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...

For centuries, workers have organized themselves in order to collectively resist the oppressive and exploitative forces of capital. From the early 1900s to the current day, the most common form of worker organizing has been the labor union. With the rise of urbanization, over half...

Many on the left have laid the blame for defeat at the door of Brexit. It’s imperative that we also examine why Brexit became such a central issue and why the left was incapable of addressing it. This failure to address Brexit in part stems...

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...

Activists in Berlin have been trying to adopt the concept of Sanctuary City to try to improve urban living conditions while simultaneously work on the further development of the political concept itself. Learning from other self proclaimed cities of change, rebel cities or solidarity cities ...

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...

Until relatively recently, the status quo in the cities of the Global South vacillated between neglect and persecution of the poor. In the past decade, however, we have seen a paradigm shift in urban policy, and cities in Brazil, Colombia and elsewhere are pioneering new...

As part of what he calls new “municipal socialism”, Jeremy Corbyn recently advocated giving local authorities the power to immediately seize empty properties in order to redress the increasingly shocking levels of homelessness. The outlines of these can be seen in cities like Preston or...

In Spain, as in other countries, the electricity sector remains dominated by a handful of large companies, powerful enough to impose their interests and hinder the energy transition. Movements against energy poverty and green cooperatives show a path towards greater energy democracy, but a third...

How has COVID-19 affected municipalism’s confederal and democratizing mission? In Spain, as elsewhere, the government’s response to the pandemic has implied a centralization of power. At the same time, municipalities are seeing their already limited resources stretched to the limit by the health and economic...

Murray Bookchin reviews aspects of the history of the US and abroad in recent decades leading of up to the 90’s from a political lens; the academy and a subculture of self-styled postmodernist intellectuals have nourished an entirely new ensemble of cultural conventions that stem...

There is no war today, just politicians who love comparing their roles to those of their blitz counterparts. But every crisis is an opportunity. What might emerge from coronavirus that is on a par with Beveridge? We need local testing centres, local food supplies, local...