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

Santamarina, Ana and Ince, Anthony ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5279-0997 2025. Urban neighbourhoods and far-right spatial strategies: displacement, infrastructure, and civic life. Dialogues in Urban Research 10.1177/27541258251337053

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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.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Published Online
Status:	In Press
Schools:	Schools > Geography and Planning (GEOPL)
Publisher:	SAGE Publications
ISSN:	2754-1258
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	20 March 2025
Date of Acceptance:	18 March 2025
Last Modified:	12 May 2025 15:45
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/177028

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