The new municipalist agenda is shaping up worldwide. The requirement for successful municipalist experiences to exceed the local level and enter the regional or national agenda might jeopardize their existence, since it challenges the very bases of their conception. The notion of growth by “scaling...

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...

PENGON-FoE  was established as an umbrella organization to coordinate among various Palestinian non-governmental organizations tackling issues of environmental sustainability in Palestine. It remains the only Palestinian environmental organization’s network that works in both the West Bank and Gaza, with fourteen organizational members within it. PENGON...

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...

This article identifies three new municipalisms – platform, autonomist, managed – whose characteristics, contradictions, interconnections and potentials are explored in terms of state-space restructuring, urban-capitalist crisis and cycles of contention. Photo: Sharon McCutcheo

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. Aaron Vansintjan argues that the...

As a fresh wave of popular revolt washes over the globe, the fundamental questions of how revolutions happen, and how emancipatory outcomes result, are suddenly concrete concerns for organizers and movement builders. Photo: Anthony

In the 1970s, Chicago’s 44th Ward was placed under direct democratic control of its residents, challenging the corrupt mayor’s near-total control over the city. The objective of the ward assembly was two-fold: first, to direct the alderman on legislation in the city council, and second...

Over recent years there’s been a surge in European cities that, via public tendering, are using their spending power far more pro-actively and strategically to promote social justice and environmental goals. Leading this trend are city governments that define themselves as municipalist and are committed...

The rise of loneliness worldwide, the centrality of real estate speculation for global economic growth, and the breakdown of many large-scale factories that helped to bring workers together mean that we have to rethink the ways we demand change. We can build community and force...

This paper seeks to outline the changes that enabled the citizen platform Barcelona en Comú (Catalan for “Barcelona in Common”) to win the elections in Barcelona in 2015, a victory that signaled a rupture in the status quo of Spanish politics. Although the citizen platform...

In September 2013, 51% of the electorate voted to “re-municipalise” the local electricity and district heating networks, as proposed by grassroots initiative “Our Hamburg Our Grid”. And while the energy debate has only played a minor role in this year’s election campaign, it has increased...