Towards a new perspective on the role of the city in social movements

Abstract

Cities were at the centre of the ‘Arab Spring’, but did they play a decisive role or were they just the passive settings in which these uprisings took place? This paper develops a new way of understanding the role of the city in social movements by looking at changes and continuities in urban policy in North Africa after the ‘Arab Spring’. The paper’s main argument is that the role of the city in social movements can be understood through an analysis of governments’ urban policy responses to those movements. First, it shows that North African urban policy has always reacted sensitively to social unrest and that neoliberal planning schemes have even strengthened this sensitivity. Second, the paper provides an empirical comparative analysis of urban policy in Egypt, Morocco, and Tunisia after the ‘Arab Spring’. The study shows that public authorities give pivotal attention to public space and to informal settlements as they have been stigmatised as breeding grounds of social unrest and as a threat to the political establishment.

Key words:

• urban policy
• social movements
• Arab Spring
• informal settlements
• public space
• worlding cities

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank two anonymous reviewers, Margit Mayer, Amr Khafagy and Mohammed El Shewy for their insightful comments on earlier versions of the paper. Furthermore, I feel indebted to Rym El Dhaouady, Nizar Amri, Tachfine Baida, Sara Hamouda and Tariq Suleiman for their support during field research.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Raffael Beier http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9772-2293

Notes

1 Stadnicki, Vignal, and Barthel (2014) and Allegra et al. (2013) also evoke this potential double-function of the city as both the site and the focus of the ‘Arab Spring’.

2 Of course, social movements have also adapted and reacted to changes in urban governance and planning practices.

3 Whereas interviews in Cairo were conducted in English, most quotations from interviews in Tunisia and Morocco are translated from French.

4 Bukhatir and Sama Dubai are Gulf-based real estate development companies.

5 Fonds de Coopération des Collectivités Locales (décret n° 2797 du 08.07.2013).

6 For example, the Programme d’Appui à la Gouvernance Urbaine et Développement Economique Local (PAGUDEL) of the Dutch city association (VNG) as well as the CoMun programme of the German development agency GIZ.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Ruhr University Research School PLUS, funded by Germany’s Excellence Initiative [grant number DFG GSC 98/3].

Notes on contributors

Raffael Beier

Raffael Beier is at the Institute of Development Research and Development Policy, Ruhr-University Bochum, and further affiliated with the International Institute of Social Studies, Erasmus University Rotterdam.