Emergent imaginaries

This chapter looks at the emergent urban imaginaries implicit and explicit in three national US struggles around place engaged in by poor and working-class communities and communities of color. This examination of key urban movements for survival itself will build theoretically on the writing of Laura Pulido (1996) and others that extend the reach of radical thinking about subaltern positionality and struggle and of a radical political economy (Lefebvre 2010; Harvey 2013). These intersectional movements range from Black Lives Matter to the grassroots organizations driving collective action for environmental justice and multiple variants of a ‘Right to the City’. Finding strengths in place, in history, in tradition and in culture, such collective organizing articulates alternative visions and values through confrontations with the current capitalist conjuncture. Such collisions throw into high relief the capitalist imaginaries dear to urban development and exploitation, but also the emergence of alternative visions for urban life and space. In comparing how such imaginaries are being collectively constructed through movement, this chapter will work towards building a stronger methodological praxis of hope and struggle.