Gentrification without Gentry in a Declining Global City?: Vertical Expansion of Tokyo and Its Urban Meaning1

This article explores the reasons for the vertical expansion of cities till the 2020s by analyzing the history of urban space production for about half a century, using Tokyo as an example. As a concept, gentrification partially explains the changes in Tokyo. However, summarizing the entire urban transformation as a gentrification trend can lead to some misunderstandings. Most of the development took the form of simply rebuilding skyscrapers in limited areas, rather than the displacement of an entire class in the whole district. Consequently, the sharp contrast between island‐like skyscrapers and the densely populated small houses surrounding them became the typical landscape of current semi‐gentrified Tokyo. Instead of gentrification, “gentrification without gentry” would be a better expression for describing most cases in Tokyo. Alliances for urban speculation are always embedded in multi‐scale conditions in a globalizing world along with the inherent historical and structural constitution of the city. Through dynamic but contingent processes, a structure was constructed to promote urban development in a way that might exceed the actual demands. In the case of Tokyo, the bubble economy era and its effects, a would‐be global city ideology, mega‐events such as the Olympic Games, and expected earthquakes had a distinct influence on other common factors.     

Demolition for Development: A Critical Analysis of Official Urban Imaginaries in Past and Present UK Cities

This article analyses official urban imaginaries of “demolition for development” in two different UK cities and time periods: 1) the City Improvement Scheme in Birmingham (1875–1914) during a time of rapid industrial growth, and 2) a housing‐led neighbourhood regeneration scheme in Walker, Newcastle upon Tyne (2000–2011) during a time of post‐industrial uncertainty. The concept of the “official urban imaginary” is employed to critically examine assumptions of growth, progress and success within “demolition for development” policies across different times and places. Drawing on both historical and sociological qualitative case study methods, this research contributes to a range of debates on urban regeneration, gentrification, creative destruction, comparative methodology, and imagining the city. The article argues that there is a serious need to rethink urban policy trajectories of property‐led regeneration and “planned gentrification”, particularly in the post‐2008 context of recession.     

Between moderation and radicalization: transnational interactions of Jamaat‐e‐Islami of India

Abstract Religious movements have often been studied in the context of nationstates. With scholarly attention now shifting to globalization and other world system processes, there is a growing move to go beyond the particularity of nation‐states and study the general transnational dimensions of religious movements. In this article I describe the processes through which Jamaat‐e‐Islami Hind (JIH), a contemporary Islamist movement in India, developed links with ideologically similar movements, institutions and networks in the Gulf countries, Iran and the West. Taking JIH as a social movement, I argue for a more nuanced conceptualization of transnational social movements, because existing theories are based on the experiences of Western democracies and, as such, are insensitive to collective actions in undemocratic polities such as the Gulf states. While making a case for taking into account the transnational dimensions of understanding JIH, I call into question the alarmist thesis that emphasizes the homogenous radicalization of the entire movement as an inevitable consequence of the transnational connections an Islamic movement develops. On the contrary, I contend that they also lead to conflict within the movement and its moderation.     

Theorizing the radical right: Directions for social movements research on the right‐wing social movements

Most current social movement theory has been built by observing movements on the left. This poses a number of problems when we try to port those theories over to social movements on the right. This paper examines how existing social movement theory falls short in explaining the rise of right‐wing social movements and their profound influence in the Republican Party. This paper combines a critical literature review with an eye toward adapting and synthesizing existing theoretical frameworks on social movements in ways that account for the unique aspects of right‐wing movements.     

Forces of Altermodernization: Urban Social Movements and the New Urban Question in Contemporary Poland

The article discusses contemporary Polish ‘right to the city’ movements and their potential for creating change, described here as the potential for ‘alternative modernization’, a term rooted in the alterglobalist movement. The waning of the latter’s energy has fostered the emergence of local movements focused on protest and reform. In Poland, both an historical anti-urbanity and monologic patterns of regime transformation (the latter producing the ‘anti-city’) have become points of reference for urban movements and their demand for alternative patterns of modernization, called here altermodernization. The altermodernist model focuses, among other things, on discourses and praxis of decommodification, institutional reform and visions of a ‘well-organized city’. The article is primarily a product of desk research and the author’s own materials based on in-depth interviews collected in six Polish cities as well as participant observation and content analysis.     

THE NATURE AND SOCIAL BASES OF PROGRESSIVE SOCIAL MOVEMENT IDEOLOGY: Examining Public Opinion toward Social Movements

Social movement scholars argue that movements within the same social movement family represent an ideologically coherent social force driven by an overarching master frame. Yet this claim has thus far been poorly documented. Analyzing public opinion data from a nationally representative April 2000 Gallup Poll, we find substantial evidence of a progressive social movement ideology centered around the extension of rights within the American public, as support for individual movements within this family is highly interrelated. Adherents to this progressive social movement ideology are drawn from self‐identified political Liberals and Democrats, the more highly educated, women, younger, and less religious adults. We argue that public opinion research should be seen as a valuable complement to existing case‐based social movement scholarship.     

From Tourists to Anti-Tourists to Tourist Attractions: The Transformation of the Amsterdam Squatters' Movement

Urban social movements are increasingly confronted by the growth in urban tourism and its influence over city development. This growth promises to create new opportunities for mobilization, resistance, and compromise. For both tourists and activists, place matters. However, place matters differently for each group, bringing conflicts over how the city should respond to their different, and sometimes opposing, needs. In this article, I examine the Amsterdam squatters’ movement and its relationship with tourists. I trace four major periods of the interaction between activism and tourism, from initial unity, to separation, to mutual antagonism, up to their ultimate reconciliation. I show that the interplay between tourism and urban social movements is more complex than a relationship of exploitation and resistance. Tourism has both the power to radicalize and depoliticize movements. Likewise, movements can both repel and attract tourists. This analysis emphasizes the role power differential plays in the evolving relationship. A powerful squatters’ movement resisted tourism, but the movement in decline, shifting from political to cultural activism, made the strategic choice to compromise in order to maintain the movement.     

Middle‐Class Parents,Urban Schooling,and the Shift From Consumption to Production of Urban Space

Dominant approaches to the study of gentrification tend to attribute this process either to the production of urban space by elites or to the consumption of urban space by individual consumers. In this article, we take a preliminary step toward bridging this gap by illustrating how these groups may, in some cases, be the same actors. Drawing on in‐depth interviews with middle‐class parents in Boston, we explore the transitions that gentrifiers undergo as they age and have children. As young singles and childless couples, our respondents interacted with the city mainly as passive consumers. Years later, however, facing pressures to relocate in search of high‐quality educational options, these parents emerged as active producers of the urban landscape through their substantial involvement in their children's public elementary schools. This school‐based engagement reinforced their loyalties to their neighborhoods, dissuading them from moving to the suburbs. Since it is based on intense interactions with small local institutions, though, this strategy will likely be more difficult for parents to sustain in larger, less personal high schools. Thus, these parents may reconsider their dedication to city living as their children age. We discuss the implications of this research for urban theory and policy.     

Immigrant rights and social movements

The disciplinary fields of immigration and social movements have largely developed as two distinct subareas of sociology. Scholars contend that immigrant rights, compared to other movements, have been given less attention in social movement research. Studies of immigrant‐based movements in recent decades have reached a stage whereby we can now assess how immigrant movement scholarship informs the general social movement literature in several areas. In this article, we show the contributions of empirical studies of immigrant movements in four primary arenas of social movement scholarship: (a) emergence; (b) participation; (c) framing; and (d) outcomes. Contemporary immigrant struggles offer social movement scholarship opportunities to incorporate these campaigns and enhance current theories and concepts as earlier protest waves advanced studies of collective action.     

When Bourgeois Utopias Meet Gentrification: Community and Diversity in a New Urbanist Neighborhood*

Abstract

Scholars have recently begun to explore how social and politically liberal gentrifiers make sense of the classed and racial inequalities linked to gentrification. In this article I ask how residents of one new urbanist “bourgeois utopia”—the Mueller Development in Austin, Texas—experience and give meaning to their neighborhood in a context of gentrification. Drawing on 31 in-depth interviews I explain how new urbanism has reimagined and marketed “diversity” and “community” to middle-class and wealthy consumers and provides these to affluent people as neighborhood amenities. I show how residents draw on diversity ideology and multicultural capital to neutralize what they see as their neighborhood’s role in gentrification. In doing so this article adds to our theoretical understanding of how contemporary urban development exploits pursuits for the social good as rhetorical tools to assuage privileged guilt while promoting profitable enterprises.     

Dangerous Issues and Public Identities: The Negotiation of Controversy in Two Movement Organizations*

Social movement organizations frame not only their target issues, but their own organizational identities. In doing so, they are sometimes forced to make difficult decisions that pit principle against considerations of image. This article compares and contrasts episodes from two different movements: (1) Amnesty International's (AIUSA) expansion of its human rights agenda to include death penalty abolitionism and (2) the American Civil Liberties Union's (ACLU) endorsement of drug legalization. Based upon documentary and interview data, I demonstrate that Amnesty's decision to work toward the abolition of capital punishment provoked intense internal debate based upon the prevalence within AIUSA at that time of a narrow conception of human rights, concern about the effect of anti‐death penalty projects on the group's priorities, and the fear that the carefully crafted image the organization had built would be damaged by anti‐death penalty work. The ACLU's endorsement of drug legalization provoked some of the same concerns, but issues of public identity management were far less evident. Instead, internal debates focused on the proper breadth of the organization's anti‐prohibitionism. I suggest that the differences between the two cases may be understood in terms of contrasting organizational cultures, framing vocabularies, and membership profiles.     

Negation,Refusal and Co‐Optation: The Frankfurt School and Social Movement Theory

This article outlines how the critical theory of the Frankfurt School has influenced some key debates within social movement studies. The impact of Jürgen Habermas's sociology is widely acknowledged, especially with regards to our understanding of ‘new social movements’. There have however also been several lesser‐known attempts to bring the concerns of Theodor W. Adorno's negative dialectics and Herbert Marcuse's critique of one‐dimensional society to bear onto social movement research. For this reason it makes sense to outline the relevance of the ‘first generation’ members of the Frankfurt School – something that is often missing from the most authoritative overviews and textbooks on social movement theory. Presenting a body of literature that often appears as fragmented or only on the periphery of social movement theory in this way reveals a number of common themes, such as negation, refusal and co‐optation. To this end, the article provides a comprehensive theoretical overview of the multiple ways of how critical theory has made sense of social movements and argues that its concerns can be brought into a rewarding dialogue with contemporary social movement studies.     

Symbols,sentiments, and stories: Urban culture and social problems

Cultural approaches to the study of urban life have enjoyed brief bursts of popularity within the social sciences over the past century. Although many urban sociologists acknowledge that meanings, symbols, narratives, and feelings, in other words local culture, help shape urban places, relatively few take this notion any further. In this article, I first lay out the foundations of cultural approaches to the study of urban life. Second, I argue for the continued significance of the distinction between space and place. Third, I describe a contemporary stream of urban sociology called the urban culturalist perspective. Fourth, I describe important insights gleaned from studies embracing cultural urbanist approaches to an area of urban research receiving increasing attention: gentrification. Fifth, and finally, I outline a few ways in which micro‐cultural investigations of urban phenomena provide useful opportunities for public sociology.     

Return of the gentleman farmer?: Conceptualising gentrification in UK agriculture

In this paper, processes of gentrification are assessed in relation to non-commercial farming: the production of agricultural commodities without the intent of earning a living. The author argues that due to the connection between residence and productive assets (particularly land) inherent in farming, agricultural gentrification represents a special case, distinct from rural and urban gentrification, where gentrification is possible from within the existing farm household. Pluriactivity of the farm household enables both economic capital accumulation and alterations in the cultural capital held. Similar to rural and urban gentrification processes, agricultural gentrification leads to landscape change. Both non-commercial farming and gentrification processes are found to have been encouraged by the state, through post-productivist polices and laws aimed at commercial agricultural producers. The author argues for further research on farmers as consumers of rural amenities, and raises questions about the environmental impacts of ‘non-commercial farming’ and the acquisition of farm land by the wealthy elite.     

Nonviolent Civil Resistance and Social Movements

Research on non‐violent civil resistance has burgeoned in recent years. This field has much in common with the study of social movements, and yet there has been little cross‐fertilization between these literatures. In this article, I review the historical development of non‐violence studies from its Gandhian roots, through an emphasis on strategic non‐violence, to current empirical research that has generated new insights into the strategic interactions between non‐violent movements and their opponents, the effects of repression, the factors shaping movement outcomes, and cross‐national tactical diffusion. I summarize key findings and implications for the field of social movements. I conclude by charting out new areas of inquiry that future researchers ought to explore.     

Shifting Boundaries and Splintering Movements: Abortion Rights in the Feminist and New Right Movements

Social movement boundaries are fundamentally about deciding who “we” are by defining who we are not. However, newly salient issues in a movement community can shift these boundaries by changing the membership criteria for both insiders and outsiders. Through a comparative case study of two relatively conservative feminist organizations, Women's Equity Action League (WEAL) and Feminists for Life (FFL), I examine how shifting boundaries around abortion rights in the feminist movement led to movement splintering, as organizations struggled and sometimes failed to maintain their relationships in a movement that increasingly defined them as outsiders. This analysis reveals how abortion rights' growing importance to both the feminist movement and the New Right resulted in the realignment of FFL with the feminist countermovement. This process had important consequences for both the organization and the countermovement with which it was realigned. This article contributes to our understanding of how shifting boundaries affect individual organizations, the movements in which they participate, and the relationships between countermovements.     

Stuck on a Muddy Road: Frictions of Mobility amongst Urban Toba in Northern Argentina

This article explores how the Toba, an indigenous group in the North of Argentina, shape places and an urban subjectivity in the frictions of their mobility between villages, the urban barrio (neighborhood), and the periurban bush. I argue that the experience of Toba moving to the city is better understood as frictions between the Toba desire to progress in the city, the organization of difference in space, and their multiple movements “back” to the villages. In addition, I analyze their contemporary hunting trips, which take urban Toba to the nearby bush, as a mobility that shapes a form of indigeneity engaged with access to both the city center and the bush. This practice confronts them with ranch owners and police but reconnects the barrio and the bush by traversing them. If frictions emerge between forces that trigger movement and forces that slow that movement down, in the frictions of mobility the Toba have at once shaped their position in the city and overflowed its limits.     

The medicalization of Nonhuman Animal rights: frame contestation and the exploitation of disability

Nonhuman Animal rights activists are sometimes dismissed as ‘crazy’ or irrational by countermovements seeking to protect status quo social structures. Social movements themselves often utilize disability narratives in their claims-making as well. In this article, we argue that Nonhuman Animal exploitation and Nonhuman Animal rights activism are sometimes medicalized in frame disputes. The contestation over mental ability ultimately exploits humans with disabilities. The medicalization of Nonhuman Animal rights activism diminishes activists’ social justice claims, but the movement’s medicalization of Nonhuman Animal use unfairly otherizes its target population and treats disability identity as a pejorative. Utilizing a content analysis of major newspapers and anti-speciesist activist blogs published between 2009 and 2013, it is argued that disability has been incorporated into the tactical repertoires of the Nonhuman Animal rights movement and countermovements, becoming a site of frame contestation. The findings could have implications for a number of other social movements that also negatively utilize disability narratives.     

Toward an integrated analysis of social movements and new religious movements research

Despite calls from researchers for intersectional studies between religion and social movements over the past few decades, scholars have not engaged in fruitful conversation about integrating the two disciplines. This article aims to facilitate such discussion by examining the topic of new religious movements (NRMs). I first review the existing literature on NRMs and discuss why NRM research has been neglected in social movement studies. Then, I explore a few research areas where both NRM studies and social movement research could intersect and benefit from a synthetic approach. Specifically, I suggest that social movement studies could advance through the examination of some relatively ignored subjects of research, such as persistent participation and disengagement, by drawing on empirical cases of NRMs. I also propose ways in which the application of social movement theories would enhance our understanding of different aspects of NRMs, such as their leadership and coalition practices. In making these arguments, I refer to one of the prominent, long-term NRMs, the Unification Church or Movement, to help illustrate my ideas.