Northern Uproar
For some activists on the Labour left, municipal politics may now offer a constructive outlet and an opportunity to play a useful political role by using town halls as a base for action and agitation, linking up with trade unions, tenants’ unions, social movements and…
City council aims to support minorities with groundbreaking community program
Preston City Council commissioned the development co-operative Stir to Action to deliver a groundbreaking new community programme by focusing on providing targeted support for BAME organisations in the city, stimulating cultural awareness and interest in worker-owned business. With BAME communities suffering disproportionate impacts from the…
Public housing and the right to the city
John Boughton’s book Municipal Dreams offers a robust and clearheaded rejoinder to academic and activist work that pivots around the slippery, less tangible notion of the right to the city. Drawing from the unequivocal celebration of the confident, progressive “spirit of ’45”—which delivered vast amounts…
The pandemic will accelerate the evolution of our cities
Since the beginning of the pandemic we have already witnessed dramatic increases in the mobility of people, goods and information while simultaneously confronting the realities of climate change and carbonisation. We are now seeing trends away from fossil fuel to cleaner electric propulsion, vehicles that…
Homeless people mustn’t be abandoned to life on the streets again
Coronavirus has exposed the true numbers of those “hidden homeless” who were sofa-surfing and dependent on the generosity of family and friends. As the UK went into lockdown, close on 15,000 people in England who had been sleeping on the streets or in crowded night…
Democracy, participation & civil society
If we want to create a democratic culture that invites people in, though, we can’t restrict our thinking only to big-P “Politics” as represented by elections, Westminster, and political parties. Participatory and collaborative decision making happens in all sorts of settings and places.We need a…
Murray Bookchin, municipalism, popular democracy and left politics
In this podcast there’s a discussion of the work of Murray Bookchin, relating it to the experiences and debates around municipalism and wider left political practices and theory. The guests focus the discussion on the recent edited collection of Bookchin’s work: The Next Revolution: Popular…
Will coronavirus kill democratic local government?
If there’s one lesson the COVID-19 pandemic has taught us, it is that local government plays a vital role in people’s lives – and elected local politicians are better placed to make decisions that affect the communities they serve than distant apparatuses with little understanding…
The “Preston Model”. A UK city takes the lead in progressive procurement
Strongly affected by deindustrialisation, and more recently by austerity policies imposed on councils following the financial crisis, Preston, in the north of England, has chosen to no longer depend on external investors for its “development” and radically reorient its public procurement to favour local economic…