EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Alternatives to Resistance? Comparing Depoliticization in Two British Environmental Movement Scenes

Joost de Moor

International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 2020, vol. 44, issue 1, 124-144

Abstract: Processes of politicization and depoliticization are increasingly studied in relation to urban contexts, and cities have been depicted as incubators of social movements. What has been largely ignored is why, in some cities, forces of politicization or depoliticization are stronger than in others. To address this question, this article compares two British cities—Manchester and Bristol—which have historically been central hubs of environmental resistance, but currently face similar depoliticizing forces: austerity, anti‐squatting laws, police repression and activists’ disillusion with environmentalism. Curiously, these conditions have had very different impacts on the two environmental scenes. In Manchester they have caused environmental resistance to become replaced almost entirely by non‐confrontational ‘alternatives’. In Bristol alternatives have emerged that tend to be in synergy with environmental resistance. The comparison thus suggests that Bristol is more conducive to maintaining environmental resistance under depoliticizing conditions. Findings suggest that differences can be attributed to features of the physical urban environment, including city size. Historically, these differences were not decisive. Yet, after a period of dwindling environmentalist energy in the UK, the number of environmentalist hubs has been reduced. This has prompted a reputational snowball that increasingly concentrates environmental resistance in the one city that best insulates the environmental movement from broader depoliticizing forces.

Date: 2020
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2427.12860

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bla:ijurrs:v:44:y:2020:i:1:p:124-144

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.blackwell ... bs.asp?ref=0309-1317

Access Statistics for this article

International Journal of Urban and Regional Research is currently edited by Alan Harding, Roger Keil and Jeremy Seekings

More articles in International Journal of Urban and Regional Research from Wiley Blackwell
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-19
Handle: RePEc:bla:ijurrs:v:44:y:2020:i:1:p:124-144