Hebrew University; Philipp Reick (Buber Fellow) (Web)

Venue: Jerusalem
Time: 27.-28.01.2019
Proposals by: 15.09.2018

The global protest cycle of 2011 has brought to life a plethora of urban social movements. From occupying Puerta del Sol in downtown Madrid to pitching tents on Tel Aviv’s Rothschild Boulevard, from struggles against evictions in Cape Town to the tenants’ movement of Warsaw, from Gezi Park to Wall Street–cities across the globe witnessed waves of collective action that were genuinely urban in both form and content. In the light of these events, historians have rediscovered the rich legacy of past urban struggle.

But notwithstanding the growing number of contributions that analyze urban riots, rent strikes, anti-eviction campaigns, housing reform initiatives or struggles for access to collective consumption and political participation in the cities of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, past urban protest is usually studied in a heavily localized and temporalized context that tends to shun comparison across borders or through time. By default skeptical of generalizations, historians are thus contributing to the widespread perception in the social sciences that urban social movements somehow appeared out of thin air in the aftermath of the rebellious 1960s. Read more and source … (Web)