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This paper analyzes the rise and decline of social movements in Amsterdam and Paris, focusing in particular on the organizations of left-wing immigrant workers. These organizations performed crucial roles for new social movements in the 1970s and 1980s but were isolated and coopted in the 1990s and early 2000s. To explain why this is so, we engage in a dialogue with Jacques Rancière and develop an understanding of cities as strategic sites for both politicization and policing. Cities serve as sites of politicization because they are incubators of the relational conduits that enable activists from different sectors to engage with one another's struggles and look beyond narrow temporal and spatial horizons. However, cities also serve as sites of policing because authorities constantly attempt to reconfigure governmental arrangements in such a way that civil society serves as an extension of the government and comes to fulfill an instrumental role in the development and implementation of policy. Just as politicizing implies the widening of temporal and spatial horizons, policing implies the narrowing of such horizons. The analysis shows the social movements of the 1960s lost steam in two of the major hubs of the new left and reveals some of the more universal mechanisms through which cities generate or quell dissent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although planned as the 'City of Tomorrow', the Bijlmer district in Amsterdam quickly became the quintessential symbol of urban decline. Today, even with half of the planned renewal of the Bijlmer completed, the alleged success of this urban revitalisation programme is questionable. Parts of the black middle class did not move out and some are even returning to the Bijlmer; the combination is producing a type of 'black gentrification', which forces the 'undesirables' like drug users, homeless people and undocumented immigrants to leave. This revanchist renewal not only benefits the middle and lower-class population of the district, but it also serves the interests of private developers. European revanchism makes the city safe for corporate investment and aims to restore social order as well as stimulating the development of a strong middle class. This paper demonstrates how hard revanchist policies are demanded not only by private developers but also by the middle and lower classes, and they exist alongside soft 'caring' policies, even for the 'undesirables'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the Dutch and more broadly European context, urban policymaking has generally been studied through the conceptual lens of neoliberalism. While important, I argue that this neoliberal lens does not fully account for the design and impact of urban policies currently transforming cities like Amsterdam. Following Mustafa Dikeç's (2007, Badlands of the Republic: Space, Politics, and Urban Policy) understanding of urban policy as place-making practices that normalize particular distributions of people, authorities and spaces, I propose to focus on underlying visions of the normal and the good city that shape urban policymaking. Drawing on 18 months of ethnographic research on Amsterdam's 'notorious' Diamantbuurt, I argue that this vision is informed by neoliberalism and by racialized concerns with migrants and ethnic minorities. It entails particular classed and racialized preferences that normalize and underwrite the partial displacement that is underway in the neighbourhood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]