The 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...

We can chart a new path forward by grounding that vision in the lessons learned from past struggles and an understanding of how hierarchy is the shared root of oppression. But this can all feel a bit intangible without clear examples. To get an idea of what...

Coronavirus has exposed the true numbers of those “hidden homeless” who were sofa-surfing and dependent on the generosity of family and friends. As the UK went into lockdown, close on 15,000 people in England who had been sleeping on the streets or in crowded night...

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...

The new municipalism incarnated by experiences like Barcelona en Comú has become a model of political transformation. A new hypothesis seeks to put the international context in the centre of municipal debates and municipalism in the centre of global debates. The conclusion reached is that...

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 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...

After the success of the Fearless Cities North America summit held in New York, author Masha Gessen reflects on the origins and values of Barcelona en Comú, as well as the challenges that Ada Colau faces half way through her term in office. Photo: Umberto...

In 2014, and with the state government hell-bent on pushing through their privatization plans, ERA/FoEN launched the ‘Our water, Our Right’ campaign, a grassroots-heavy initiative that amplifies the voice of community people in Lagos, Nigeria. Since thise launch the campaign has held more than a...

After apartheid, Cape Town remained a city of islands: social, cultural and economic divisions are the rule. This has long undermined city-wide collective organizing and solidarity. The severe COVID19 lockdown and the goverment response aggravated the situation for many inhabitants. But an unprecedented community-led response...

John Boughton’s book Municipal Dreams offers a robust and clearheaded rejoinder to academic and activist work that pivots around the slippery, less tangible notion of the right to the city. Drawing from the  unequivocal celebration of the confident, progressive “spirit of ’45”—which delivered vast amounts...

Even before Hugo Chávez and Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva rose to national power and kicked off discussions of a Pink Tide, scholars and activists celebrated the municipal alternative in Latin America, where Porto Alegre’s participatory budgeting and El Alto’s cooperatives set the horizon of...