The Tenants' Movement is both a history of tenant organization and mobilization, and a guide to understanding how the struggles of tenant organizers have come to shape housing policy today. Charting the history of tenant mobilization, and the rise of consumer movements in housing, it is one of the first cross-cultural, historical analyses of tenants’ organizations’ roles in housing policy. The Tenants' Movement shows both the past and future of tenant mobilization. The book’s approach applies social movement theory to housing studies, and bridges gaps between research in urban sociology, urban studies, and the built environment, and provides a challenging study of the ability of contemporary social movements, community campaigns and urban struggles to shape the debate around public services and engage with the unfinished project of welfare reform.

Six months after the Selma to Montgomery marches and just weeks after the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, a group from Martin Luther King Jr.'s staff arrived in Chicago, eager to apply his nonviolent approach to social change in a northern city. Once there, King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) joined the locally based Coordinating Council of Community Organizations (CCCO) to form the Chicago Freedom Movement. The open housing demonstrations they organized eventually resulted in a controversial agreement with Mayor Richard J. Daley and other city leaders, the fallout of which has historically led some to conclude that the movement was largely ineffective. In this important volume, an eminent team of scholars and activists offer an alternative assessment of the Chicago Freedom Movement's impact on race relations and social justice, both in the city and across the nation. Building upon recent works, the contributors reexamine the movement and illuminate its lasting contributions in order to challenge conventional perceptions that have underestimated its impressive legacy.

Providing an overview of urban social movements from a diverse range of both empirical and theoretical perspectives, this Handbook includes not only a critical analysis of the transformations that have occurred in the urban landscape recently, but also sheds light on the strategies implemented by social actors in various socio-political and cultural contexts. It focuses on understanding better how and to what extent collective action around urban issues remains relevant in our modern world. This title contains one or more Open Access chapters.

What can we learn about collective action across Central and Eastern Europe by focusing on activism within urban spaces? This volume argues that the recent resurgence of urban grassroots mobilisation represents a new phase in the development of post-socialist civil societies and that these civil societies have significantly more vitality than is commonly perceived. The case studies here reflect the diversity and complexity of post-socialist urban movements, capturing also the extent to which the laboratory of urban politics is richly illustrative of the complex nexus of state-society-market relations within post-socialism. The grassroots campaigns and actions reflect the new social cleavages and increased polarisation as a consequence of neoliberal urbanisation and global integration, as well as the transformation of state power and authority in the region. Studying urban activism in Central and Eastern Europe is instructive for urban movements scholars generally, as it forces us to acknowledge the variety of forms that contention can take and the usefulness of embedding the study of urban movements within a larger understanding of civil society.

This open access book discusses the emergence and development, and in some cases also the disappearance, of social movements and activism in Sweden during the 1980s. Its aim is to nuance and problematize the image of the 1980s as unilaterally dominated by right-wing politics and neoliberalism, as well as the idea of a conflict-free Scandinavian model. The 1980s have often been described as a period when the influence of radical-left movements during the 1970s diminished. Instead, this book argues that the 1980s was a decade in which new radical social movements emerged in opposition to the prevalent political order, including the nuclear disarmament movement, the women's movement, anti-fascist movements, and the punk and environmental movements. The authors also demonstrate how issues such as squatting, nuclear resistance, rent strikes and the environment, included a variety of contentious collective action. Sweden, therefore, presents an interesting example of how resistance and conflict in a strong welfare state have been influenced by contentious social movements. Placing Sweden within the wider context of Scandinavia and Europe, this edited collection makes an important contribution to the history of social movements.