Anti‐global movements reclaim the city

The paper examines the city as an object of contestation from the point of view of the grassroots. After discussing the city as a transforming field of social movements and grassroots mobilizations from the 19th to the 20th century, it examines the action of the recent anti‐global or alternative global movements on the city. It focuses especially on the foundation of the European Social Forum during November 2002, in Florence, on the World Charter on the Right to the City, brought forward for discussion at the meeting of the World Social Forum, as well as on the anti‐war movement. As an active member of the Greek and European Social Forum and having been aware of the theoretical discourse on urban social movements, the author argues that new formations of social movements—the 'movement of movements’—are reviving and reshaping, at least in Europe, the meaning of the urban, having the city as a base of their activities and as an object of contestation from their own point of view. *This is the paper referred to in the introduction to our special feature in issue 10.3 “Urban social movements: from the 'right to the city’ to transnational spatialities and flaneur activists”