Volume 27.

December 2003

942-51

International Journal of Urban and Regional Research

Glocalizing Protest: Urban Conflicts and Global Social Movements*

BETTINA KOHLER and MARKUS WISSEN

Introduction
Among the features which distinguish the emerging global social movements from the social movements of the last third of the twentieth century, the most obvious and most frequently cited are their international orientation, their broad range of issues and their diversity. Another feature, which is also rather striking but named less frequently, is the fact that the movements' emergence, as well as important struggles in their short history, is symbolized by the names of cities, the most prominent ones being Seattle, Genoa and Porto Alegre. This is not accidental: groups stemming from all parts of the world need `places' to constitute themselves as a movement. Furthermore, cities represent to a large extent the global and local focal points of social movements, because a large part of the issues and institutions criticized by the movements are located in cities. This is not to say that rural conflicts are a less heeded local focus. On the contrary, conflicts over land distribution, the exploitation of natural resources or the use of genetically modified seed form an important field of action for the movements, especially for local groups in the South, but also for NGOs and activists in the North. Like urban conflicts they are essentially linked to global neoliberal restructuring. The conflict over the Plan Puebla Panama in Mexico, for example, is shaped by interests which organize themselves on different spatial scales while claiming control over a certain place: there is a mega-infrastructure project in the service of global markets and in the interest of national competitiveness in the global economy, competing with the claims of local communities over their territory. The struggles of `rural' actors like the Mexican Zapatists or the movement of the landless in Brazil (MST) not only marked important starting-points of the global social movements but still form essential parts of them. Furthermore, many rural conflicts are increasingly connected to the situation in cities, through the unevenly distributed global flows of resources, capital and power, as well as through the migration of people. Nevertheless, cities play a key role in neoliberal restructuring (Keil and Brenner, 2003; Mayer, 2003a; 2003b). At the same time, they have always been a favourable place where alternative practices and resistance against hegemonic projects could emerge. The role of cities in representing great parts of the movements' history and consciousness therefore can be read as a metaphor which hints at the importance of urban struggles within the global social movements. The aim of this article is following some brief terminological remarks concerning the terms `glocal' and `global social movements' is: (1) to examine to what extent and in which context urban conflicts became part of the global social movements against capitalist globalization; (2) to highlight the variety of spatial scales and forms of articulation as a central feature of these conflicts; and, finally, (3) to analyse different types of `glocalized' protests and the contributions they can make to the strategic orientation of the global social movements.
* We would like to thank Roger Keil and two anonymous referees for their very helpful comments.
Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2003. Published by Blackwell Publishing. 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main St, Malden, MA 02148, USA

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Terminological remarks
As pointed out by Novy (2002: 93), the term `glocal' is used in some contexts to describe the one-directional shaping of the local in the interest of global capital, leaving space at the local level only for repairing the damages of the global. The way the term is used in this article is a more dialectical one. The local and the global, the regional and the national are deeply intertwined; their relation is one of being mutually constituted (Swyngedouw, 1997). That means that the global is not a pre-given entity external to other spatial scales. Instead it is produced, reproduced, modified and challenged in a multiplicity of actions on various spatial scales. Thus, rather than conceptualizing the relationship between the global and the local as a one-directional process, we emphasize the influence of local actors and power relations on urban living conditions as well as on the form taken by globalization. This will become obvious when looking at an important feature of urban movements from the 1990s onwards: while criticizing and acting upon very local/material urban issues, they often explicitly relate and politicize these issues in a broader context and articulate their criticism on various spatial scales not only on a local but also on a global scale. As far as the term `global social movements' is concerned, we have to admit that it is rather unwieldy. Nevertheless, we consider it more appropriate than the term `antiglobalization movement', which has gained some discursive publicity in the last couple of years this for the following three reasons. First, the movements characterized as being `against' globalization by the term `anti-globalization movement' certainly constitute one of the most globalized actors of our time. Although rooted in various local and national contexts, they are able to act and to articulate themselves on a global scale. The logistics and coordination implied in such `diffuse global networks' (Colectivo Situaciones, 2003) has much of the complexity needed for the administration of great transnational corporations. Secondly, there are indeed forces which fight globalization, but without pursuing any emancipatory aim. These groups usually belong to the extreme right. They fight for example for `cultural homogeneity' within national borders, which they see as threatened by migrants and refugees as well as by international (financial) capital. Of course, speaking of `global social movements' instead of speaking of the `anti-globalization movement' alone does not prevent reactionary groups from getting a foot in the door of international protest. But at least it tries to preclude a nationalist interpretation and politicization of capitalist globalization terminologically, stressing that emancipatory movements do not fight globalization per se, but all kinds of power relations capitalist, patriarchal, racist which are strengthened by the globalization process. Thirdly, and regarding the plural form in `global social movements' in contrast to the singular form in `anti-globalization movement', we wish to stress that there is no single and homogeneous actor. Rather, the plural form `movements' implies heterogeneity, diversity and contradictions. It hints at a variety of different actors which explicitly have no common (symbolic) representation. Developing the last point further, it has to be emphasized that the notion of global social movements besides showing material articulation and action in certain places is a highly discursive phenomenon. Perceiving the variety of glocal movements as interrelated to each other and as part of a new global social movement scene is to some extent a question of the intellectual perspective, cultural context and discursive construction. Not all movements or activists of local groups referred to in this paper may perceive themselves as politicized and contributing to the global social movements. In many cases, of course, the struggles for basic needs are prior to general reflections, even though the material claims may be compatible with the aims of the global movements. Also, the question of representation is not always very clearly articulated within the movements: if one member of a local social movement participates in a Social Forum or writes an article in this context, the whole group will easily be related to the `global social movements', sometimes without the other members being aware of this. Indeed, the emergence of global social movements from a
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variety of actors and differing local or urban experiences seems to rely very much on decentralized `resonances'1 between sometimes very unique approaches. Against this background, terrains like the World Social Forum, which was organized for the third time in Porto Alegre in 2003, play an important role if they contribute to strengthening these resonances and avoid creating a single common representation or even new hierarchies.

Neoliberal restructuring and urban conflicts

Urban conflicts, of course, are not a new phenomenon. Cities and their everyday life have always been places where hegemonic projects developed. But cities have also been the milieu where conflicts, alternative practices and resistance against hegemonic projects emerged. In Europe, cities saw the development of grassroots and community groups at the end of the 1960s and in the early 1970s.2 The efforts of these groups were directed against the technocratic Keynesian style of urban development policy as it was manifested, for example, in large-scale renewal projects and modern housing construction (Mayer, 2000: 132). Being partially successful in their resistance to such politics, from the mid-1970s on social movements were increasingly confronted with a changing social and political environment: neoliberal politics began to shape living conditions as well as ways of thinking and horizons of expectation. Quite often they managed to integrate the social movement critique of a bureaucratic Keynesianism and to give it a regressive turn. They successfully occupied formerly progressive discursive terrains. For example, former sites of cultural and artistic resistance to the bureaucratic state and occupied spaces for autonomous ways of living were integrated into the marketing concepts of cities and became part of the cultural diversity and attractiveness of the post-Fordist city. Ronneberger (2002: 55) following the differentiation of a `critique sociale' (against exploitation and inequality) and a `critique artiste' (for autonomy and selfrealization) by Boltanski and Ciapello (2000) states that the structural transformations ongoing with the crisis of Fordism `correspond above all to the demands of the ``critique artiste'''.3 Aspects of autonomy and self-realization were transformed into a notion of lifestyle and flexibility a process which became even stronger during the 1990s and contributed essentially to the hegemony of the neoliberal model (see also spacelab, 2000). Cities played an important role in this process. As places where the `nodal functions' of regional, national or global economies can be found, they were often starting-points and fields of experimentation for neoliberal restructuring and the corresponding image production. With neoliberal restructuring in the 1980s and throughout the early 1990s the conditions of urban conflicts changed dramatically. Distributive politics were reduced or replaced by measures in favour of strengthening urban competitiveness. As a consequence, socio-spatial polarization increased, wealth and opportunities became more and more unevenly distributed, and the gap between the promises and the realities of neoliberalism widened. That also meant that the latter, from the early 1990s on, was increasingly confronted with its own contradictions and consequences. Neoliberalism's
Starting from the Argentine experience, Colectivo Situaciones (2003: 180) differentiates between `diffuse networks' and `explicit networks', saying that `explicit networks', as they are pursued by many activists, include the danger of creating new hierarchies, domination and forms of exclusion, whereas `diffuse networks' rely above all on resonances and interchange between different decentralized movements and thereby leave space for very differing local experiences. Both approaches coexist. 2 For an overview of the respective research, see Keil and Brenner (2003) and Pickvance (2003). 3 The `previously dominant ``critique sociale'' has begun to lose its overarching role as the ``ideology of liberation''' (Ronneberger, 2002: 55).
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primary `mission' was no longer to overcome the Fordist class compromise, but to manage its self-made disasters by methods such as `the aggressive reregulation, disciplining, and containment of those marginalized or dispossessed by the neoliberalization of the 1980s' (Peck and Tickell, 2002: 389). As Mayer (2000; 2003a) has analysed for German cities, the infrastructures created by, or under the influence of, social movements (like third-sector organizations) played an ambivalent role in this process. On the one hand they contributed to institutionalizing the influence of social movements and secured a space for oppositional thought and action. On the other hand, and sometimes due to an increasing financial dependence on the neoliberal (local) state, they became functionalized as manufacturers of consent in a polarized urban society. There they even contributed to commodifying civil society sectors till then not subordinated to market rationality. An example of this is local employment and development initiatives. Originally stemming from the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s, in the 1990s they were often integrated into local poverty reduction strategies. Thereby, they not only abandoned former political aims like the empowerment of disadvantaged groups or changing social power relations in order to concentrate more on their own organizational reproduction, they also became agents of a market-oriented strategy for fighting poverty, which consisted, for example, in re-integrating marginalized people into a more and more deregulated labour market. Thus, they contributed to filling the gap which the cutback of social rights had left.4 Mayer (2003a: 273) interprets this as a conflictive shaping of the precarious balance between, on the one hand, the production and reproduction of uneven social relations by competition and, on the other hand, the empowerment of marginalized people. Glocal social protests since the late 1990s challenged this constellation. As such they can be interpreted both as a politicization of the contradictions of neoliberal restructuring and as a critique of the discursive and institutional terrains which were developed in the 1990s with the participation of movement actors. The protests appeared with the sharpening of the inherent contradictions of neoliberalism and with the (newly) established terrains playing a very ambivalent role between institutionalizing movement politics and administering the consequences of neoliberalism. But in some cases the new protest generation was also able to build on the infrastructures created by earlier generations, so that these infrastructures formed an organizational starting-point and secured a degree of continuity to former struggles and experiences. In Europe, a very striking example of this is Italy. Since the early 1970s in Italian cities a lot of spaces have been created in which new forms of societalization alternatives to capitalist production and markets, as well as to statebureaucratic intervention could develop (Maggio, 1998; Romano, 1998). The `social centres' in many Italian cities are of particular importance in this context. Most of them were squatted in the 1980s, forming a space for various cultural and social activities like exhibitions, concerts, the production of records, CDs and video cassettes, workshops, congresses, free legal offices, playgrounds or after-school groups for children. Furthermore, they soon established international links, `establishing a sort of parallel market of self produced goods' (Maggio, 1998: 235). Today the social centres form an important infrastructure for a glocalized protest, which became clear when two major events of the global social movements took place in Italian cities: the demonstrations against the world economic summit 2001 in Genoa and the first European Social Forum 2002 in Florence. In the
4 This is not to deny that, even during the 1990s, new forms of action developed which were more radical than those institutionalized in third-sector organizations, for example initiatives which fought a new generation of large-scale urban development projects or groups which aimed at making cities less attractive for big investors and speculators, like the anti-Olympia campaigns in Berlin (1993) or Toronto (1998). Another phenomenon of growing importance is the protest by marginalized groups like homeless people or migrants and refugees like the sans-papiers in France. In general, the urban movement scene in the 1990s became more fragmented (Mayer, 2000: 18).
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following section we wish to address the very specificity of the protests since the late 1990s: their multiscalarity or their `glocal' character.

The multiscalarity of protest

There is a strong link between neoliberal restructuring and globalization. The latter is both a result and a medium of the former: it results (to a great extent) from capital being `freed' of national boundaries by neoliberal politics, and it shapes the conditions which are favourable for further neoliberal restructuring. Globalization can be understood as a complex rescaling and reconfiguration of politics and economy on various spatial scales, a contested process of an uneven de- and re-territorialization (Brenner, 1998; Keil and Brenner, 2003; Swyngedouw, 1997). New institutions like the WTO are established on a global scale, older supranational institutions like the EU gain in importance, and on the national scale the repressive and economic state apparatuses are strengthened vis-a-vis the social ones (Hirsch, 1995; Jessop, 1997). Thereby, terrains are formed which are highly structurally selective, so that powerful actors find favourable conditions for generalizing their own interests and marginalizing the interests of weaker actors. Constraints are created which heavily influence the terms of national and local conflicts. This is not to say that local actors are just victims of global processes. In contrast, globalization is essentially a local product, insofar as global constraints are to a large extent created, reproduced and naturalized by local politics and everyday practices. Urban competition politics, for example, are an important transmission belt for transforming global constraints into material local realities. `The logic of interurban competition . . . turns cities into accomplices in their own subordination' (Peck and Tickell, 2002: 393). Furthermore, the implementation of neoliberal politics is to a great extent carried out through its acceptance and reproduction in the local everyday life of people. It is this complex interplay between institutions and processes on different spatial scales which influences and provokes the search for new forms and scales of resistance. With the articulation of urban protest not only on a local but also on a global scale, urban social movements confront those institutions and actors which are increasingly influencing their living conditions. Claiming the `right to the city' today means the improvement of material living conditions in cities. At the same time, it relates to broader conceptions of dignified livelihood including (varying and dependent on the context) aspects of democratic participation, human rights, equal access to goods and services, reclaiming a sense of a public sphere, environmental justice or solidarity within society. Thereby, material issues are politicized and linked to the various spatial scales which shape them. In this sense, housing movements, like those which have been gathering at the Social Fora, are not just fighting for affordable houses but questioning the general constitution of society and contributing to a global movement. This means referring to realities on a global, national and regional scale, demanding simultaneously the democratization of international institutions which shape local living conditions or in cases like the IMF or the WTO even their abolishment and the immediate improvement of living conditions in the cities. Thereby, the intertwining of various spatial scales from the sub-local to the global is politicized and a precondition for the development of practices that go beyond the mere administering of global constraints or the management of the few spaces not penetrated by these constraints (Novy, 2002) is created. The global articulation of urban protest can be interpreted as a `scale jumping' (Smith, 1995) which strengthens the symbolic representation of urban non-competition interests and essentially contributes to the formation of a global, but nevertheless diverse movement. During recent years the global articulation of protest has taken various forms. There are, for example, the demonstrations against the symbolic representations of
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neoliberalism at Seattle, Genoa and Prague. Other important examples are the World Social Forum and the subsequent continental and local Social Forums. This type of meeting can be interpreted as one kind of crystallization of a glocalized protest where spaces for reflecting and exchanging specific local experiences with movements from other parts of the world are opened. Nevertheless, these types of events represent only one visible expression of the glocal movement scene. Beside them various formal or informal, short or long-lasting, widely perceived or rather hidden exchanges and networks emerge and contribute to the global movements. They differ due to local cultures, traditions and the specificity of former movement infrastructures. The variety of approaches is of special importance when conceiving and creating alternative strategies and encouraging struggles on different spatial scales. In what follows we shall analyse three different types of glocalized urban action: a first type which focuses on attacking images of neoliberal restructuring and the imaginations associated with it, a second type which creates alternative knowledge, and a third type which aims at constructing material infrastructures beyond state and market. The typology, of course, is not exhaustive. Urban struggles are more diverse than these examples reveal. In the context of this article, however, the three types are of particular interest because they fight neoliberal hegemony, into which large parts of the movements of the 1970s and 1980s were integrated, at the different levels where it is reproduced in everyday life. They do so either by intervening in neoliberal image or knowledge production, and thereby creating the discursive space in which alternatives become thinkable again, or by setting up (or at least living and experiencing) concrete alternatives beyond the existing social power relations. Thereby, they politicize the contradictions of neoliberal globalization and redefine the city, establishing various forms of alternatives.

Urban conflicts and the transformation of everyday life

The first type to be presented here attaches special importance to the symbolic aspects of neoliberal restructuring. Going far beyond `traditional' urban issues like housing and urban infrastructure (though these issues continue to be essential) it aims at transforming dominant narratives and attacking hegemonic images. This can, for example, take the form of a reproduction and overstretching of certain images or practices, as an experience from Hamburg shows (Hafele and Sobczak, 2002): activists, dressed as members of a private security service and equipped with cameras, distributed flyers in which they propagated a more secure and clean central station. They underlined their claims by controlling tickets, and filming and accompanying people obtrusively `for security reasons'. The action called `Security now!' aimed at criticizing the control of public space by cameras and security services by means of an over-affirmation. Another example of the first type of urban action were the worldwide protests against the world economic summit on 18 June 1999 in Cologne. In more than forty cities all around the world local groups organized street parties, theatre or other actions at symbolic places like the City of London, thereby reclaiming streets and places dominated by global capital. This is a striking example of a glocalized urban protest: although the actions were directed at specific local places, they confronted global power relations as symbolized in the buildings of banks, corporations or international organizations. Furthermore, they were coordinated on a global scale in order to be perceived by a broader public (Brunzels, 2001).5 The focal point of the first type of action are symbols and images which transport the neoliberal message of corporate power, flexibility, entrepreneurship and self-reliance,
5 For further examples of the adoption of this type of action see Becker (2001), autonome a.f.r.i.k.a.gruppe (1997) and http://www.contrast.org/KG/.
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as well as security and cleanness. This approach takes into account that the quotidian reproduction of meaning systems on various spatial scales is a central means of achieving neoliberal hegemony and therefore needs to be questioned in a contextspecific manner. By entering this symbolic universe, disturbing it or occupying it with alternative meaning systems, neoliberalism is fought at a point where its hegemony is essentially produced and reproduced and at which it therefore proves to be vulnerable. Because of the interventionist and the very context-dependent character of the first type of protest, many groups only act for a short time. A second type of urban action tries to establish more organizational continuity. It also aims at undermining and questioning dominant paradigms. However, it does not primarily focus on neoliberal symbols but tries to produce alternative knowledge. In Germany, for example, many local groups of ATTAC practise this kind of intervention. `ATTAC' stands for `Association for the Taxation of financial Transactions for the Aid of Citizens'. It was initiated by the editor of the French Journal `Le Monde Diplomatique', Ignacio Ramonet, in 1997. Against the background of the financial crisis in Asia, Ramonet demanded the `disarming of the markets' and proposed founding a civil society network which should strive for an international tax on currency speculation (the Tobin tax). Starting from France ATTAC expanded into several countries and now forms an important part of the global social movements. It has also broadened its thematic focus from the financial markets to neoliberal restructuring in a more general sense. There are an increasing number of local groups gathering information about the manifestation and production of neoliberal globalization in their specific environment. For example, groups examine and campaign on the privatization of education systems, health care, the water supply and sewage disposal, and reflect upon this trend in the context of the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) within the WTO. By reflecting on and questioning dominant paradigms they produce knowledge and thereby provide approaches for alternative activities and practices. The third type of action to be discussed here is also a more long-term oriented one. It aims at establishing alternative social and economic (infra-)structures in general. This type ranges from very practical and locally rooted infrastructure concepts to rather complex and broad concepts. Some very striking examples of this type of action can be found especially in countries of the South where, as in Argentina, many people found themselves in long-term structural disintegration and poverty due to economic crisis and political failure. Out of socio-economic desperation and the absence of perspectives in the current political system people started to develop alternative approaches which provided them with material solutions but at the same time contained a fundamental system critique. Movements of unemployed workers like the `piqueteros' struggled throughout the 1990s for improvements in their working and living conditions. After the crisis of 2001 workers began to occupy factories abandoned by their former owners due to the economic crisis, and started to take over the whole production process (Colectivo Situaciones, 2003). Another phenomenon which emerged and spread widely6 after the crisis of 2001 in Argentina was the alternative Local Exchange Trading Systems. In the first place this was a solution for satisfying basic needs in a situation of crisis. Though most of them collapsed after a while for various reasons, in many places they created the networks for further political action (Thimmel, 2003). Another example of this type are projects of cooperative housing movements like those in Uruguay or Brazil where solutions for affordable housing are developed and at the same time experience, spaces and knowledge for alternative political reflection, articulation and action are developed. Some of the examples mentioned act very locally and do not all have a clearly articulated relation to global movements. But in their way of acting and expressing system criticism it may be stated that they contribute to the glocal movement scene.
6 During the year 2002 there were up to 1,800 alternative Local Exchange Trading Systems in the whole country (Colectivo Situaciones, 2003: 153) with an estimated maximum number of 10 million members at the best time (Thimmel, 2003: 163).
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A European example is the already mentioned social centres in Italian cities, where people experiment with new forms of societalization, crossing the borders between economy and politics. They try `to put together the development of productive enterprises with political action . . . The social centres are not only places for political aggregation, but also places for self-production that build a network of social cooperation outside the welfare state, and free from the intermediation of money, to produce what they need in harmony with nature' (Maggio, 1998: 236). This is far from being easy. The social centres are threatened by quite familiar problems like the danger of being integrated into urban competition strategies as a special cultural attraction, a problem which is enforced by the need to finance the centres. Furthermore, within the centres there are problems concerning the division of labour, generational problems or tensions between innovation and continuity (Romano, 1998: 241). The ambivalence between setting up alternative structures and the danger of being integrated into the system as repairers of the dismantled structures can be diagnosed for most approaches of this type a phenomenon which is closely linked to the concept of `social capital' (Mayer, 2003b). What the three approaches, despite their differences, have in common is that they fight the destructive influences which neoliberal globalization exerts on everyday life:7 the privatization of public space and urban infrastructures, the deterioration of working, housing and environmental conditions, the cuts in social services, the shrinking space for autonomous action. In doing so they make an important contribution to the strategic orientation of the global social movements: protests against neoliberal globalization do not exhaust themselves, for example, in the demand for the re-regulation of financial markets or the global economy in general. The struggles on a global scale, this is the message of the three types presented, strengthen the struggles against power relations in everyday life in the city, in the neighbourhood, at home, at the workplace, at school or at university and vice versa. `Everyday life is like quantum reality: by going small you can begin to understand the whole structure of life. By changing everyday life you can change the world; why change the world if it doesn't change everyday life? And yet, how can you change everyday life without changing the world?' (Merrifield, 2002: 129).

Conclusions
Urban social conflicts contribute to politicizing the contradictions of neoliberal globalization, to making them visible. They do so both on a material and on a symbolic level: on a material level insofar as actors aim at improving concrete living conditions, for example by preventing the privatization of public goods or by creating alternative infrastructures beyond state and market. On a symbolic level we have to distinguish two meanings of urban social conflicts. First, they contribute to disturbing the dominant narrative which takes globalization as given, inevitable and, `in the long run', as for the benefit of everybody. Thus, they de-naturalize neoliberal globalization and make it understandable as a contested process, which is driven by certain social, political and economic forces. Second, urban conflicts represent an important dimension of the struggle against neoliberal globalization: the changing, or better liberating, of everyday
7 The importance of everyday life as the sphere which is `linking the economy to individual life experiences' (Ronneberger, 2002: 42) has already been stressed by Lefebvre in his `critique of everyday life', a thought which was widely discussed in the 1970s. `Lefebvre introduced `lived space' (espace vecu) as a new subversive category: this refers to a realm that is essential to everybody but that becomes increasingly deficient for its users as social space is integrated ever more directly into processes of capital valorization.' (ibid.: 44). In recent times this discussion is taken up (see Ronneberger, 2002; Merrifield, 2002; Keil, 2002), linking it to the new conditions of the neoliberal city and the possibilities of its subversive confrontation. For a more general discussion of Lefebvre's theory of space, see Brenner (1997) and Schmid (2003).
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life. We consider this a crucial issue because everyday life is the sphere where neoliberal hegemony has its roots (in shaping meaning systems, horizons of expectation and thereby corridors of action) and, consequently, where it can be challenged. Thus, urban social conflicts contain the chance, on the one hand, to be concrete by fighting for direct improvements of living conditions and, on the other hand, to be radical by opening up a perspective beyond existing power relations. Of course, this is always a precarious balance, as the experience of urban social movements from the 1970s to the 1990s has shown. They were at the same time expressions of (antagonistic) protests and, mostly as an unintended consequence, agents of the modernization of local economies and political systems. One cannot escape this dilemma. The only way to learn from the success and failure of former movements is a permanent reflection about the chances and threats of acting within and/or against existing institutions, of fighting the `spectacle' without becoming part of it. Besides this reflection being an important task of critical social science, the simultaneous articulation of protest on different spatial scales and the embeddedness of urban conflicts in the broader frame of the global social movements can help to deal with unavoidable tensions. It creates the space for exchanging experiences, for rethinking one's own political practice and for collectively developing strategies to challenge power relations. This is what remains crucial: the amplifying of space for a broad culture of reflection and debate for the movement itself. The multidimensional activities and strategies and the long-lasting search for, and diffusion of, alternative practices can only be tackled if alternative symbolic and material spaces are occupied and defended.
Bettina Kohler (bkoehler@iemar.tuwien.ac.at), Faculty of Architecture and Planning, Technical University of Vienna, Treitlstrasse 3/272, A-1040 Vienna, Austria and Markus Wissen (wissen@zedat.fu-berlin.de), Department of Political and Social Sciences, Free University of Berlin, Malteser Strasse 74-100, 12249 Berlin, Germany.

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