Laura Flanders reports from Amsterdam at The Future is Public, a conference that brings together hundreds of organizers, scholars, and government officials who are working to democratize their municipal and national economies.   Photo: rompalli harish

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

Even as anti-authoritarian, anti-racist movements all over the world are working to take power where they live, self-described localist movements have also won elections with racist, and frankly fascist, platforms. New right movements like the Lega Nord have even adopted the more typically leftist, anti-authoritarian...

The paper examines the successes, limitations and possibilities of citizen platforms after their first months in power in cities across Spain. Photo: Pixabay

Housing in London is a miserable experience for many, and it is most miserable of all for private renters. But London Renters’ Union has arrived! The article explains how the union works to transform individual difficulties into a collective struggle, which are the strategies, how...

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....

The local struggle to protect the Rio Blanco ecological reserve epitomizes the resistance against the destructive impact of decades of neoliberal development. Photo: Néstor Morales

The deaths of black Americans that proceeded George Floyd’s death all have a troubling common theme: the officers involved faced little to no legal repercussions for their actions. State and local governments are long overdue to publicly acknowledge, apologize and end their complicit role in...

Elected officials and environmental activists mobilised in Grenoble in the 1980s and 1990s to prove that corruption was involved in many deals, and set up an alternative, municipal entity to take back and run the water utility. Remunicipalisation took place in 2001, and opened the...

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...

As we witness the limits of the imaginable being radically shifted, the Zapatista experience is more relevant than ever. Yet, despite the challenges, in 26 years of their struggle for autonomy, Zapatistas have built functioning social arrangements based on bottom-up democracy, cooperation and communal justice,...

The conditions that brought about the “Greek crisis” are prevalent in many parts of the world and represent a new normality that threatens to shake the very foundations of social coexistence. Departing from the statement that the urban space is always a crystallization of broader...