Communities of resistance between empowerment and direct social action

The apparent disintegration of the traditional community is a defining feature of postindustrial societies, in which individualisation and the fragmentation of everyday experience have been profound in terms of both their intensity and their incorporation into the collective imagination and memory. However, communities have not disappeared; rather, they have transformed and multiplied. The idea of the community as a stable, continuous structure with well-defined internal relationships has been replaced by definitions that are more dynamic. In sociological studies, the differences between traditional communities and modern societies can be summarised by the dichotomies of stability versus uncertainty, continuity versus discontinuity over time and stable versus multiple internal relations. Nevertheless, focusing on these distinctions obscures the transformations over the past three decades that have increased the number of possible community types and influenced the places where communities can form (local, digital, or both); the density and quality of relationships and the temporality of the community. Spatiality has become central to people’s social and media practices (Couldry, 2004, 2025; Couldry & Hepp, 2017), and it transforms community-making towards greater flexibility, widespread molecularisation and unprecedented forms of social innovation and resistance, albeit in certain respects. For example some microcommunity experiences seem to have taken on the characteristics of late 19th-century workers’ mutuals but with a focus on territorial links rather than links connected to the sphere of work or a combination of both, as with the collective linked to the GKN experience in Campi Bisenzio, near Florence. Connections based on work experience reflect a modern worker’s ability to operate in the spheres of both training and cultural promotion in the territory. This chapter focuses on case studies from Italy, Spain and Latin America, where grassroots initiatives have reconfigured public spaces, strengthened social economies and generated innovative forms of participatory governance.