Chapter 1 introduces the study with a vignette of a critical case from Yungay, Santiago. There, a group of residents with no prior background in activism, in a city with unsympathetic political institutions and leadership, organized and achieved remarkable and sustained policy impact and stopped planned redevelopment in their neighborhood. The chapter then presents the key questions: How have citizens adapted resistance against urban redevelopment to profound political, social, and technological changes? And under what conditions do they reach their goals? The chapter justifies the focus on struggles against urban redevelopment: Urban redevelopment plays a critical role in contemporary capitalism and has important social and political implications. Investigating the struggles against redevelopment, in turn, can lead to broader insights about contentious politics. Finally, the chapter presents an overview of argument and a plan for the rest of the book.

The conclusion elaborates on the implications of the use of experiential tools in violent or confrontational tactics, with special attention to the militant protest and rent strikes organized in Los Angeles by Union de Vecinos and the Los Angeles Tenants Union. It then examines lessons derived from the case studies that can be useful in limiting displacement, summarizing and expanding on various resistance strategies toward prevention, mitigation, and provision of alternatives to residential displacement in the face of gentrification and urban redevelopment. It reviews various approaches emerging from the case studies in the book regarding rent stabilization and compensation. It focuses on a comparison between community benefit agreements and Toronto's Section 37 funding, a legislated development impact fee. It also illustrates examples of community planning and construction, for example with land trusts.It concludes by arguing that experiential tools – despite their effectiveness in protest – can ultimately have the paradoxical effect of promoting rises in property prices, and the associated displacement.

This chapter explains the research design and presents an overview of the results with discussion and flow charts. When are residents able to mobilize against displacement? And when is their mobilization able to affect policy? To answer these questions, the book explores protest in “aspiring global cities” – cities characterized by urban governments that make economic competitiveness their priority. Starting with an analysis of globalization indexes, and with a rigorous selection mechanism, the chapter presents twenty-nine protest campaigns between 2005 and 2015 in Buenos Aires, Hamburg, Istanbul, Los Angeles, Madrid, Melbourne, Santiago, Seoul, Tel Aviv, and Toronto. The main findings are that successful organizers rely on experiential tools – activities designed to attract participants by offering transformative experiences with the goal of making the protest site the place to be. And when these protesters have allies in city council and competition between local and higher level executives, mobilization has policy impact. The legal system and the variety of capitalism in each country influences the strategies of protest organizers, with important differences between liberal and coordinated market economies.

Chapter 10 zooms in on resistance in public-housing estates, a most unlikely setting because residents are transient and vulnerable. The chapter presents two pairs of cases, in Toronto and Melbourne, each city displaying a success and a failure in both mobilization and impact. The Toronto cases show how cultural producers engaged in boosterish programming that distracted public opinion from ongoing displacement in one site, while, in the other, experiential tools and preexisting networks combined to foster a strong residents’ voice in revitalization plans and prevented displacement. The analysis of Melbourne’s estates confirms the powerful role of union support and shows how a councillor’s ideology gains salience in the context of multimember districts.

Chapter 5 analyzes cases featuring a combination of experiential tools and networks. It examines Santiago, where despite an especially adverse institutional context, protesters from the neighorhood of Yungay were able to succeed thanks to an extensive deployment of experiential tools and networks. It examines in detail the multifaceted approach they used and the different types of experiential tools, with special attention to events and archives. The chapter also reviews a second case in Santiago, in the area of Colina, where protesters emulated the strategies developed in Yungay to great effect. The chapter reviews two cases of weak mobilization in Istanbul: Sulukule and Fener & Balat, where networks were fragmented and therefore mobilization was weak. It then hones in on cases in which the deployment of experiential tools and networks led instead to mass mobilizations: in Istanbul with Gezi Park and in Tel Aviv with encampments against gentrification that prompted the largest protest in the country's history. The chapter concludes by examining the institutional, ethnic, and social features that undermine mobilization in the Jaffa neighborhood of Tel Aviv.

Chapter 2 presents the theoretical contribution of the argument: Successful organizers rely on an understudied and remarkably effective approach – experiential tools – activities designed to attract participants by offering transformative experiences. Often wielded by politically mobilized creatives, experiential tools come in four types – events, social archives, neighbourhood tours, and performances – with the goal of making the protest site the place to be.The chapter sets experiential tools in the context of the literature on social movements. It also discusses the role of networks and prior protest experience in effective mobilization. The chapter moves on to discuss the second outcome of interest: protest impact. It argues that when protestors have allies in city council and competition between local and higher level executives, mobilization has policy impact. The legal system and the variety of capitalismin each country influences the strategies of protest organizers, with important differences between liberal and coordinate market economies.

Chapter 11 examines Union de Vecinos, a group in the Boyle Heights neighborhood of Los Angeles that deployed a radical approach to fighting displacement: It directed its militant protest directly at art galleries, identified as the key culprits of gentrification. Alarmed by the negative publicity and the increasing inability to conduct normal business, gallery directors reached out to residents and activist groups. But the response was defiant, and in response some galleries closed. While the group had some success, it is too early to assess the overall impact of the strategy. Yet the approach merits examination because it is an innovative, ambitious, and analytically coherent response to the threat of displacement. The campaign questioned the role of cultural producers and experiential tools as it called for a radical approach to artistic practice, able to counter art's ties to a capitalist market. It also contributed to the debate on resistance against gentrification because of its harsh critique of the nonprofit sector, judged to be exceedingly accommodating and moderate in its demands.

In Chapter 6, the analysis of mobilization moves to examine the complex role of legacy in squats. It starts with a case in which prior protest experience was counterproductive (illustrated with Seoul’s Yongsan) and continues with a comparison of three squats with enduring anarchist legacies (Hamburg’s Gängeviertel and its antecedent protests of Park Fiction and Skam, as well as Toronto’s Pope Squat, and Madrid’s Tabacalera). In these latter three cases, experiential tools and cultural producers were critical to the outcomes. The analysis also illustrates that prior protest is helpful in gaining the squat but an enduring outcome depends heavily on organizational features and varieties of capitalism.

Chapter 4 provides background on the ten aspiring global cities and their theoretical and empirical comparability. Despite important variations, the cities examined share these core features: (1) They are key national and regional nodes of business and politics. (2) They experienced major and controversial redevelopment, which has caused different forms of displacement. (3) They have intensified the use of branding and cultural policies as engine of economic growth, often thereby promoting the “creative class.” The chapter presents data showing their shared prominence and discusses the high degree of institutional variation between the cities.There is significant variation in how markets and governments combine to pursue international competitiveness policies and the associated urban redevelopment. In developmental states, an essential feature is the elimination of informal settlements, with the consequent massive and brutal displacement of the poor, as examined in Seoul, Istanbul, Buenos Aires, and Santiago. In more advanced economies, a key dynamic is the erosion of public-sector housing, as illustrated for Hamburg. Redevelopment policies weresupported by city branding and legitimized by connections to cultural industries as new engines for economic growth, as examined in Tel Aviv, Seoul, Buenos Aires, and Los Angeles.

Chapter 8 examines mobilization in three cases in Buenos Aires, where union support is strong. It also shows that when unions failed to support a neighborhood organization, residents shifted their strategy to experiential tools instead. The first two of the anti-displacement groups examined – the Movimiento de Ocupantes e Inquilinos Movement of Renters and Occupiers (MOI) and the Asamblea del Pueblo San Telmo – actually constitute official chapters in the national union, Central de Trabajadores de la Argentina (CTA). That link provided renters and squatters with exceptional organizational and mobilization resources. Despite this common linkage, the two organizations differed strategically. The MOI engaged in direct actions, rallies, occupations, and, above all, in extensive technocratic negotiations with authorities over Law 341 and its implementation. The Asamblea del Pueblo San Telmo, instead, focused on occupations and direct actions and pursued a strategy of subversive resistance, consciously serving a marginal population in order to discourage gentrification. In contrast, the Asamblea Parque Lezama lacked close institutional and political affiliation to unions, and, rather than resorting to militancy, it succeeded with experiential tools.