners and families who could not make ends meet, were crafting an emerging oppositional bloc.

The pension protests began in September 2019, when strikers closed down the metro and the buses for a day. A few months later, different sectors from health care workers, legal professions, social services, educators and others, organized massive strikes and demonstrations in the streets that continued until they were shut down by the Covid 19 epidemic in March 2020.

Gilets Jaunes among the grassroots union members, in many ways, had forced the unions to take up more militant positions against the pension changes. As health workers, lawyers and transportation workers marched in massive protests through Paris, Gilets Jaunes could be seen populating the street protests of every profession in their distinctive yellow jackets, personal statements written in black marker on their backs. The signature song of all the pension protests was that of the Gilets Jaunes, as were many of the chants and banners. Until Paris was closed down for Covid-19 in March 2020, the Gilets Jaunes and the massive pension marches combined in different, often conflicted, ways across France, in some cities with more cooperation in time and place than others.

Image 2. Gilets Jaunes protests in Paris (Photo: Ida Susser, May 2019)

In France, Nuit Debout, the Gilets Jaunes, the pension strikers and many other movements represent transformative spaces where people in the current era of financialization and globalization are struggling to work out new strategies. Activists envision horizontalist movements as an effort to develop innovative forms of protest to counteract the increasing inequality, authoritarian tendencies and hardened boundaries of the new global regime. Such progressive representation strives for inclusivity and the breakdown and recognition of established hierarchies of gender, race, immigration and class, among others. Each of these groups has to be understood in the context of their own history and social movements. The participants in Nuit Debout were not the same as the Gilets Jaunes. However, in France and elsewhere, multiple subaltern groups may be beginning to recognize themselves as part of a larger political bloc in opposition to the destruction of the welfare state and degradation of democratic representation (Kalb and Mollona 2018). Such movements are contingent and contested, reflective of the same rage against the destruction of living standards and aspirations for a generation but offering hope for more inclusive solutions.

Image 3. Protests against police brutality in Paris (Photo: Ida Susser, May 2019)

Before the Gilets Jaunes, in 2016/7 activists from Nuit Debout had protested the police violence often focused on young men of color in the streets. The Gilets Jaunes protested the violence of the police against their own street demonstrations for over a year. It is a crucial development that in June 2020 the Gilets Jaunes joined ranks with the protests against police brutality and racism that were rocking the world. At this conjuncture, after the shocking Covid-19 shutdown and the disproportionate deaths of people of color in France as elsewhere, the displaced workers of the urban periphery joined directly with the superexploited immigrants, refugees and previously colonized people of color from the banlieues in several unprecedented massive demonstrations.

Image 4. Gilets Jaunes protester with Black Lives Matter support message (Photo: Ida Susser, May 2019)

As Polanyi knew, rage against the disastrous failures of (neo)liberalism could be expressed in brutal and fascist ways (see also Maskovsky and Bjork-James 2020, Kalb and Halmai 2011). However, the protests that we see today are a hopeful sign in their inclusive progressive moments bringing together many groups who are all at risk in different ways and at different levels or aspects of exploitation. They are demanding a rebalancing of the destructive neoliberal assault of the past 50 years. They are constructing an inclusive but uneven critical community which may serve as an antidote against the growing fury which is fueling nationalism and exclusivism (see also Kalb and Mollona 2018).

Ida Susser is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Her most recent book is The Tumultuous Politics of Scale, co-edited with Don Nonini.

References

Fraser, Nancy and Rahel Jaeggi. 2018. Capitalism: A Conversation in Critical Theory. Medford, MA: Polity

Carrier, James and Don Kalb (eds.) 2015. Anthropologies of Class: Power, Practice and Inequality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Kalb, Don and G Halmai (eds.) 2011. Headlines of Nation, Subtexts of Class: Working Class Populism and the Return of the Repressed in Neoliberal Europe. Vol. 15. Oxford: Berghahn Books.

Kalb, Don and Massimilliano Mollona (eds.) 2018. Worldwide Mobilizations. New York: Berghahn Books.

Kasmir, Sharryn and August Carbonella (eds.) 2014. Blood and Fire. New York: Berghahn Books

Kalb, Don 2020. Covid, Crisis and the Coming Contestations. http://www.focaalblog.com/2020/06/01/don-kalb-covid-crisis-and-the-coming-contestations/

Maskovsky, Jeff and S. Bjork-James (eds.) 2020. Beyond Populism: Angry Politics and the Twilight of Neoliberalism. Morgantown, WV: West Virginia University Press

Nonini, Don 2020 Black Enslavement and the Coming Agro-Industrial Capital. http://www.focaalblog.com/2020/07/03/don-nonini-black-enslavement-and-agro-industrial-capital/

Nonini, D. and I. Susser (2020). The Tumultuous Politics of Scale. New York: Routledge.

Smith, Gavin (2011). Selective Hegemonies, Identities, 18(1): 2-38.

Steur, Luisa (2015). Class trajectories and indigenism among agricultural workers in Kerala. In: Carrier J and Kalb D (eds) Anthropologies of Class: Power, Practice and Inequality. Cambridge: CUP, pp.118-130.

Poperl, Kevin and Ida Susser (1996). “The Construction of Poverty and Homelessness in US Cities.”Annual Review of Anthropology 25 (1): 411–35.

Susser, Ida (2018) Inventing a Technological Commons: Confronting the Engine of Macron, http://www.focaalblog.com/2018/04/19/kevin-poperl-and-ida-susser-inventing-a-technological-commons-confronting-the-engine-of-macron/

Susser, Ida (2017). Introduction: For or Against the Commons?, Focaal 79:1-5.

Susser, Ida (2017). Commoning in New York City, Barcelona and Paris: Notes and observations from the field. Focaal 79: 6-22.

Susser, Ida (2020, forthcoming). “They are stealing the state”: Commoning and the Gilets Jaunes in France. In: Urban Ethics Moritz Ege and Johannes Moser (eds.). New York: Routledge.

Cite as: Susser, Ida. 2020. “Covid, police brutality and race: are ongoing French mobilizations breaking through the class boundaries?” FocaalBlog, 3 December. http://www.focaalblog.com/2020/12/03/ida-susser:-covid,-police-brutality-and-race:-are-ongoing-french-mobilizations-breaking-through-the-class-boundaries?/

Features, Urban Struggles

Raúl Acosta, Flávio Eiró, Insa Koch and Martijn Koster: Introduction: Urban struggles: governance, resistance, and solidarity

This post is part of a feature on “Urban Struggles,” moderated and edited by Raúl Acosta (LMU Munich), Flávio Eiró (Radboud University Nijmegen), Insa Koch (LSE) and Martijn Koster (Radboud University Nijmegen).

The global trend away from rural living and towards urbanization continues unabated. This is so despite high levels of inequality, poverty and forms of exclusion that are part and parcel of city life for the many. Indeed, across the globe, growing numbers of urban dwellers struggle to meet even the most basic needs for housing, security, and income. In response to these challenges, governments have attempted to present solutions that are too often palliative, addressing merely the symptoms of inequalities rather than their causes. In a similar vein, highly mobile policies are frequently implemented under the banner of terms like “good governance,” “participation” or “crisis management” that reinforce the social exclusion of the most marginalized, often contrary to their stated intentions (Peck and Theodore 2015). Cases of such exclusion include mass evictions, the rise of gated communities, the securitization of urban spaces, shifts towards austerity measures, punitive policies of migrant populations, and the regulation of the informal sector.  

As such, cities are places of multiscale struggle (Mollona 2014) where a variety of different actors, from (inter)national and local government bodies to charities, corporations, grassroots movements and citizens make competing claims of legitimacy and express visions for future living (Harvey 2003, Susser and Tonnelat 2013, Lazar 2017). Indeed, cities have become focal points for various class struggles.  

Based on a panel held at the IUAES conference in Poznań, Poland, in August 2019, this collection of papers addresses both the various forms of resistance to, and the reproduction of, exclusionary urban policies. Our main ambition is to expand important conversations in anthropology on urban mobilizations emerging from Henry Lefebvre’s “right to the city” and the “production of space” via a focus on the character and persistence of urban struggles (Lefebvre 1991, Banerjee-Guha 2010, Kalb and Mollona 2018, Koster and Kolling 2019). In this post and the contributions to this feature blog, we understand the study of urban struggles as a collection of productive tensions where governance, resistance and solidarity play out in plural and often unexpected ways within global frameworks of highly unequal regimes of accumulation (Susser 2014).   

Urban governance: facing challenges and reproducing inequality  

Cities grow by layers of time. This is related to both population growth and changes to the built environment. The number of urban dwellers grows not merely through the reproduction of those already living in urban spaces, but through constant immigration that originates in the countryside from surrounding areas and often from much further afield (Davis 2006). Many migrants who are attracted to urban life consider the city to be full of opportunities that cannot be found elsewhere, even as they find upon arrival that their status and rights to the city are often less recognized and sometimes actively suppressed compared to those of more established populations. The steady growth of cities across the planet has created, in turn, new pressures on local government bodies to keep up with the provision of infrastructure, public goods and employment opportunities needed to meet even the most basic demands for living (Caglar and Schiller 2018). 

To respond to the challenges faced by urban dwellers and the risk of social turmoil these entail, governments have come to implement a range of policies aimed at improving the urban lived environment. Governments thus tend to see larger cities both as centers where political legitimacy is built and where their ideologies and visions of the future take shape. Because of this combination, cities have also become sites of experimentation for states, where policies are tested before being rolled out more broadly. Often sold under the banner of buzzwords like “civilizing cities”, promoting “active participation”, “community building” or embarking on “crisis management”, these policies promise to improve the quality of life and built environment of the most vulnerable (Nuijten 2013, Schinkel 2010, Masco 2017). To do so, many come to rely on new forms of technocratic governance that uses the matrix of statistics and quantitative science in implementing various political and legal projects, ranging from social housing provisions to environmental policies to regeneration projects (Koch 2018). 

While these various initiatives may have ostensibly democratic goals, their implementation all too often reproduces the structural conditions of exclusion that they are meant to address (Alexander, Bruun and Koch 2018). The objective or neutral language of urban initiatives disguises the complex ways in which these policies are embedded in, and further promote, capitalism’s circuits of value and accumulation. Decisions by government policy makers usually favor the segments of the population who already hold most capital in the city. Meanwhile, urban infrastructure projects and regeneration initiatives attract real estate developers and to gentrify neighborhoods (Evans 2016). Both processes are aggravated when budget cuts and austerity measures fuel the outsourcing of urban governance to third-party actors – private companies and non-governmental organizations alike – that are often unwilling and sometimes unable to adequately provide public goods.  

Urban struggles as resistance and solidarity 

Cities, as sites where different actors compete for legitimacy, are the locus of productive urban struggles. We use the term urban struggle to refer to the complex and varied sets of negotiations through which city dwellers, grassroots movements, activist groups and political and development brokers critically engage with the claims to legitimacy and visions for the future that are promoted by official channels. As these groups face a wide variety of problems from insufficient housing (Cohen 2014) and infrastructure to environmental hazards, they develop an equally vast repertoire of resistance strategies, tactics and responses. These include, as the contributions to this feature show, amongst others, squatting initiatives, land occupations, grassroots art exhibitions, and the expansion of informal ties that are often viewed with suspicion by the state. There is thus a constant push and pull between dispossession and resistance, austerity and solidarity, exclusion, and inclusion unfolding in urban spaces.  

Image 1: Street graffiti in Recife, Brazil  (Photo: Martijn Koster, 18  August 2015) 

Yet, creative engagements seemingly opposed to neoliberal urban policies do not produce unequivocal forms of resistance, less even a singular anti-capitalist stance against structures of oppression (Kalb and Mollona 2018). On the contrary, ambiguities and contradictions prevail as citizens move within the same unequal processes of accumulation that frame official policies (James and Koch 2020). One example of this concerns the case of slum dwellers who aspire, above all, to become landlords and rent out rooms to even poorer slum dwellers under extractive conditions. Hence, the practices of the poor are not necessarily expressions of unequivocal solidarity and care (Palomera 2014). Likewise, social movements and grassroots initiatives, while often deploying a universal language of humanitarianism, may only benefit particular groups of urban dwellers, thus generating resentment and jealousy amongst those excluded (Wilde 2020). Urban struggles do not necessarily produce a better city, even as their spokespersons claim to speak on behalf of the most vulnerable and excluded (Gutierrez-Garza 2020).  

Acknowledging the contradictions that are at the heart of urban struggles opens the space for a particular analytical lens: one that conceptualizes cities as assemblages of productive tensions where a variety of actors, groups, movements and policy makers define, and continuously compete over, the meanings of urban citizenship, “rights to the city”, and democratizing access to infrastructures and public goods. This, in turn, can help us see how social responses, including those of social movements, grassroots initiatives, and local care networks, should not be romanticized as simple expressions of political resistance. Neither, however, does such a lens lend itself to a dystopian view in which capitalism erases all alternatives. Instead, cities emerge as places of ongoing, open-ended power struggles. Ethnography, with its focus on the lived experiences of urban dwellers, is particularly well placed to capture both the moments of solidarity that continue to exist and the wider forces disabling them. The papers in this feature seek to do precisely this.  

Ethnographies of urban struggles 

Our blog contributions highlight urban struggles and their complicated politics in a range of settings, taking the reader from Latin American’s mega-cities to European urban centers to recent urban developments in Asia. In Mexico City, Raúl Acosta analyses how cycling activists, intent on improving the infrastructure of the city, engage in a project that uses technical expertise to put forward a moral project of improving life in the city. However, the capacity to claim such moral projects is not evenly distributed, as activists on the “periphery” – both in the spatial and the social sense of the word – find that they lack the economic and cultural capital to be heard by power holders. In Brazil, questions of resistance and power are also at the center of the urban activism practiced by the poor. Sven da Silva explores how occupancy urbanism of the poor is negotiated in the context of development projects in the fast-growing Recife, in Brazil. Here, community leaders engage in political activities to resist real state pressure and in favor of what they view as community interests. Adam Moore’s contribution presents the hopes and dreams of victims of development in Medellín, Colombia. Looking at practices of autoconstruction, he explores the ‘human cost’ of ‘urban renovations’ and challenges the hegemonic narrative about urban transformation in Medellín, which heralds the local government as exemplary in its commitment to equitable and pro-poor urban development interventions. 

In Europe, struggles over governing urban populations and spaces similarly abound, bringing together a complex network of third sector organizations, private actors, Universities and state bodies. In the “policy laboratory city” of Rotterdam, frequently celebrated for its allegedly inclusive and innovative social policies, conflicting views over how to govern migrant populations have opened the space for new technologies of control. Here, Lieke van de Veer shows that the effort on the part of local groups claiming a role on the reception infrastructure of migrants often become riddled with internal tensions over funding and resources as different groups are unequally positioned to access these competitive funds. Meanwhile, in the UK, two of our blog contributions focus in more closely on questions of inequality in the city. Sarah Winkler-Reid’s work on Newcastle-Upon-Tyrne focuses on the university’s role in the network of actors influencing urban development proclaiming to create the “good city”. Here, the rapid growth of privately owned, mostly purpose-built student accommodation, create new forms of inequality in the city’s historical centre. In her contribution on the voluntarization of welfare advice in Manchester, Janne Heederik demonstrates how a withdrawal of state funding and a shift of tasks and responsibilities from government officials to citizens have transformed the landscape of welfare provision. If solidarity is the basis of the relationships between claimants and non-state advisers, they are also marked by tensions that are the result of the structural shifts austerity has imposed on the welfare system. 

In all of the contributions considered thus far, concessions and gains experienced by one urban group can simultaneously constitute a loss or betrayal for another. Indeed, this insight is also key to Anne-Christine Trémon’s ethnography of the city of Shenzhen in the People’s Republic of China (PRC), where the authorities’ attempts to gain the status of a “national civilized city” – a status bestowed by the PRC government in recognition of “quality of life and a higher degree of urban civilization” – have introduced new forms of inequality for migrant populations vis a vis the typically much wealthier natives. Trémon makes use of the concept of “variegated governance” to make sense of how cohabiting residents in the same territorial unit receive differential treatment depending on their respective economic valorization and the political acknowledgement of their social worth. Finally, in Ezgi Guler’s contribution on urban Turkey, we move closer to questions about the possibility of collective resistance to oppressive urban structures and policies. Yet, once more, while the transgender sex workers with whom she carried out fieldwork rely on dense networks of mutual support and care, these rarely translate into collective political action as material pressures, including financial stress, inequality, competition and stigma also make workers deeply suspicious of one another.

This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No. 679614).

Raúl Acosta is a postdoctoral researcher at the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich. He currently carries out research on urban activism in Mexico City in a sub-project of the German Research Foundation (DFG) funded Urban Ethics Research Group. His monograph “Civil Becomings: Performative Politics in the Brazilian Amazon and the Mediterranean” examines activist and advocacy networks. 

Flávio Eiró is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Anthropology and Dvelopment Studies at Radboud University, Nijmegen. He has conducted ethnographic research on electoral politics and conditional cash transfers in Northeast Brazil, and currently works in the ERC funded project “Participatory urban governance between democracy and clientelism: Brokers and (in)formal politics”.  

Insa Koch is Associate Professor in Law and Anthropology at the London School of Economics. Her recently published monograph “Personalizing the State: an Anthropology of Law, Politics and Welfare in Austerity Britain” offers an ethnographic study of the crisis of democracy and urban citizenship in Britain.  

Martijn Koster is Associate Professor at the Department of Anthropology and Development Studies at Radboud University, Nijmegen. Currently, he leads the ERC funded project “Participatory urban governance between democracy and clientelism: Brokers and (in)formal politics”. 

References 

Alexander, C; M Hojer Bruun; I Koch. 2018. Political economy comes home: on the moral economies of housing. Critique of Anthropology 38(2): 121–139 

Banerjee-Guha, S. (Ed.). 2010. Accumulation by dispossession: Transformative cities in the new global order. SAGE Publications India. 

Caglar, A. S. and N. G. Schiller. 2018. Migrants & city-making: dispossession, displacement, and urban regeneration. Durham, Duke University Press. 

Cohen, Yves. 2014. “Crowds without a master: A transnational approach between past and present,” FocaalBlog, November 10, www.focaalblog.com/2014/11/10/yves-cohen-crowds-without-a-master-a-transnational-approach-between-past-and-present. 

Davis, M. 2006. Planet of slums. London, New York, Verso. 

Evans, G. 2018. London’s Olympic Legacy: The Inside Track. London, Palgrave MacMillan. 

Gutierrez Garza, Ana. 2020. “Te lo tienes que currar”: enacting an ethics of care in times of austerity. Ethnos, Published online. 

Harvey, D. 2003. The right to the city. International journal of urban and regional research, 27(4), 939–941. 

Kalb, D. and M. Mollona. 2018. Worldwide mobilizations: class struggles and urban commoning. New York, Oxford, Berghahn Books. 

Koch, I. 2018. Personalizing the state. An anthropology of law, politics, and welfare in austerity Britain. Oxford, Oxford University Press. 

Koch, I. and D. James. 2020. The state of the welfare state: advice, governance and care in settings of austerity. Ethnos, Published online. 

Koster, M. & M. Kolling (eds). 2019. Betrayal in the city: Urban development across the globe [Special Issue]. City & Society 31(3). 

Lazar, S. 2017. The social life of politics: Ethics, kinship, and union activism in Argentina. Redwood City, Stanford University Press.  

Lefebvre, H. 1991. The production of space. Oxford, Basil Blackwell. 

Masco, J. 2017. The crisis in crisis. Current Anthropology, 58(S15), S65-S76. 

Mollona, Massimiliano. 2014. “The Brazilian ‘June’ revolution: Urban struggles, composite articulations, and new class analysis,” FocaalBlog, October 28, www.focaalblog.com/2014/10/28/massimiliano-mollona-the-brazilian-june-revolution-urban-struggles-composite-articulations-and-new-class-analysis.  

Nuijten, M. 2013. The perversity of the “Citizenship Game”: Slum-upgrading in the urban periphery of Recife, Brazil. Critique of Anthropology, 33(1), 8–25. 

Palomera, J. 2014. Reciprocity, commodification, and poverty in the era of financialization. Current Anthropology 55(S9): S105-S115. 

Peck, J., & Theodore, N. 2015. Fast policy: Experimental statecraft at the thresholds of neoliberalism. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press. 

Susser, I., & Tonnelat, S. 2013. Transformative cities: the three urban commons. Focaal, 2013(66), 105–121. 

Susser, Ida. 2014. “Re-envisioning social movements in the Global City,” FocaalBlog, 12 November, www.focaalblog.com/2014/11/12/ida-susser-re-envisioning-social-movements-in-the-global-city. 

Wilde, M. 2020. Eviction, Gatekeeping and Militant Care: Moral Economies of Housing in Austerity London. Ethnos, Published online. 

Cite as: Acosta, Raúl, Flávio Eiró, Insa Koch and Martijn Koster. 2020. “Introduction: Urban struggles: governance, resistance, and solidarity.” FocaalBlog, 2 July. http://www.focaalblog.com/2020/07/02/raul-acosta-flavio-eiro-insa-koch-and-martijn-koster-introduction-urban-struggles-governance-resistance-and-solidarity/