Venezuela’s communes bring together communal councils—local units of direct democratic self-government—with productive units known as social production enterprises. As Chávez himself often put it, the choice on the table is increasingly between la comuna o nada, the commune or nothing. Photo: Amber Lamoreaux

Barcelona has launched an ambitious 10-year plan to reclaim the city’s streets from cars and cut down pollution with the creation of green spaces and public squares. The new plan seeks to augment the city’s chronic lack of public space and address its equally chronic...

For over 50 years, one of the largest open air landfills in Europe has been poisoning the soil and air of Belgrade suburbs. French water and waste management giant Suez has signed a major contract with the leaders of the Serbian capital to build a...

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...

While today’s crises require action on a big scale, fighting for local democracy is the best chance to address them. Given that capitalism works at scale, radical municipalism requires collaboration at higher level to be successful. Gatherings as the Fearless Cities Summit in New York...

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...

INDEX 0. JUSTIFICATION 1. SITUATIONS COVERED BY THIS DOCUMENT 2. PREVENTION 3. CODE OF CONDUCT 3.1. OUR VALUES. WHAT IS OK. 3.2. WHAT IS NOT OK. EXAMPLES. 4. LINES OF ACTION IN THE EVENT OF SITUATIONS OF  VIOLENCE 0. JUSTIFICATION This document proposes two lines...

This piece situates entrepreneurial municipalism as one strand in an assemblage of new municipalist interventions, between radical urban social movements and more neoliberal strategies such as financialised municipal entrepreneurialism. Exploring how local authorities are working with social enterprises to harness place-based assets in ways which...

On Sunday the 28th of June, voters across France went to the polls to decide the municipal governments of 4.820 communes, including all of the country’s largest cities. Looking beneath the surface, all these victories were undergirded by widely differing political constellations. Despite a few...

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...

Municipalism is evolving strongly in Spain and across Europe, as shown by the examples portrayed during the Fearless Cities encounter in Barcelona. While there is a need for democratic reform in New Zealand, the possibility of embracing municipalism as a tool for change would require...

Faced with skyrocketing rents and powerful real estate empires, the citizens of Berlin are fighting back. They have forced the city’s authorities to take up the issue by freezing rents and protecting apartment blocks from speculators. A referendum campaign is under way that would go...