The city and the far-right grassroots? Reactionary neighbourhoods,beyond 'left behind'

Abstract

Santamarina and Ince's ‘Urban neighbourhoods and far-right spatial strategies: Displacement, infrastructure and civic life’ is a timely refocusing on the neighbourhood scale as a loci of political subjectivity, especially at a time when the far-right makes inroads into highly localised processes. The idea that the grassroots is sometimes reactionary, fragmented and oppositional is not necessarily new. What is especially novel about this intervention is a focus not only on the spatial strategies employed by the far-right today in contexts like England and Spain, but also the enticing proposal that the neighbourhood be re-centred from an anti-fascist perspective. It is here that more research is needed, in terms of mapping out practical pathways for filling the spaces taken up by the far-right with better alternatives. Santamarina and Ince suggest that over-focusing on languages of cohesion, or ‘left behind-ness’, are not always productive, because affluent, cohesive neighbourhoods also sometimes trend toward far-right outcomes.

Dreaming of the neighbourhood

The San Francisco neighbourhood activist and politician Harvey Milk once claimed that ‘The American dream starts with the neighbourhood’. But what kind of dream? What kind of neighbourhood? Milk was assassinated in 1978 by someone with a different dream, who saw Milk as an existential threat, representing something ‘other’ that needed to be defended against.

I thought of Harvey Milk when reading Santamarina and Ince's (2026) timely exploration of the contested terrain of neighbourhood-level civic and social infrastructures, and the degree to which these are not necessarily the domain of the kind of progressive activism that Milk, and others of his era – the ‘golden age’ of grassroots activism of the 1960s and 1970s – represented. The far-right has its teeth sunk deep into neighbourhoods. As evidenced by the local success of ‘Vox’ in Spain, or ‘Reform UK’ in this year's local elections, or other trends across Europe – this is not limited to North America. But perhaps the ingredients for far-right neighbourhood territorialisation were already there, pre-existing. In a neighbourhood, people watch each other, notice things and phenomena with a particular and peculiar micro-scrutiny. A shrub, out of place. A pothole. A shop, opened or closed. New neighbours.

Here's a short reflexive memory. Years ago when I was a PhD student in London, I lived in Elephant and Castle, when the neighbourhood was still largely working-class. I found myself chatting to one of my neighbours, an elderly white British woman and longtime resident. Quickly, she steered the conversation to foreign migrants who, in her words, were ruining the neighbourhood. I politely pointed out that I, too, was a foreigner – I was American after all. Without missing a beat, she said: ‘but you’re the right kind of migrant’. Her front garden was impeccable, and she always had a smile. What was her neighbourhood dream? As (Santamarina and Ince 2026: 73) note, the far-right shift into neighbourhoods grows out of an extant ‘clear identitarian dimension – protect what is yours; safeguard that which belongs to you’. Through weaponizing these pre-existing grassroots sentiments and sympathies, the far-right has been able to cultivate, and latch onto, feelings of needing to be ‘defended against the threats posed by otherness, immigration and globalism’ (ibid: 9). This raises the perhaps uncomfortable reflexive question of: is there room for empathy? Sympathy? Indeed, the spatial violence experienced by neighbourhoods undergoing rapid processes of (fill in the blank: change, gentrification, environmental degradation, austerity, infrastructural breakdown) instigates all manner of responses, including and understandably, anger, mistrust, and scepticism. The far-right cannily fills the need for meaning and offers pathways for transformation when other options – anti-fascist options – seem unavailable or inaccessible. The far-right preys upon people like my neighbour, back in Elephant.

Santamarina and Ince's (2026)'s intervention rests on three key arguments. Firstly, that neighbourhood-based mobilisations are crucial for understanding the growth of far-right grassroots movements. Second, that the strategies and tactics deployed by the far-right in neighbourhoods mark a shift from violent to civic territorialities reappropriating forms of protest that are characteristic of progressive social movements, and thirdly, that the strategy of the far-right is closely linked to the re-signification of the everyday and the ‘cultural war’ over key left wing concepts related to everyday community and social reproduction. In a sense, they (ibid) provide a timely update to earlier explorations of the grassroots, a scale that has fallen out of favour in recent decades amidst geography's ‘flat ontological’ turn.

Harvey Milk did his work in the Castro, one of the oldest and largest gay neighbourhoods (or ‘gayborhoods’) in the world. The grassroots activism there in the 1970s drew the attention of the critical urban scholar Manuel Castells, who featured the Castro in his seminal ‘City and the Grassroots’ (1983) which theorised the nature of urban social movements (USMs) at the neighbourhood scale. Castells defined USMs as ‘urban-orientated mobilizations that influence structural social change and transform the urban meanings’ (Castells, 1983: 305). Notably, as Margit Mayer (2006) summarises, ‘USMs’ transform ‘urban meanings’, i.e. they undermine the societal hierarchies which structure urban life and create, instead, a city organised on the basis of use values, autonomous local cultures and decentralised participatory democracy' (Mayer, 2006: 202).

Here's the thing: neighbourhood ‘meaning’, and ‘autonomous local cultures’, are not only the domain of progressives. Castells hints at this, noting the contestations and fragmentations within grassroots activism and the complexity of cross-scalar relations between neighbourhood and state. Mayer (2006: 204) notes how the context has ‘dramatically transformed due to globalization and neoliberal restructuring, producing new battle zones around privatization, retrenchment and social polarisation’. Polarisation, indeed.

We can return to San Francisco’ Castro, today, to see how this has played out: the ‘gayborhood’ is now one of the city's wealthiest addresses, in one of the world's wealthiest cities; a city and patchwork of neighbourhoods that have been transformed by the power, money, and ideology of Silicon Valley techno-feudalists and venture capitalists. The Castro's streets are exclusive spaces, homes cost millions, and the unhoused and undocumented exist – notoriously – in a parallel urban world of precariousness and dire living conditions. Whilst few Castro residents would self-identify with the far-right, its echoes and seductions are not far away.

Santamarina and Ince (2026) look to Spain and the UK to suggest the uneasy trend of far-right infiltration into neighbourhood civic infrastructures and participatory processes. They suggest that it is by and through the local scale – the grassroots – that the far-right increasingly gains legitimacy and shores up support. Such a claim contradicts how grassroots activism, and neighbourhood-level organising, are often perceived, insofar as the neighbourhood is often framed as a progressive scale resisting / contesting an illiberal state.

Whilst they (ibid) focus on barrios both rich and deprived in places like Madrid and Bristol, other global cases are also instructive in validating this hypothesis. Witness the United States of course, and the deeply localised cadences of Trumpian and hyperbolically patriotic, Christian-Nationalist ideologies in town council meetings, school board elections, church services and even on arts and cultural commissions. The group #Moms4Liberty, for example, is illustrative of the grassroots network of self-proclaimed ‘guardians’ of ‘freedom’ and safety for children, from the perceived tyranny of worldviews, practices or lifestyles that threaten the American patriotic Judeo-Christian idylls. These #moms organise via barbeques and school fundraisers, showing up in local happenings and knocking on doors.

But witness also the barrios of Buenos Aires, where the far-right libertarian party of Javier Milei – La Libertad Avanza – has established neigbourhood programmes, kitchens, and outreach networks, helping to build a base of support for Milei's dramatic and violent economic restructuring. Or, across Germany, witness how crucial the neighbourhood has been for the growing appeal of the AfD (Alternative für Deutschland), with campaigns often focusing block-by-block, building-by-building. So Santamarina and Ince's highlighting of how these processes extend to urban Spain, through the case of the right-populist party VOX, and through the neighbourhoods of the UK, feels like an important and timely exploration.

It is inevitably true that the far-right has had a resurgence in recent years (again, just look around!), and secondly, that the far-right constantly uses new tactics, mediums and socio-spatial configurations to enter mainstream arenas and galvanise support, including those forums that erstwhile were the domain of progressive groups. Through rhetorical spins, appealing and accessible slogans and images and inclusive outreach, the far-right has been cannily-adept at latching onto specific issues which are important in neighbourhoods, from traffic, bike lanes and ‘Ultra Low Emission Zones’, to the real and gripping scarcity of housing, to the loss of meaningful public social and recreational space. Austerity – in the UK, but observed elsewhere through decades of neoliberal privatisation and state-retrenchment – has left gaps in housing, in infrastructure, in services and in impactful public policy. Where there is a gap, the far-right threatens to fill it. The left, and anti-fascist, progressive coalitions (which could, should, and must fill these gaps instead!) seem fragmented and disorganised in comparison. Santamarina and Ince are right to point all of this out, and to urge for anti-fascist alternatives.

However, and perhaps here is a slight nudge for some further reflection and introspection – I am not totally convinced that these trends are as new as perhaps the authors indicate they may be. For, in some ways, hasn’t the neighbourhood always been a hotbed of reactionary elements: anxiety, fear, mistrust and distrust, gossip and stigmatising, individualistic competition and exclusion? Maybe, in other words, many of those elements we now recognise and call out as ‘far-right’ were there, packaged and operating under different names and different frameworks. The smiling neighbour with the impeccable hydrangeas was ready to demonise migrants even before she was given the language and platform to do so publicly and a politician to vote for saying what she wanted to hear. And, importantly, this latent, already-existing neighbourhood far-right was not necessarily limited to working class or so-called ‘left behind’ communities. This is a point Santamarina and Ince make, but could perhaps drive further.

Not just ‘left behind’: neighbourhood fascism lurks in mansions and fine wine

Lisa McGirr, in her 2001 book ‘Suburban Warriors’, looks back at the grassroots conservative mobilisations and political formations in suburban communities in California in the 1960s. As she wrote, ‘doorbells rang throughout Southern California as volunteer cadres gathered signatures’ for the conservative candidate Barry Goldwater. ‘Recruiting the like minded, they organized study groups, opened ‘Freedom Forum’ bookstores… entered school board races…. All in an urgent struggle to safeguard their particular vision of freedom’ (McGirr, 2001: 6). However – the socio-demographics of these ‘suburban warriors’ trended toward the middle and even upper middle-class, permeated by deep status-anxiety and insecurity about class positioning. Furthermore, McGirr notes ‘these ideas took hold among a highly educated and thoroughly modern group of men and women… conservatives of Orange County enjoyed the fruits of worldly success, often worked in high-tech industries, shared in the burgeoning consumer culture’ (2001: 8). Barbara Ehrenreich (1989) famously captured this middle-class anxiety in her ‘Fear of Falling’, arguing that it was precisely the presence of bourgeois comforts that instigated a vicious fear of losing such things.

Santamarina and Ince rightly acknowledge that ‘the far right is not entirely working class’ (5) and reiterate this point on page 9 – that the far-right is also organised in wealthy neighbourhoods. Bourgeois fascism is a powerful reality and explains why so many of Trump's winning locales were, in fact, quite affluent, but also speaks to ‘Brexit’ vote realities in which wealthier rural communities and suburbs voted ‘Leave’ alongside more working-class, industrial heartlands. And, as Santamarina and Ince show in Spain, the entanglement of the business elite, the far-right and local communities has been especially strong (there, and arguably in other Latin contexts like Argentina, Chile, and Brazil). I think there was room to go deeper into this thread vis a vis the British context, which is so often and uncritically framed in terms of working-class alienation and resentment, the subject of endless research projects and policy agendas.

The authors (ibid, 2025) presciently highlight how the far-right has ‘deployed narratives of peripheralization and socioeconomic exclusion effectively in its narratives of place and belonging to establish footholds in urban neighbourhoods’ (5). Gentrification and uneven development, inequality and the dramatic juxtaposition of cosmopolitan pockets abutting devalued and lower income areas, help fuel resentment and the ‘wariness of outsiders’ (ibid: 5). There, I think again of my encounter with my Elephant and Castle neighbour, and her wariness of the outsider, and my own position, then, as both a privileged actor in gentrification processes (or studentification, in my case), and also, as a migrant, hosted on a temporary visa, in a shared-house with other students, in a fast-changing neighbourhood. Wariness, and the invitation of far-right sympathies, are not the only outcome of these juxtapositions: the authors are sure to acknowledge that processes of ressentimént are not inevitable and that ‘dispossession is not necessarily an indicator of far-right sympathies (ibid:6)’. But paradoxically, neighbourhood cohesion – so often framed as the antidote to mistrust and exclusion – may not preclude far-right processes. Santamarina and Ince (6) find that ‘high levels of local-scale cohesion can actually lead to better electoral outcomes for far-right parties in certain circumstances… and individuals who are well embedded in civil society are just as likely to vote for far-right parties as others’. This further complicates the reductionist binaries often applied to ‘left behind’ areas, and also poses critical questions for a ‘cohesive communities’ agenda: cohesive how? For whom? Meaning what? These, as ever, are contextual matters.

Context matters, and contextual anti-fascism is vital

Context matters greatly in the neighbourhood grassroots, something Castells (1983) was keenly aware of through his place-focused case-studies. As Santamarina and Ince note, the ‘development (of political subjectivities) continues to operate in a close relationship with place’. This comparison of the micro-contexts of neighbourhoods in metropolitan Bristol, England and Madrid, Spain is thus a valuable patchwork of contexts, with overlapping patterns and distinctive and contingent properties.

And the work of anti-fascism, too, is deeply contextual, and something that the authors (ibid) suggest should foreground much additional neighbourhood scale research. This is an enticing invitation. They (ibid) argue that common foci of study – from gentrification processes and local health, to austerity and infrastructural provision – might be framed as anti-fascist issues. The crucial question then becomes, how can other things, besides far-right actors, ideas, agendas, false promises and dreams, fill these gaps and address these contextual emotional intensities and developing political subjectivities? How can the far-right be effectively excluded from playing a part in neighbourhood cohesion and community building?

In something of a return to Castell's earlier work, a coda to his thesis on the grassroots, the authors conclude by calling for the neighbourhood to be ‘placed at the centre of antifascist struggle’ (ibid:17). This is inspiring, but begs the questions: how? What do anti-fascist neighbourhoods look like, and how can the grassroots be reclaimed? I would like to see a follow-up piece that begins to map out more clearly what this might entail, and how we, as neighbourhood residents, can position ourselves to do the hard work necessary to achieve anti-fascist outcomes.