People Power in Cities

Abstract Can people power confront global urban injustices and create alternative urban futures? This book focuses on collective action at the city scale that seeks to address urban issues and democratize urban governance, and explores how people power strategies evolve over time and space. The opening chapters provide a framework for understanding urban people power. The framework identifies eight strategic dilemmas that face anyone trying to change their city and shows how distinct strategic choices for building and exercising people power are made in response to these dilemmas. Five people power strategies are examined: playing by the rules, mobilizing, organizing, prefiguring, and running for office. Each is illustrated through chapters that analyze how and why the strategy was chosen, how it interacted with other strategies, and its strengths and limitations. The first case looks at Austin’s housing movements and their use of playing by the rules. The second explores Hong Kong’s anti–extradition bill movement and its innovative approaches to mobilizing. The third examines the Sydney Alliance’s Voices for Power campaign, which organized communities of color for energy justice. The fourth highlights Cape Town’s Reclaim the City movement and its prefigurative housing occupations. The final case considers how some of Barcelona’s activists transitioned to electoral politics and the productive tensions between institutional and movement-based strategies. The concluding chapter reflects on those cases, posing a series of “questions to be curious about” for movement practitioners and thinkers. It proposes an ecological approach to understanding the interplay of people power strategies across diverse urban contexts.