Anthropocene action does not unfold without criticism or struggle. An array of resistance, made up of contests, alternatives or urban social movements, mobilize against industrial pollution, create utopian communities, take care of their local environment, organize collectively, initiate “transition cities”, influence on waste management. By combining the contributions of environmental humanities, urban studies and literature on social movements, this article accounts for the different ways in which social environmental movements have seized urban questions and have opposed to the anthropocene action other forms of environmentalist actions, displayed as four families of urban environmentalism, “naturalist”, “protestor”, “ordinary” and “democratic”.