Arve Hansen's aim in Urban Protest is to illuminate “how mass protests are affected by urban public space” (19). Specifically, the author seeks to create a model that will help researchers take spatial factors into account in studies of urban protests. The author develops his perspective in the course of three main case studies of urban protests—in Kyiv, Minsk, and Moscow. A “trial run” of the perspective follows as Hansen assesses a “Yellow Jacket” protest in Paris.
Approximately the first half of the study is devoted to theory and methodology, along with occasional comments on how the project took shape. Having identified a lacuna in the political-geographic literature on urban protests, the author follows convention and provides relevant definitions and clarifies terms while drawing selectively on various works. Although Hansen notes in passing that the social sciences “tend to be overly focused on theory and methodology” (81), nevertheless he continues discussing those topics for another forty-five pages. Urban Protest began as a dissertation, so perhaps the length of the theoretical/methodological discussion is a result of the need to satisfy the author's examiners.
In order to conduct a social-scientific analysis, the author had to break up urban space into definable components. His starting point is Kevin Lynch's research into how people perceive the space around them (The Image of the City, 1960). Lynch found five common elements of spatial perception: paths, nodes, landmarks, districts, and edges. Hansen deems these elements independent variables, and in the course of the study he adds another twenty-one to form a list of “elements of the city” (113–19). In this section, in my view, the author goes astray by trying overly hard to fit the study into a conventional social-science mold. Hansen divides the list into three main categories: “perceived (subjective) elements,” “physical elements,” and “social elements” (114). Whereas all the “physical” and “social” elements are held to be “measurable,” an additional sub-division in the “perceived” category distinguishes between “measurable” and “abstract.” Hansen includes “history,” “ideological symbols,” and “history of protests” among the “measurable” factors. Perhaps these elements can be measured— Seven Years War—but what is crucial is their subjective meaning.
The author claims to have discovered “that non-physical elements—such as the history of a space, people's relation to the space… can affect protests” (104). In his narrative account of interviews with protesters, Hansen indeed seems aware that it matters what places mean to people. But his “model” does not, and perhaps cannot, deal with this basic fact apart from nudging future researchers to inquire about it. In contrast, historians have been able to weave meaning and motivation into studies of place-based protests (for example: Orlando Figes and Boris Kolonitskii, Interpreting the Russian Revolution: The Language and Symbols of 1917, 1999, 30–70).
More useful are the author's “intermediary factors”: accessibility, mobility, “defensibility / policeability,” sense of safety, visibility, symbolic value, and motivation (120–23). Some of these factors are “testable” to a degree, but mainly they require that the researcher perceive the place of protest from the protesters’ and/or the authorities’ point of view. From that standpoint the relative significance of the “intermediary factors” can be assessed through what might be called the “life cycle” of a protest, but which the author labels as “dependent variables”: “emergence,” “realization,” and “impact.”
Fine-tuning his apparatus along the way, the author explores the “Maidan” rebellion in Kyiv in 2013–14, unsuccessful protests in two central squares in Minsk in 2006 and 2010, and the disastrous defeat of Russia's opposition in 2011 at Swamp Square (Bolotnaya Ploshchad΄). These chapters contain much of interest. However, because they are translations of journal articles, they repeat many of the theoretical/methodological considerations contained in the first half of the book.
In sum, the author's strengths—multilingualism and personal immersion in the research areas—are obscured by the trappings of social science. The “model” does not have predictive capability, nor does it lead to any law-like generalizations. However, Hansen has provided an “updated language to discuss such space [of protest] more efficiently” (96). That is not a bad thing, especially if it encourages more scholarly attention to the places where protests occur. A final note: the maps of the city centers are excellent.
