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...

Mississippi is the poorest state in the U.S. with the highest percentage of Black people and a history of vicious racial terror. The concurrent Black resistance is the backdrop and context for the drama captured in the collection of essays that is Jackson Rising: The...

The Bronx Cooperative Development Initiative, a network of various Bronx community groups, has four main components underway; the Innovation Factory, to develop new production and innovation capacity with digital manufacturing technology. The BronXchange, to get major local institutions such as Fordham University and Montefiore Medical...

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...

Given “new municipalist’s” aspirations towards the transformation of the municipal state, how might state theory inform research and practice on new municipalism going forward? This is the question with which Bertie Russell concludes his paper which focuses on municipalist initiative Barcelona En Comú’s endeavours towards...

In 2015, a wave of social movements lifted left-wing mayors to power in Spain. Their experience in office shows the importance of linking institutional power to bottom-up mobilization. Fearless Cities, a recent book produced by BenComú activists, has sought to draw wider lessons from these...

An Extinction Rebellion Handbook, recently released by Penguin, is a collection of 32 short essays that aims of pushing the message – and the confidence to take action – even further. An accessible text appropriate for introducing the average reader to both the scale of...

Urban movements, borne out of civic activism in the first decade of the twenty-first century, function beyond the frameworks of official Polish urban development institutions and policies. In the recent years they have managed to enter the political debate, some of them morphing into a...

The author asks: how can local action further our goals for global transformation? First, there is a reflection on the limits of local action and local democracy. Then the author goes back to social ecology writings and other theoretical discussions to find some clues. Finally,...

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...

While Scotland has blazed a new trail, much of England seems to have stuck to politics as usual. In fact, under the media radar, a growing number of self-styled independents are trying to kick out the big parties and take over the parts of government...

Gerardo Pisarello, Barcelona Deputy Mayor during the 2015 – 2019 term, intervened at the “Sanctuary Cities” gathering of March 7, 2017, to disclose the position of the new municipal government on the matter. Photo: Pixabay