In Search of a New Framework: Collective Actions in Non-Metropolitan Cities of the South

Following Castells some scholars analysed urban conflicts in the framework of ‘Urban Social movements’. Both urbanists and Social movements scholars in the South except a few, however completely neglected this framework, where the discussions were focused on different sets of issues.

In the last two decades cities in the South are experiencing explosion of collective action. Actors old and new are participating in the campaigns and movements around issues of access to livelihood, food and employment. Mostly these collective actions are woven around ‘identity issues’ and are therefore seen as ‘aberrations’ from the given theoretical frameworks.

Research on non-metropolitan cities shows that there is urgent need to go beyond binary understanding of collective action in terms of material and symbolic, old and new, urban and rural to capture the complex interplay of socio-economic and cultural factors and to encompass the scalar complexity that we have undermined so far. Race, gender, caste and religion are not just general categories underlying these collective actions, but these are historically and spatially intertwined to express new combinations, allainces and contradictions. Collective action arguing for citizenship rights is also articulated in very different ways. The novelty and the creativity of the actors from the South has to be seen not as 'pathological', but as an alternate way of enagaging with modernity and neo-liberalism.

There is an urgent need to reformulate the theoretical tenets of urban studies to incorporate the dynamics of collective action in the urban arena and the frameworks in Sociology of Social movements warrant reformulation so as to address new forms of urban collective actions which redefine social movements.