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Re-grounding the city with Polanyi: From urban entrepreneurialism to entrepreneurial municipalism
9th January 2020This piece situates entrepreneurial municipalism as one strand in an assemblage of new municipalist interventions, between radical urban social movements and more neoliberal strategies such as financialised municipal entrepreneurialism. Exploring how local authorities are working with social enterprises to harness place-based assets in ways which...

Reason, creativity and freedom: The communalist model
11th February 2017The attitudes of racism and xenophobia, which have fueled the virulent rise of fascism today in places like the United States, must be combated by a radical humanism that celebrates ethnic, cultural and spiritual diversity. With communalism we might remake the world upon humanity’s potential...

Animal liberation from below: toward a radical interspecies municipalism
6th August 2018The political Left, especially in its anti-authoritarian strains, has a long history of supporting welfare and even rights for nonhuman animals. Anarchists such as Leo Tolstoy and Elisée Reclus were vegetarian and drew explicit links between violence against humans and other species. Similar views were...

Radicalising democracy: How Hannah Arendt’s legacy endures in Barcelona
20th November 2018Writer Hettie O’Brien analyses Hannah Arendt’s model of council democracy, and how Barcelona en Comú are transforming the way democracy works. According to O’Brien, if Arendt had been alive today, she may have looked to Barcelona’s government and Europe’s fearless cities movement for examples of...

Portland just passed the best low-density zoning reform in US history
11th August 2020Portland’s city council has set a new bar for North American housing reform by legalizing up to four homes on almost any residential lot. It’s the most pro-housing reform to low-density zones in US history. Portland’s new rules will also offer a “deeper affordability” option:...

The confederation as the commune of communes
22nd December 2019Confederalism as a revolutionary strategy provides us with the means to build and organize a radically democratic and egalitarian society at scale. To understand how the confederation can form a real threat to the ruling class, one needs first to understand the strategy of social...

What is social ecology?
1st January 1993What defines social ecology as “social” is its recognition of the often overlooked fact that nearly all our present ecological problems arise from deep-seated social problems. Conversely, present ecological problems cannot be clearly understood, much less resolved, without resolutely dealing with problems within society. Photo:...

Switching off Spain’s electricity oligopoly. Three proposals to dismantle the corporate power of Spain’s electricity companies
25th June 2020In 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 can a civic movement set the agenda in city hall?
31st July 2019An interview with Rui Franco – Deputy City Councilor of Lisbon at the Our Common City conference in Budapest (February 22 & 23, 2019). Part one: Part two: Part three: Photo: Luisa Azevedo

The municipalist moment
6th January 2020Movements on the left are increasingly looking to build power at the local level. The question is how we can leverage municipal gains to transform the system at expanding scales. Photo: Hello I’m Nik 🇬🇧

The Jackson – Kush plan and the struggle for black self-determination and economic democracy
23rd May 2012The J – K Plan in its concrete form is the product of a self-generated organizing challenge that emerged from the 2008 Ideological Conference of MXGM and NAPO. The challenge was to test the strength of our organizing model and work in the South after...

Cities versus Multinationals
12th March 2020This confrontation between cities and multinationals is a reflection of the increased pressures on local authorities and urban spaces since the 2008 financial crisis, including austerity and budget cuts, the financialisation of housing, overtourism that negatively impacting locals, and the targeting of cities by Big...