ABSTRACT
There is a widespread hostility towards middle-class contentious politics in urban studies literature. Many researchers hold a tacit assumption that residents' movements are conservative and guided by narrow, parochial interests. A classic example of this is provided by Mike Davis in his City of Quartz. Homeowners' associations in southern California were by his account busy establishing "bourgeois utopias". This chapter describes different lineages and dynamics of the relationship between political contention, class and space, showing a case of the material and daily struggles for the right to the city. New suburbanization and the flood of used cars that was embraced by city populations clogged inner cities; the traffic jams extended further and further out. Although it came from the low-rise neighbourhoods that had the most extensive experience in self-management at the residential level, it was embraced by vast swathes of the (post)socialist middle class.
