Amanda Tattersall

This chapter explores how the housing movement Reclaim the City has fought for urban spatial justice within the inner city of Cape town by desegregating housing in the city through the creation of affordable housing for the working class Black majority using prefigurative people power. Prefigurative people power involves people running community experiments that model, or “prefigure,” their vision for how the city should be. It is a strategy that powerfully creates a narrative for change by building “concrete utopias” that demonstrate how change can work in practice. Yet the intensity of labor required to sustain these experiments can lead them to struggle. The chapter differentiates prefigurative strategy from the more commonly used term “prefigurative politics,” which sees prefiguration as a more ideological or normative practice rather than a strategy that seeks to change the state or market. Reclaim the City came to use prefigurative people power after playing by the rules and social mobilization on their own had failed to deliver policy reform on affordable housing. They occupied two large properties in the inner city and turned them into community housing—desegregating the city themselves. This chapter explores the evolution of their seven-year resident-run movement accommodating more than 1,000 Black working-class families. The story of Reclaim the City points toward the potential for prefiguration to be deployed pragmatically as well as ideologically, showing how urban movements and organizations can use prefiguration in combination with other political strategies with which it is often contrasted and opposed.

This chapter sets out the book’s people power framework. It defines the book’s approach to key concepts such as power, people power, and strategy; it defines urban people power strategy as the forms of association that urban movements and organizations use to build their power and the actions they take to exercise their power in shaping the city. The chapter then builds an approach to people power strategies that understands strategy as a response to the dilemmas faced by movements and organizations in the city. These dilemmas include familiar questions encountered by organizers and activists and are grounded in the literature from across social movements, political science, and geography. The dilemmas are the following: Who will be involved? How will you make decisions? What will you fight for? How will you fund the fight? Where will you stage your fight? What tempo will you work at? What tactics will you use? And how will you define success? The chapter then outlines the five people power strategies explored in the case studies: playing by the rules, mobilizing, organizing, prefiguring, and running for office. It shows how each of these strategies is defined by its distinct responses to the dilemmas of urban people power. It then argues for the importance of seeing how these strategies interact and relate as an ecology in the space of the city.

People Power in Cities’ case studies begin in Austin, a city beset by political tensions over housing. The primary conflict is between longtime residents keen to “preserve” the city as it is and new younger “urbanist” residents keen to expand development to increase the supply of affordable housing. The chapter analyzes the strategy of playing by the rules, where people build and exercise power using the formal opportunities for participation available in liberal demotic society. It explores how preservationists and urbanists sought to advance their goals for urban growth by initially using formal consultative mechanisms around land zoning changes and later through more creative strategies such as petitions, citizen-initiated referenda, and legal cases that sought to change the rules of the game. The strengths and limits of these strategies are assessed, such as how they enabled voices to be heard while providing tools that were more accessible to some residents than others. The chapter documents how preservationists and urbanists at times combined playing by the rules with other strategies like organizing. In this expansive decade-long exploration of urban politics, the chapter also analyzes how community organizing alliances like Austin Interfaith intervened in the debates with mixed success.

What strategies do we have for building and exercising people power in cities that can effectively confront global urban injustices and give us the ability to create alternative urban futures? This question animates this book. This chapter begins by locating our inquiry amid the tumult of an urban world in crisis, in which cities are plagued by unequal distributions of resources, intolerance and repression of social groups, a wide range of environmental harms, and the curtailment of democratic participation. It then introduces the authors, discussing the experiences and concerns that have led them to collaborate on the research, and their desire to write a book for “do-ers” and “thinkers” alike. From here, the chapter introduces the book’s approach to people power, considering the history of that term before examining its relationship to cities. It argues that cities are essential spaces for a particular brand of people power politics, in which the city is a site of political imagination, aspiration, and identification. It defines urban people power movements and organizations as those that seek to address issues and problems that people face as city dwellers and democratize the governance of their cities, asserting the power of the people to shape the urban process. The chapter concludes with an outline of the book.

1.1Overview of our exploration of people power in cities 172.1How do people define success? 382.2Five people power strategies 46

In 2015 former housing activist Ada Colau ran for office and became Barcelona’s first female mayor, riding a wave of popular mobilization against austerity and elite capture of politics into power. She was the candidate of Barcelona en Comú—a new political platform established by activists from the city’s vibrant neighborhood and social movements who decided to run for office as a strategy to democratize and feminize the city’s politics. This chapter explores what Colau and Barcelona en Comú’s experiences in office from 2015 to 2023 can tell us about the potentials and limits of running for office as a strategy for building and exercising people power in cities. It does this by reflecting on two key elements of the Barcelona experience. First, it shows how success in winning an election does not guarantee successful enactment of your electoral platform—focusing on housing policy as an illustrative example of the challenges of changing the city from municipal government while maintaining productive movement-party relations. Second, it delves deeper into one particular achievement during Ada Colau’s administration that illustrates the way their effort to “occupy the institutions” managed to “change the game”–namely, the pursuit of “public-commons partnerships” as an alternative model of urban governance. Barcelona en Comú’s success in running for office provided an opportunity for people inside and outside the state to collaborate on projects that sought not only to do things with the state but to do things to the state, with potentially transformative effects that could resonate across time and space.

The conclusion presents a series of four “questions to be curious about” that draw out the book’s key implications in ways that honor and hold in tension “thinker” and “do-er” mindsets. Resisting the silver bullet simplicity that tends to elevate a single strategy above others, the chapter instead identifies a series of questions that take the strategic dilemmas and people power strategies and turns them into provocations that can be applied to everyday urban social change practice. Borrowing from the Zapatista tradition of “walking we ask questions,” it raises questions around (1) who and how are “the people” in people power, (2) strategy and the challenges of the city, (3) time, and (4) how to relate to different people power strategies. The final question launches a discussion about the ecology of people power. This section explores how an ecological mindset, one that understands the need for productive cohabitation between strategies, offers a new way for practitioners to see the different strategies they use and how they relate to others. This ecological mindset for people power strategy invites us to embrace our strategic differences while recognizing that no strategy is an island. The section offers a series of movement and organizational practices that can support cohabitation, including strategic curiosity and the avoidance of parasitic behavior, while also recognizing that this diversity and interconnected ecological practice can happen not only in a city but between cities.

This chapter takes readers into the streets of Hong Kong during the tumultuous years of protest against the Hong Kong government’s proposed extradition bill. It analyzes the mass movement that mobilized millions to protest against the legislation. Mobilizing involves identifying people who are sympathetic to a cause and then “turning them out” to participate in actions in support of that cause. While mobilizing has been criticized for its reliance on dedicated activists, it is often embraced as a strategy for acting quickly in the face of urgent pressures. Hong Kong activists embraced mobilizing to confront an immediate threat, but the chapter shows how the Anti–Extradition Law Amendment Bill (Anti-ELAB) Movement evolved from a broader ecology of people power experiments undertaken in the wake of the 2014 Umbrella Movement. It then considers how the movement reacted to the Hong Kong government’s crackdown, shifting from mass marches in central areas to distributed protests across the city. Initial demands for withdrawal of the legislation simultaneously evolved into more complex and positive protest goals through decentralized online discussion. The chapter concludes with reflections on the way that Hong Kong’s mobilizing strategy addressed limitations of mobilizing, diversifying the places and practices of participation in a way that facilitated mass involvement in action and in decision-making. It also shows how mobilizing in Hong Kong struggled to overcome significant internal divisions that have been exacerbated in the wake of the Hong Kong and Chinese governments’ crackdown on dissent.

This chapter explores the introduction and evolution of broad-based community organizing as a new people power strategy in Sydney. Organizing is a strategy for building and exercising people power through the cultivation of relationships across diverse constituencies and the leadership development of people and institutions. This approach was introduced into Sydney’s political landscape by the Sydney Alliance, a coalition of community organizations, faith groups, and trade unions that publicly launched in 2011. Its approach drew on the tradition instigated by Saul Alinsky and was incubated by the Industrial Areas Foundation. While this tradition helped to address some of the problems associated with other strategies like mobilizing, applying the “universals” of community organizing to Sydney’s political context also generated a series of dilemmas. In particular, the Alliance was confronted with a range of strategic dilemmas about how to build relationships across the city’s geographical and cultural diversity. The chapter then shifts to focus on a decade of strategic innovation in the Alliance’s organizing strategy that emerged when it sought to work on climate issues with the Pasifika community and other communities of color and migrant communities. The Alliance’s Voices for Power project succeeded in expanding participation in Sydney’s climate politics beyond the “usual suspects.” But in the process, Voices for Power leaders agitated for changes to the organizing model used by the Alliance to ensure that it worked with culturally and linguistically diverse communities to build knowledge, strategies for action, and power “with” them rather than “over” them.