Public Protest, In The Context Of Urban Space Reconstruction

The expansion of capital, market and city brought movements about worldwide transformation of old city and space reconstruction, along with various grassroots movements resisting demolition, transformation and deprivation. Today the demolition of housing has become one of the fields with sharp contradiction in the city society. With the process of capital reconstruction in city space and around the land property rights, interactions among different people in the city become more and more complex, which causes a series of civil resistance and appeal to civil rights. This study took a demolition resettlement community in city B as an example to describe the local resident's resistant practice and process in the demolition of transformation course in details. The civil resistance experienced the process from daily, opportunistic fight to legal struggle, then to the struggle for civil rights. This study revealed the driving mechanism of civil resistance through those kinds of struggles, including external institutional background or opportunity structure, internal enhancement of public right consciousness and so on and furthermore discussed the construction process of civil resistance from specific interests to right consciousness. In addition, it analyzed the practical process of resistance, including struggle space, mobilization structure, action strategies and legitimacy construction which proved possibilities of civil resistance action. From social differentiation and social struggle perspective, this study attempts to provide some beneficial discussion for community harmonious construction with showing these mechanism and process of conflicts in the city.The study found three mechanisms which cause current civil resistance actions that mainly include improvement of institution, laws and regulations and the opening of public opinion. Thereby the civil' right consciousness has been enhanced and they begin to learn and use laws to safeguard their legitimate rights and interests. Some individual struggle just fights for specific substance interest or carries symbolization or opportunism. However, with the development of civil resistance, the actors strive for rights that beyond the simple substance interests. They use different resistance technology and strategy to create space of expression of interest and resistance. On the other hand, from all forms of civil resistance actions we found the power relation is the most important factor for action success. In practice, they face strong alliance of interests who master economic, political capital and the discourse right, from the point of powers and resources they have, the disparity between them is very great. In fact it is the unbalanced power condition creates civil resistance actions, but also hinders the success of the actions.