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The new municipalism (part 2)
5th April 2020In 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...
Seattle flirts with ‘municipal socialism’
31st July 2018The Seattle City Hall is deploying a set of “municipalist socialist” actions aimed at reversing the negative trends of the new urban job market and limiting private interests, therefore improving the lives of its inhabitants. An in other progressive cities, the municipal level has become...
Putting the ‘public’ back into public services
5th December 2019In the face of climate catastrophe, mounting inequalities and growing democratic unrest, public services are more important than ever. Across the world, people are building better, more democratic and inclusive public services because privatisations are failing. Amsterdam is confronted with challenges comparable to those facing...
The right to the city in an age of austerity
21st July 2017The 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...
Bakur rising: democratic autonomy in Kurdistan
21st July 2017In recent years, following the collapse of the peace process between the Turkish state and the Kurdish freedom movement, the struggle for autonomy in the towns and cities of northern Kurdistan, or Bakur, has undergone a significant shift from a non-violent re-organization of social and...
Casting shadows: Chokwe Lumumba and the struggle for racial justice and economic democracy in Jackson, MS
8th September 2015W.E.B Du Bois wrote these famous words in Black Reconstruction, linking America’s promise of democracy to the horrendous conditions for Black people in the South. Sadly, the State of Mississippi has long been a bellwether in this regard, from slavery and lynchings to Jim Crow,...
Conceptual prefiguration and municipal radicalism: Reimagining what it could mean to be a state
13th August 2019The book examines what value, if any, the state has for the pursuit of progressive politics; and how it might need to be reimagined and remade to deliver transformative change. Photo: Peter Döpper
Social ecology and the right to the city: Towards ecological and democratic cities
1st July 2019Cities are increasingly a major cause of, but also a potential solution for, environmental and social crises. Across the world, a new wave of urban social movements are arising: movements building economic, social, and political alternatives based on solidarity, equality, and participation. At the forefront...
Jackson rising: The struggle for economic democracy and black self-determination in Jackson, Mississippi
1st October 2017Mississippi is the poorest state in the U.S. with the highest percentage of Black people and a history of vicious racial terror. The concurrent Black resistance is the backdrop and context for the drama captured in the collection of essays that is Jackson Rising: The...
Debt. The straightjacket on municipalism
25th June 2020One of the main goals of the “municipalities of change”, elected in 2015 in Spain, was to tackle the debt problem. Drawing on the experience of civil society, they sought to develop approaches such as “citizen audits”, but found themselves facing the power of finance....
When a movement becomes a party: the experiment of Barcelona en Comù and the new network of Spanish democratic cities
7th September 2015To analyse and understand the ways in which it is possible for a decentralised and polycentric movement such as Barcelona en Comù to be voted at institutional level, D-CENT partners IN3 15M Data Analysis Group and Barcelona Media conducted the recently published research ‘When a...
Radical cities in Latin America: Past and present
6th December 2019Even 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...