The Social Prerequisites for the Upheaval of Urban Social Movements: an Exploratory Study of the Paris Metropolitan Area, 1968–73

Abstract

Urban contradictions are increasingly finding themselves at the centre of the social and political stakes of advanced capitalist societies; this is for two basic reasons:

• (i) The first refers to the essential role played by the consumption process in advanced capitalism. The growing socialisation of consumption and the intervention of the state in its management, both of which underlie the urban problematic, are key elements in the organisation of consumption in that they deepen contradictions while politicising them.

• (ii) The second relates to the diffusion of an urban ideology as an ideological form specific to the dominant classes. This ideology ‘naturalises’ class contradictions by considering them as ‘urban’. It does this by encapsulating class differences into one humanist totality and by preaching the social causality of spatial forms.