ABSTRACT
Urban social movements are both seismographs and drivers of urban change. Within these social movements political collectivities are responding to specific regimes of accumulation of capitalism, its corresponding mode of regulation and – when considered as a local process – the according mode of urbanism. This chapter analyses three distinct political collectivities formed in the three phases of crisis in tenant protest in Berlin and New York: an antagonistic collectivity that responded to laissez-faire urbanism at the end of the nineteenth century until the Second World War; an autonomous and identitarian collectivity formed in response to Fordist urbanism in the 1960s to 1980s. Today’s tenant movements respond to the crisis of neoliberal urbanism with a post-autonomous and post-identitarian political collectivity.
