Where Is Culture in Rome? - Global Rome: Changing Faces of the Eternal City - page 240

ally employed within social movement studies, and thus their applicability to
italian social centers should be discussed. other theoretical models have also
been proposed (e.g., fitzgerald and Rodgers 2000), but it is worth considering
the most prevalent. according to the new social movement approach, a social
movement is a collective actor who intervenes in the process of structural social
change, usually formed to tackle temporary or single-issue themes, such as femi-
nism and antiracism (Castells 1983). The resource mobilization scholars instead
view social movements as composed by goal-oriented actors making collective
claims and employing various forms, or repertoires, of actions (tilly 2006). The
long-term experience, activities, and connections of social centers make it dif-
ficult to examine them in conjunction with new social movements made up of
temporary or single-issue organizations or to consider them as resource mobili-
zation centers. in fact, social centers develop much more complex actions: on the
one hand, their activities are consistent with traditional class struggles, geared
toward reappropriating social space and time; on the other hand, their collective
demands intend to deny the legitimacy of power and the current uses of social
and intellectual resources. both mainstream approaches emphasize movement
participation and claim to be incorporated in the dominant trends, something
that is at odds with most of the social centers. we can to a certain extent accept
the idea that social centers are a container for new social movements and they
make use of resources with a distinctive repertoire of struggles, but if we want
to expand our knowledge, we have to shift our analysis to power relations. Ge-
ographers tend not to use the term social movement in their analysis; instead, re-
sistance, which is a much broader term, is increasingly being used (miller 2000).
according to foucault (1982, 780): “[to] understand what power relations are
about, perhaps we should investigate the forms of resistance and attempts made
to dissociate these relations.” antiauthority struggles are transversal, not limited
to one country; people criticize instances of power that are the closest to them,
in particular, uncontrolled power over bodies, health, life, and death. in short,
they are “immediate” struggles (foucault 1982). The resistance and immediate
struggles set up by social centers are threefold: first, squatting of empty build-
ings is arranged as visible public action. second, this public action challenges
urban speculation, housing scarcity, private property rights, and the neoliberal
production of space on behalf of speculation and private interests—this also pro-
vides an exhibition of new power relations in order to transform a piece of the
city. Third, new public space is proposed within a framework of commons, or
better, it aims to turn the noun common into a verb, into an action. in fact, there
are no commons without incessant activities of commoning, of (re)producing in
common (De angelis 2010).
This resistance has to address urban entrepreneurialism, organized, for ex-
ample, through competition to hold sport events and privatization of services