Neoliberal Urbanism and Uprisings Across Europe

Abstract

This chapter explores the impact neoliberal urbanism has had on the conflicts and contestations that have erupted across European cities over the last decade. After presenting the concept of neoliberalization and its uneven implementation within Europe, it delineates the characteristic features of neoliberal urbanism, highlighting in particular the strategies with which cities respond to global pressures and crisis developments. City managers have intensified and innovated regeneration and upgrading policies, deliberately valorizing real estate and public space, and politicians have turned, especially since the 2008 financial crisis, to more austere policies and new strategies to displace undesired uses and groups from vibrant parts of the city. As tensions and conflicts have emerged around all of these strategies, different forms of urban resistance have emerged, which themselves have been shaped by the very restructuring processes and policies that the contestations—to varying degrees and in more and less articulate forms—oppose. The third section of the chapter deepens some observations about the contestations around neoliberal urbanism: first, how the field of urban activism has become both larger and more heterogeneous in response to the particularities of urban neoliberalization; second, how struggles against urban upgrading have taken on a variety of forms, covering the spectrum from Right to the City networks and their well-organized campaigns all the way to violent uprisings; and, finally, how the massive societal upheaval that erupted in Greece and Spain provided a context for new grassroots solidarity initiatives to build ‘another city’. The concluding section resituates these findings, particularly the challenge thrown up by the heterogeneity of the contemporary forms of urban resistance, within the conceptual framework of neoliberalization and its being overcome by ‘deep societalization.’