This report examines the re-emergence of the urban commons as both a bottom-up emergence by citizens/commoners and a radical municipal administrative configuration. Starting with an exploration of the relationship between cities and the commons, with a particular focus on the recent revival and growth of...

One of the common features of the experiences gathered around the notion of Fearless Cities is their will to decentralize power by bringing it closer to the people. More than about policies themselves, new municipalism is concerned about the construction of new forms of organization...

Since the summer of 2019, Commons Network has been working with a team of civil servants and activists, supported by the municipality. The Fearless team uses the name ‘The 99 of Amsterdam’ for this new movement, referring to the 99 neighbourhoods of Amsterdam while also...

The Covid-19 crisis has made clear the disastrous effects of years of austerity, social security cuts, and public service privatisation. But it has also demonstrated that public services and the people who operate them are truly the foundation of healthy and resilient societies. As privatisation...

Faced with skyrocketing rents and powerful real estate empires, the citizens of Berlin are fighting back. They have forced the city’s authorities to take up the issue by freezing rents and protecting apartment blocks from speculators. A referendum campaign is under way that would go...

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...

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...

Barcelona has become one of the key targets – and victims – of the global tourism and property industry, spurred by financial firms such as Blackstone. But inhabitants and social movements are fighting back. Photo: Daniel Von Appen

Municipalist movements from all over Europe gathered in the Serbian capital in June 2019 to exchange ideas and plan a common strategy against deeply entrenched political structures in their home countries in the fifth Fearless Cities summit. How municipalist movements can help shape the future...

Barcelona is planning a major expansion of low-traffic zones, giving priority to pedestrians and cyclists to reduce pollution and provide green spaces. The work is part of a 10-year plan focusing on the central Eixample district of the Catalan capital, Mayor Ada Colau has announced....

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...

Scholars of participatory democracy have long noted dynamic interactions and transformations within and between political spaces that can foster (de)democratisation. At the heart of this dynamism lie (a) the processes through which top‐down “closed” spaces can create opportunities for rupture and democratic challenges and (b)...