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...

For some activists on the Labour left, municipal politics may now offer a constructive outlet and an opportunity to play a useful political role by using town halls as a base for action and agitation, linking up with trade unions, tenants’ unions, social movements and...

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...

Local elections in May 2015 represented a major shift in the political history of Barcelona (Spain). The Barcelona en Comú candidacy, born in January 2015 under the impetus of a set of progressive social and political organizations, became the first municipal political force in the...

In this episode of “City Stories” Alba del Campo, a Spanish journalist and activist fighting for more energy democracy. She has been an advisor to the local authority of Cadiz since 2015. A new local government elected in 2015 and re-elected in 2019. Since then,...

Four years ago progressive platforms won power in some of Spain’s biggest cities, including Madrid and Barcelona. The international left can learn a lot from their successes – and failures. Photo: Alex Wong

The article analyses the results of the 2019 municipal elections in Spain in different cities. According to the author, in order to understand the situation it is useful to pay attention to what happened to “the three souls of the movement”: traditional “left” forces, grassroots...

In the second part of the New Municipalism series, Ross talks to Barcelona-based scholar-activist Laura Roth. She talks about the Spanish experience, particularly in relation to Barcelona en Comú, the movement party, which has been in minority government since 2014. Laura talked about a range...

Mayors in some of England’s biggest cities are warning that local authorities are at risk of going bust with potentially devastating consequences for communities unless the government takes immediate action. As the impact of the Covid-19 crisis hits local authorities, the mayors of London, Greater...

Cooperation Jackson is only five years old, but the vision behind it is older. The original founders began to strategize to build a community of cooperatives in 2001, while many still lived in disparate parts of the country. Eventually, they chose to launch their participatory...

The book Sharing Cities looks back at the creation of Sharing Cities, composed of fifty cities around the world that began mapping their shared resources in October and November 2013 during Shareable’s first annual #MapJam. This was just the beginning of the Sharing Cities Network...

The new municipalist agenda is proving its capacity to provide effective responses to the demands for greater democracy at the local level. Furthermore, there is another, complementary argument for municipalism: it has the potential to feminize politics in a way that political action at the...