Urban neighbourhoods and far-right spatial strategies: Displacement,infrastructure and civic life

Abstract

This article examines key dynamics of the neighbourhood scale significant to the study of far-right politics in the Global North, highlighting the importance of critical urban research for anti-fascist horizons. Drawing from research in Spain and the UK, it identifies three core themes that thread far-right politics through urban neighbourhoods. First, far-right actors increasingly use neighbourhoods as hubs of civic engagement, challenging the assumption that local social capital and citizenship practices always reduce prejudice. Second, gentrification and displacement of working-class communities highlight the role of dispersal from neighbourhoods (or the threat thereof) in generating both classed and cultural anxieties about loss on which the far-right prey. Third, neighbourhood-scale infrastructures function as points where locally specific struggles over meaning and value take place, through which both far-right and anti-fascist narratives of place and belonging can emerge. Rather than thinking of far-right neighbourhood politics as simply downscaling political processes taking place at national, regional or global levels, we expose how everyday socio-political experiences at the neighbourhood scale play a central role in shaping patterns of far-right support at multiple scales. We conclude by calling for greater attention to the neighbourhood scale in our understandings of how opportunity structures for both far-right and anti-fascist politics operate in urban life.