ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews the existing literature on social movements, and brings out the main theoretical issues concerning the analysis of urban movements. It develops a more useful and coherent theoretical framework to understand urban movements in a specific social and political context. The chapter argues that the strategy of an urban movement is an adequate dependent variable, and that the analysis of the process of its formulation and implementation is the key to unravelling the complexity and dynamics of urban movements. It discusses the resource mobilization perspective. The chapter explores and examines two recent theoretical models, that is, the political process model and the social construction of protests, and shows that these two models are complementary to the resource mobilization perspective. It links up the resource mobilization perspective with the political process and social construction models, and illustrates a possible way of using their conceptual and analytical elements in our analysis of social movements.
