Social ecology: Communalism against climate chaos
Social ecology, as understood by Murray Bookchin and others, can offer a response to the challenges of climate change. The author describes the philosophy of social ecology and also its political strategy in order to reflect about its ability to overcome the limits of local…
The city as the new political centre
A radical change is taking place. Cities around Europe – through platforms, movements and international networks – are creating paths for citizens to participate in and influence politics directly. Joan Subirats, one of the founders of Barcelona’s municipalist platform Barcelona en Comú, discusses how cities…
The power of a transformative city
Cities constitute a privileged place to organise collectively and to imagine new ways of living and working together, spaces where bodies and minds interact and where ideas spread quickly and have unparalleled impact. Cities are also able to advance democracy to a greater extent than…
Municipalism: From citizen emancipation to shared political power
After the first Fearless Cities summit that took place in Barcelona in 2017, we look back at the relevance, the challenges and achievements that the municipalist movement is facing. As the author writes in this document, ‘behind these practices of muncipalism, a genuine refounding of…
What municipalism and #FearlessCities could mean for New Zealand
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…
The right to the city in an age of austerity
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…
Bakur rising: democratic autonomy in Kurdistan
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…
From citizen platforms to Fearless Cities: Europe’s new municipalism
The growing momentum of local democratic initiatives seizing institutional power at a city level has great potential to address national and transnational political problems. In 2017 Barcelona hosted the Fearless Cities Summit, an international gathering which took important first steps in linking the new experiments…
Municipalism and the feminization of politics
The new municipalist agenda is proving its capacity to provide effective responses to the demands for greater democracy at the local level. Furthermore, there is another, complementary argument for municipalism: it has the potential to feminize politics in a way that political action at the…