Drawing on insights from her latest book “Global Urban Politics”, Julie-Anne Boudreau puts the current response to the coronavirus in Mexico City and Montreal in a larger frame of understanding. She elaborates on the difference between urban and state logics of action and its importance...

We can understand almost all of today’s crises to be crises of democracy. Representative ‘democracy’ has turned people from empowered citizens to alienated constituents. Libertarian municipalism, which promotes direct democracy, is an essential tool to regain power at the citizen level and provide solutions to...

Yavor Tarinski is an independent researcher and activist whose publications and talks center on the possibilities of direct democracy and commoning practices as an alternative to the current social imaginary. In this interview with Eve Olney he discusses some of the ideas regarding where direct...

The article analyses whether and how, two years into the first mandate, Spain’s Cities of Change jump from the streets to the institutions has helped advance the demands of the social movements from which these candidacies derived their legitimacy. Photo: Ann H

Naples was the first Italian city to establish a “Department of the Commons” and the first to change the municipal statute by inserting the “commons” as one of the interests to be protected and recognised as a fundamental right. This italian city is just one...

In spite of the tools that there are available nowadays to plan the city, critical imagination of cities is especially weeks. The author describes and contrasts what he calls “the closed system” of architecture and society that he connects to Le Corbusier with “the open...

Stir to Action has worked in partnership with the Centre for Urban Research on Austerity at De Montfort University in Leicester to produce a new video resource for the municipalist movement. The video was inspired by CURA’s Municipal Socialism in the 21st Century event in...

A group of five famílies, fed up with the state of their houses, the repairs not being done thought they should be their own landlords. This group, dubbed the Corcoran Five, not only have been a major part of winning a landmark $18.5 million class-action...

Madrid, Barcelona and other major Spanish cities are now governed by independent citizen fronts called “confluences.” Ahora Madrid, Barcelona en Comú, Zaragoza en Común and La Marea Atlántica (A Coruña) are confluences weaved together by the M15-Indignados social ecosystem. Other political parties, like Podemos and...

Political prisoner and theorist who helped cofound the Kurdish Workers’ Party (PKK), Abdullah Öcalan, takes a closer look at the historical background of the paradigma between nation-state. With a view to issues of ethnicity and nationhood like the Kurdish question, which have their roots deep...

In recent years, following the collapse of the peace process between the Turkish state and the Kurdish freedom movement, the struggle for autonomy in the towns and cities of northern Kurdistan, or Bakur, has undergone a significant shift from a non-violent re-organization of social and...

Municipalism is evolving strongly in Spain and across Europe, as shown by the examples portrayed during the Fearless Cities encounter in Barcelona. While there is a need for democratic reform in New Zealand, the possibility of embracing municipalism as a tool for change would require...