Ideologies in Local Politics — The Ratepayers’ and Squatters’ Movements

Abstract

Castells’s early exploration of the ideologies surrounding the conventional urbanism thesis was pathfinding, and led to the opening up of the whole field of urban studies based on collective consumption. But in his concern with urban social movements Castells does not systematically explore the influence of ideology on social movement formation. The possibility of important effects on the genesis and types of urban movements arising out of social system ideologies was discussed in Chapter 3. It was argued that ideology was one of three major formative influences on the nature of urban political organisations in Britain, the others being the structure of the local political system and social base characteristics. In the case study on the council house tenants’ movement in Chapter 4, attention focused on tactical and strategic issues within the local political system, and on the influence of social base characteristics on the life-cycles of the associations. This chapter is concerned with the third element in the analytical field: to illustrate how ideology operates in the practice of two distinct urban movements. There is a gap in Castells’s analytical method on this issue, and the material here is designed to show why it is an important omission.