Resistance is fertile: disruptions in urban politics

© 2018 Dr. Prashanti MayfieldPolitical narratives move across space and time in iterative cycles, while actions on the local level are framed and inflamed through webs of multi-scalar political and economic influence. All these actions generate outcomes that restrict the rights of some while privileging others, generating tensions between community and corporate interests in forms of development that privatise publicly-owned resources, assets and services. Four cases of contestation in the public housing and unconventional gas sectors in Australia and the UK are examined to reveal the relations of influence between development policies and protest action. Using a follow the protest methodology the research studies the movement of political narratives within and between each sector and jurisdiction, mapping key moments of interaction in each case study site. The research shows that as traditional modes of protest are met with increasingly militarised policing tactics, in turn, dynamic modes of resistance and prefigurative politics emerge. The implications of this are a trend towards regulation and control of political expression in public space, enforced through punitive measures and the redefinition of ‘lawfulness’, ‘public safety’ and ‘national interest’ in public policy. The response from activist groups is a movement towards horizontal models of political engagement centred on principles, practices and narratives of commoning. The mobilisation of diverse publics working towards a common political goal results in the generation of alternative ways of doing politics. The research finds that even as policies of economic extraction rend permanent changes in communities and landscapes targeted for development, what emerges from these fracked geographies are alternate articulations of social-ecological relations that hold the capacity to shift and catalyse current political structures away from neoliberal economic logics