From 7 to 12 March 2017, the Biennale des Villes en Transition (Biennale of Cities in Transition) took place in Grenoble, organized by its City Council. Issues such as the Right to Housing, the management of common goods and public spaces as well as the...

The conditions that brought about the “Greek crisis” are prevalent in many parts of the world and represent a new normality that threatens to shake the very foundations of social coexistence. Departing from the statement that the urban space is always a crystallization of broader...

The City of Tshwane, home to South Africa’s government and foreign diplomats, has been rocked by political turmoil for nearly a year. Coalition arrangements were first made after the 2016 municipal elections which finally collapsed earlier this year. This jockeying for power by the parties...

Even as revolutionary new technologies appear—with the potential to free our lives from drudgery and connect us to one another in ways we had never imagined possible—our undemocratic economy has deployed them as tools of disruption. Dreams of a post-scarcity technological future darken into one...

Mississippi is the poorest state in the U.S. with the highest percentage of Black people and a history of vicious racial terror. The concurrent Black resistance is the backdrop and context for the drama captured in the collection of essays that is Jackson Rising: The...

Essential workers and their families have increasingly been forced out as Airbnb-style holiday rentals have taken over a third of Lisbon’s city centre properties, pushing up rental prices, hollowing out communities and threatening its unique character. Now the city wants to bring the people who...

Laura Flanders reports from Amsterdam at The Future is Public, a conference that brings together hundreds of organizers, scholars, and government officials who are working to democratize their municipal and national economies.   Photo: rompalli harish

Given “new municipalist’s” aspirations towards the transformation of the municipal state, how might state theory inform research and practice on new municipalism going forward? This is the question with which Bertie Russell concludes his paper which focuses on municipalist initiative Barcelona En Comú’s endeavours towards...

This Wiki is an ongoing, open-ended online collaborative database and knowledge source for the Community of Practice of the UrbanA project. It captures the learning process of the UrbanA Community of Practice and is an important part of UrbanA’s knowledge commons. It includes a database...

Even as anti-authoritarian, anti-racist movements all over the world are working to take power where they live, self-described localist movements have also won elections with racist, and frankly fascist, platforms. New right movements like the Lega Nord have even adopted the more typically leftist, anti-authoritarian...

Scholars of participatory democracy have long noted dynamic interactions and transformations within and between political spaces that can foster (de)democratisation. At the heart of this dynamism lie (a) the processes through which top‐down “closed” spaces can create opportunities for rupture and democratic challenges and (b)...

Cities with above-average knowledge economies and below-average levels of social vulnerability are better placed to cope with the dual challenges of technological change and social inequality. Photo: Public Domain Pictures