Beyond Trenches and Grassroots? Reflections on Urban Mobilization, Fragmentation, and the Anti-Wal-Mart Campaign in Chicago

Studies of the relationship between urban-based contention and neoliberal capitalism have recognized the relatively fluid and potentially empowering ways in which networked and multiscaled mobilizations strive to overcome fragmentation. Yet this work has not focused sufficiently on national urban politics for understanding the legacies of division and circumscription that may shape the city as a terrain of conflict. Reconsidering two classic treatments of fragmentation in the work of Katznelson and Castells, I contend that the historically racialized and politically decentralized institutional patterns characteristic of US urban governance continue to hamper urban social-justice mobilizations that seek to grapple with sectoral and scalar cleavages. Drawing on recent work in urban history, labor sociology, and urban politics, my discussion acknowledges the emerging potential of certain kinds of cross-sectoral and multiscalar efforts—such as labor–community coalitions and translocally supported multilocal campaigns—while also emphasizing that these mobilizations take shape within urban political arenas that, in the United States, are notoriously divisive and ‘sticky’. The paper illustrates these points through a brief case example involving the anti-Wal-Mart movement in Chicago.