Organising and the other forms of urban people power

This article will appear in an upcoming book about Community Organising, published in Germany.

When I first encountered ‘community organising’ I saw it as a distinctive practice for making change in the city. Its particular form and method sat in dramatic contrast to a different type of change-making that I had tried previously, mass mobilisation.

In Sydney Australia in 2003, I was working in the union movement helping to build a social movement to try and stop war in Iraq. At one level, the movement was remarkably…