Neighbourhoods and the far right: What is to be done?

Abstract

This article responds to the set of commentaries published in Dialogues in Urban Research following our original contribution on ‘Urban Neighbourhoods and far-right spatial strategies: Displacement, infrastructure and civic life’. These responses not only engage productively with the empirical and conceptual dimensions of the paper, but also open up broader questions concerning normalization, digital spaces, class composition and the role of everyday institutions in enabling or constraining far-right advance. Taking these interventions as a point of departure, this response re-centres the discussion on the question of ‘what is to be done’. Against approaches that confine antifascism to moments of confrontation or subcultural politics, we propose a broader conception of antifascist praxis as a transversal political culture embedded in struggles over housing, belonging, care and everyday coexistence. By foregrounding place-based, quotidian forms of contestation, this response seeks to move beyond descriptive analyses of far-right strategies and contribute to an urban research agenda oriented towards effective antifascist political intervention.