In most accounts of social movements, prefiguration and strategy are treated as separate movement practices that are either contradictory or complementary to each other. In this article I argue that in the case of the alterglobalization movement, we have to understand prefiguration itself as strategic. When movement goals are multiple and not predetermined, then prefiguration becomes the best strategy, because it is based in practice. By literally trying out new political structures in large-scale, inter-cultural decision-making processes in matters ranging from global politics to daily life, movement actors are learning how to govern the world in a manner that fundamentally redesigns the way power operates. This process constitutes a prefigurative strategy in which movement actors pursue the goal of transforming global politics, not by appealing to multilateral organizations or nation-states, but by actively developing the alternative political structures needed to transform the way power operates.

This article examines how housing becomes a basis for mobilization that brings residents in East Harlem, New York City into internationally mobile social movement networks. These networks foster the mobility of people, practices and ideas to transform ‘housing’ from an immobile practice into a mobile, shifting entity experienced as tenuous, a counterfactual demand for immobility, and an expression of a shared desire for self‐determination. Through mobilizing frames that turn the demand for decent housing into a struggle against neoliberalism, gentrification and displacement, and for collective self‐determination, housing struggles create multi‐scale networks of mobility that are essential to pursuing a neighborhood‐level struggle to stay put. Résumé Le logement est à la base d'une mobilisation des New‐yorkais de East Harlem qui les a fait entrer dans des réseaux de mouvements sociaux mobiles à l'échelon international. Ces réseaux favorisent la mobilité des individus, des pratiques et des idées de sorte que le ‘logement’ ne soit plus une expérience immobile, mais une entité variable mobile vécue comme précaire, une demande virtuelle d'immobilité et l'expression d'un désir commun d'autodétermination. En passant par des cadres de mobilisation qui transforment la demande de logement décent en un combat à la fois contre le néolibéralisme, la gentrification et les déménagements forcés, et pour une autodétermination collective, les luttes liées au logement créent des réseaux de mobilitéà plusieurs échelons, indispensables à la résistance des habitants qui ne veulent pas quitter leur quartier.

SummaryOver the past forty years, the social struggles of the “long 1960s” have been continuously reinterpreted, each interpretation allocating a new mix of relevance and irrelevance to the brief global uprising. This article is a contribution to one such interpretation: the small but growing body of literature on the central importance of experiments with democracy within movements of the 1960s. Rather than examining the transformative effect of 1960s movements on institutional politics or popular culture, this article examines the lasting transformation 1960s movements had on social-movement praxis. Based on seven years of ethnography within contemporary global movement networks, I argue that when viewed from within social-movement networks, we see that thepoliticallegacy of the 1960s lies in the lasting significance of movement experiments with democracy as part of a prefigurative strategy for social change that is still relevant today because it is still in practice today.

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