Hilary Wainwright talks to Jo Littler. Hilary Wainwright discusses municipalism and its relationship to feminism, past and present. She discusses how the women’s liberation movement and in particular its creation of collective childcare produced a form of prefigurative politics which also opened up the possibilities...

Writer Hettie O’Brien analyses Hannah Arendt’s model of council democracy, and how Barcelona en Comú are transforming the way democracy works. According to O’Brien, if Arendt had been alive today, she may have looked to Barcelona’s government and Europe’s fearless cities movement for examples of...

Confederalism as a revolutionary strategy provides us with the means to build and organize a radically democratic and egalitarian society at scale. To understand how the confederation can form a real threat to the ruling class, one needs first to understand the strategy of social...

Laura Flanders reports from Amsterdam at The Future is Public, a conference that brings together hundreds of organizers, scholars, and government officials who are working to democratize their municipal and national economies.   Photo: rompalli harish

A former coal mining town in the North of France, Loos-en-Gohelle shows how a town can free itself from fossil fuel dependence through democratic participation, beginning with the real needs of locals. Photo: Pawel Blazewicz

Labor unions are losing political force in the US. Unless organized labor finds solutions to problems pervasive within its own organizations and structures, union membership numbers will continue to shrink. In order to revitalize labor unions, the lack of internal democracy is to be reversed....

Kate Shea Baird talks about her article, Lessons from the pandemic for the municipalists in Spain, on the This is Hell! podcast, commenting on US politics and Spanish municipalism. Beginning with the question of why Trump is so frightened at the movements that question the...

This report examines the re-emergence of the urban commons as both a bottom-up emergence by citizens/commoners and a radical municipal administrative configuration. Starting with an exploration of the relationship between cities and the commons, with a particular focus on the recent revival and growth of...

Scholars of participatory democracy have long noted dynamic interactions and transformations within and between political spaces that can foster (de)democratisation. At the heart of this dynamism lie (a) the processes through which top‐down “closed” spaces can create opportunities for rupture and democratic challenges and (b)...

In the Netherlands, as in other parts of the world, municipalist experiences are emerging as a way out to n alternative to the deep crisis in traditional centralist social democratic power parties. New progressive left wing political initiatives have emerged, putting the citizens in cities,...

The term ‘common space’ describes commoning processes as opposed to a purely physical space. Its particular spatiality is a dynamic condition of space sharing that produces spaces in the making. Through self-managed initiatives, the ‘right to the city’ becomes the right to collectively produce it...

New municipalism uses local government procurement as a powerful tool for reshaping local economies. The municipalist approach is seen by many as more affordable, sustainable and socially beneficial. Photo: Lewis Burrows