An interview with Florian Schmidt, District councilor for building, planning and facility management in Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg, Berlin at the Our Common City conference in Budapest (February 22 & 23, 2019). Part one: Part two: Part three: Photo: bady qb

Airbnb hosts, as they are known, are wringing their hands over the collapse of the travel industry and their loss of income, and many city authorities are rubbing theirs at the prospect of thousands of holiday lets returning to the traditional rental market. The Airbnb...

The potential health impacts of COVID-19 are immense in informal settlements, but if control measures are poorly executed these could also have severe negative impacts. Public health interventions must be balanced with social and economic interventions, especially in relation to the informal economy upon which...

As faith in political systems and politicians continues to plummet and climate change escalates, an alternative that empowers local people to rescue their own communities is vital. How can politics be reclaimed by the people? Fed up with seeing their valued local services crumble over...

By interpreting the results of the world values survey one of the conclusions that scholars are getting to is that people value democracy, but just not the kind of representative democracy that they have. In addition, political parties from the extreme right are gaining support...

A growing number of cities around the world are temporarily reallocating road space from cars to people on foot and on cycles to keep key workers moving and residents in coronavirus lockdown healthy and active while socially distancing. Photo: Jack Van Hel

The local elections in 2018 showed some advances in the modification of the once-called ‘the oldest and toughest plutocracy in the world’, but the mixed results underscored the difficulty of mobilisation around a stale and sterile managerialist model of local government, as embodied in all...

Until relatively recently, the status quo in the cities of the Global South vacillated between neglect and persecution of the poor. In the past decade, however, we have seen a paradigm shift in urban policy, and cities in Brazil, Colombia and elsewhere are pioneering new...

The way that reality is laid out for us at the moment it might seem a bit defeated and hopeless. Reviewing some of the accomplishments and origins of municipalism shines a light on what according to Murray Bookchin pointed out can be a way to...

City governments were an important source of environmental protection in the United States from the 1800s until well into the 1900s. However, since Congress passed a series of landmark environmental statutes in the 1970s, scholars have primarily equated environmental law with federal law.  NYU Law...

Gianpaolo Baiocchi offers a historical overview of what he terms Radical Cities in Latin America and draws out some lessons from the past 30 years. Comparing these experiences to municipal politics in Europe and  elsewhere, he highlights the distinctive features and charts the ups and...

Universal healthcare, a green economy, affordable and sustainable housing, and much more: for many people, the Green New Deal sounds too good to be true at a time when trust in politicians has been eroded by too many empty promises. This is why locally organised, democratic movements are not just crucial to...