Studying Of Urban Movements Through The Paradigms Of Popular Geopolitics And Anti-Geopolitics

The paper studies urban movements, as a type of social movements. These phenomena are studied through the perspectives of critical geopolitics’ two sub disciplines: popular geopolitics and anti-geopolitics. Urban movements represent a type of social movements devoted mostly to the resistance of urban population towards changing of the cities under the influence of neoliberalism i.e. capital and private interests. Urban movements that were studied were mostly the ones resisting the privatization of public space as an expression of neoliberalisation of the cities, which has been going on for the last three decades in the West, and for about two decades in the former socialist countries and various emerging economies, such as P. R. China. Studying of urban movements has a tradition of a little more than quarter of a century, since critical geopolitics as a geopolitical perspective exists. It is mostly tied with the geopolitics of resistance i.e. anti-geopolitics that is an expression of challenges to the cultural, political, moral and economic dominance of the elites in various societies. Social movements represent the ties that bind the individuals involved in resistance, hence they articulate individual actions into comprehensive, socially visible and tangible actions that attract and keep the attention of the society as well as the authorities. In the era of social media, social movements have much more diverse ways of transmitting messages and coordinating actions. The main conclusion is that we live in the era of social movements (and therefore urban movements as well), in which social media have become a very important means of the social movements’ actions.