London is a crucial site in the struggle for better local politics, because it is a city in which many people have been let down by the failures of traditional economic development. The traditional models are struggling to deliver social and economic outcomes that meet...

Instead of thinking of cities as pressure points for the global environment, we need to see them as innovation hubs for solutions to address climate change, pollution and biodiversity loss. Compact, green, inclusive urban centres are a critical weapon in our quest to keep the...

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...

Cities account for nearly 70% of greenhouse gas emissions and many of them are experiencing more instances of extreme weather, heat, droughts and flooding due to climate change. Climate change negatively affects poor communities, women, people with disabilities, indigenous groups and other marginalized populations the most....

The global movements of 2011 reconfigured urban space as a new interface of collective action and policy creation. The new political narrative of cities is serving to counteract prevailing neoliberal narratives.More than a phrase, “the Cities of the Commons vs. global neoliberalism” could be understood...

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...

Social movements in Spain and Taiwan are experiencing new developments in organizing strategy and digital technology that are helping them overcome the fundamental limitations of traditional organizations. Photo: Dainis Graveris

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...

How can new municipalism develop a progressive localism and forge translocal solidarities? This article considers municipalism as a form of progressive localism, which on the one hand connects the local and the global through translocal solidarity, and on the other scales-up and becomes an alternative...

Our cities are being hollowed out. Real estate developers carve up downtown areas for profit, displacing the poor to the urban periphery. One by one, public spaces are disappearing; cafés and libraries are closing down, and parks are increasingly patrolled by private security. Metropolitan sprawl...

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...

On 7 May, a small Somerset town in UK voted against traditional party politics and gave a coalition of independents control of all 17 seats on its council. As the crucible of ‘flatpack democracy’, Frome is leading a small-scale political revolution. Moreover, this idea seems...