New book about making change in cities: People Power in Cities
For the last seven years Amanda has been collaborating with fellow academic and community organiser Kurt Iveson, trying to better understand what it takes to change cities. It has led to People Power in Cities that explores the different strategies people use to achieve a greater say in how their cities are run.
The book is features a global spread of long-form case studies, many of which have been featured in ChangeMakers Podcasts.
- Prefiguration and Cape Town – Reclaim the City is a Black working class housing movement fighting for inner city affordable housing to deliver spacial justice in the city – the ChangeMakers episode is here.
- Running for Office and Barcelona – following the 2008 Great Recession and the resulting housing crisis , activists turned a variety of people power strategies (organising, mobilsing and prefiguring) before adding the strategy of running for office. They established a new political platform called Barcelona en Comu and ran for the City Council – with their party Barcelona en Comú winning the Mayoralty for two terms -you can listen to a ChangeMakers episode hosted by Amanda here.
- Mobilising and Hong Kong – Amanda wrote a series of four articles for the Conversation about the anti-Extradition Bill Movement in 2019 based on my time researching the movement in Hong Kong during the heights of the protest and interviews with a range of protest organisers and participants. A link to all the articles are here, the first is here. I also did podcasts about the Umbrella Movement, and two on the history of the 2019 Protests, one of the history of protest in Hong Kong, and one on the period between Umbrella and 2019.
- Organising and Sydney – We don’t have a podcast with the Sydney Alliance leaders we studied, but there is a memoir first published in the Griffith Review that includes the story of how I helped set it up, which can be read here or listened to here.
- Austin and Playing by the rules – We explore a 10 year battle of land use – between so-called YIMBYS and NIMBYS – and find that the politics of housing is far more complicated than “believing” that we need more housing or even calling for “Abundant” supply based policies. We explore how those politics played out and what it means for thinking about how cities relate and can grow well together.
Across these studies, we explores a new way of thinking about people power, one that can unlock opportunities everywhere for urban movements that are urgently seeking to create change.
Our big argument is that there are no silver bullet strategies but rather all forms of people power have strengths and limits. The art to making change is to be adaptive, and to work across and with other approaches – even if you have a critique of them – because we cannot predict the future and the kind of challenges and strategies we may need to make a difference.
You can buy the book in Paperback form and as an E- book via a variety of publishers including:
For people with access to University Libraries – you can find the e-book here via Oxford Uni Academic.
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