Big Talk in the Little City: Grassroots Resistance by and for the Common/s

This chapter sets out to do two things. First and foremost, the authors tell the story of a grassroots reimagining of urban development and community as a site of radical democratic action in Geneva, NY, wherein a broad-based interracial coalition of progressive, left, Black nationalist, and civil rights activists mobilized to redress a neoliberal land-use initiative that aimed to legitimize the privatization of public spaces. Second, and intertwined, we situate this story in the contemporary literature on neoliberal urban development and how current protests and rebellions are offering new ways of thinking the relationship between public space, democratic ideals, and the educative potentiality of a renewed commons.