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Radicalising democracy: How Hannah Arendt’s legacy endures in Barcelona
20th November 2018Writer 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...
Municipalism. Catalyst for change
20th June 2019In 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,...
From citizen platforms to Fearless Cities: Europe’s new municipalism
21st July 2017The growing momentum of local democratic initiatives seizing institutional power at a city level has great potential to address national and transnational political problems. In 2017 Barcelona hosted the Fearless Cities Summit, an international gathering which took important first steps in linking the new experiments...
Cities against centralization
1st February 1992This article is an homage to, and review of: The Rise of Urbanization and the Decline of Citizenship by Murray Bookchin. In Bookchin’s writing we can see that in his account is a pioneer effort that challenges misleading images of modern industrial achievement and triumphant western democracy....
The new municipal movements
21st July 2017The municipalist movement in the US today is like a seedling. It is small and delicate, fresh and brimming with potential. Although we often look for leftist leadership in big cities like New York City or Chicago, these new municipal leaders are rooted in relatively...
Austerity urbanism or pragmatic municipalism? Local government responses to fiscal stress in New York State
18th April 2019As local governments respond to fiscal stress after the global financial crisis, some scholars warn about an austerity urbanism response wherein local governments cut and privatize services, while others see a pragmatic municipalism response that seeks to protect public services by sharing services, applying for...
Decentralising geographies of political action: Civic tech and placebased municipalism
1st January 2019“Place-based civic tech”, citizen engagement technology codesigned by local government, civil society and global volunteers, constitutes a priced tool for the decentralization of power and decision-making. Together with certain offline practices, it fosters the politicization of civil society and renews the infrastructure of democracy. In...
Barcelona: crisis austerity and socio-political change
20th June 2016This case study of Barcelona is particularly interesting for a number of reasons. On one hand, for the strength of the participatory and collaborative tradition of Barcelona. On the other hand, because Barcelona has become particularly important since the local elections of May 2015, which...
The birth of a translocal movement
6th January 2017In 2015, the first Fearless Cities conference, hosted by Barcelona en Comú, became the starting point of a global municipalist movements that brings together a wide array of experiences with one thing in common: their will to promote the radicalization of democracy, and to do...
Pacifying the neighborhood
21st July 2017Until 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...
Homeless people mustn’t be abandoned to life on the streets again
12th August 2020Coronavirus has exposed the true numbers of those “hidden homeless” who were sofa-surfing and dependent on the generosity of family and friends. As the UK went into lockdown, close on 15,000 people in England who had been sleeping on the streets or in crowded night...
Between governance‐driven democratisation and democracy‐driven governance: Explaining changes in participatory governance in the case of Barcelona
30th September 2020Scholars 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)...