First, demonstrators had no online or face-to-face contact before the protests. In fact, online networks, community connections, and party affiliations played a limited role. This reveals a bias in the literature such as on the United States that misrepresents the role of ‘onsite mobilization’ vis-à-vis online networking.
Second, demonstrators turned the protest sites into ‘vernacular utopias’ by developing a new contentious repertoire: following Henri Lefebvre, utopias are differential spaces in the city representing a new society. What renders the protest sites in Turkey utopias of a ‘vernacular’ character is the prefigurativism performed by the protestors as in Greece.
Third, the collectivity formed on these vernacular utopias is not a community or a network. Having emerged out of the direct contact on the protest sites as in Egypt, this collectivity reveals the inadequacy of the Gemeinschaft-Gesellschaft dichotomy and makes us question the primacy of networks concerning the formation of new social movements. Instead, I suggest the notion of ‘Raumschaft’ in order to emphasize the role of the face-to-face interactions in urban space in the making of new social movements.
