ABSTRACT
The social sciences have already provided analyses of those relationships between urban social movements and political institutions that differ from the “protest-andrepression” kind, generically considering the relationships between the demands of social movements and public policies, assuming that “all movements make demands on the political system” (Della Porta and Diani 2006: 233). In so doing, they have specifically focused on the resulting processes of institutionalization that might often affect social movements (Meyer and Tarrow 1998), as well as on the possible instrumental use of movements by political power in order to gain legitimization and/or to prevent or reduce conflicts. In particular, the institutionalization of social movements is depicted as a process that bears significant implications for their goals and strategies, bringing about a “routinization” of tactics, as well as the inclusion and co-optation of compliant groups. In this kind of process, a movement’s energy is often constrained and channeled by consultative processes set up by political actors and, being at the same time within and against the state, movements have a tendency to lose their critical identities (Mayer 2000). Such analyses have mainly focused on the roles actually played by social movements within urban governance and policy-making processes, basically trying to assess whether they have been incorporated or not into both existing urban regimes and those undergoing transformation (Harding 1997), providing them with additional resources for the governability and modernization of local economies and political systems. In particular, if this happens in circumstances in which there is a prevailing neoliberal orientation to a city’s policies, “cooperative” movements run the risk of being instrumentalized (Mayer 2007). This risk is related to what has been defined as the “local trap,” identified by an “exaggerated belief in the power of local level agency and institutions to improve the world, thereby ignoring or disavowing the inter-scalar spatiality of development mechanisms and strategies” (Gonzàlez et al. 2009: 50).
