Two activist groups – Keep Sydney Open and Reclaim the Streets – have been campaigning against Sydney's so-called ‘lockout laws’. Multiple mechanisms of power in the city determine the impact of these groups and, ultimately, who is represented by them. This research is based on analyses of interview data and media produced by and relating to these pro-nightlife groups. The case study provides a unique and timely place-based comparison of two ideologically distinct movements with an apparently shared goal. While the 2am venue lockout is the central focus of Keep Sydney Open’s campaign, for Reclaim the Streets it is just one of their many ‘right to the city’-based concerns. This paper engages with current geographic debates relating to the resurgence of social movements and challenges to democratic civic engagement. In the neoliberal city, the two groups both face difficulties in influencing policy. Mechanisms of a pro-development governmentality mute ‘right to the city’ discourses and select whose voices are heard. De-politicised neoliberal discourse is problematically adopted and interacts with attempts at legitimacy amid the broader rise of populism. In this context, new activist strategies have emerged that appeal to a shifting public outlook while raising questions for ‘radical’ urban geography.

The role of news media in urban politics is changing rapidly as the media assemblage diversifies, increasing the level of participation by stakeholders and communities in the creation and contestation of ‘news’. Facebook and twitter are now major sites of people’s engagement with news. Stories may be broken on social media, propelled by the sharing of controversial stories or generated by disseminating the results of readership polls. In this paper we suggest this has three significant implications for the pursuit of urban regeneration, which we explore through a case study of news media coverage of urban regeneration in Newcastle, Australia. First, the diversification of the media assemblage amplifies the destabilisation of ‘news’ as a category of factual reporting, heightening the extent to which what is perceived and communicated as reality is dependent upon urban political affiliations and interests. Second, it broadens the role of traditional news media, allowing it to shift from advocate, to watchdog, to protestor across a spectrum of regeneration events. Third, a diverse and participatory media creates space for multiple possible trajectories of urban regeneration to emerge, as a range of actors, ideas and agencies are assembled to transform and perform the city in new ways.

This paper presents an argument in favour of a just city built on a relational ethics of care. Starting from the position that the city is a place of plural and often irreconcilable tensions, we develop a theoretical frame of a politics of value that accounts for difference without erasing difference. We do this by bringing agonistic political pluralism into contact with ethical pluralism in the form of value theory and the ethics of care. We draw on anthropological theories of value in order to think through ways we can respond to multiple, diverse and incommensurable valuations of urban phenomena. This framing of a politics of value based on an understanding of the city as a place of ongoing political and ethical contestation has been used to variously analyse different ‘wicked’ urban problems, from the irreconcilable tensions that arise between stakeholders in urban development projects, to the contradictions in the urban governance of graffiti and street art. A better understanding of the plural and incommensurable nature of value not only contributes to our understanding of the operation of agonistic pluralism, but also provides ways to think through the transition from antagonism that is necessary for a more inclusive urban politics.