Beyond urban-rural cleavages: populist mobilisations of the city - discourses of Covid lockdown in Vienna's elections

As populism studies have turned to the local level, the topos of urban-rural divisions between globalisation and anti-cosmopolitan closure raise questions about the role of cities for the right-nationalist political revival. So far, the empirical evidence of spatial cleavages is unclear, and the diverse contextual relations of social spaces imply conceptual and methodological challenges for researching populism. Manifesting complex global transformations, populist antagonising of urban uncertainties may indeed foster authoritarian shifts or conflictive escalations. But the various pro-/anti-urban mobilisations also highlight the multi-facetted political role of cities, which may gain a potential for turning polarisation into plural contentions and thus politicizing the institutions of democracy. As urban scholars join populism studies in search for democratic alternatives to nationalism and globalisation, various empirical work on new urban populisms has implied different epistemological conceptions of space and politics as well as diverse outcomes in practices. This paper discusses the urban dimensions of populism concerning the political contentions over the Covid 'lockdown' of public space during Vienna's municipal elections in 2020. Beyond either normative cosmopolitanism or anti-democratic populism, elaborating a poststructural approach to urban diversity contributes toward a pluralist open-ended research agenda on how populist mobilisations mediate social spaces and democratic legitimacies.