In a little-noticed procedural manoeuvre, in October 2020 the commission was forced to withdraw a so-called ‘Services Notification Procedure’ – which would have given it advance veto power over new laws by regional and local governments, and could have further limited local democratic initiatives in...

Did Barcelona en Comú preserve a decentralizated structure or adopted a conventional centralized organization during the 2015 Barcelona City Council election? In this article, the authors analyze the Twitter networks of the parties that ran for this election by measuring their hierarchical structure, information efficiency...

In June 2020, after a drawn-out process punctuated by the peak of the health crisis, Green lists excelled in France’s municipal elections. They are now at the head of the executive in some of France’s largest cities, including Marseille, Lyon, Bordeaux, Strasbourg, and Tours. In...

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...

In 2015, a new cycle of struggles for democratic governance unfolded at the level of the city. One such municipal movement and platform is Barcelona en Comú. Pioneering new ways and words for approaching the city as common(s), Barcelona en Comú opens possibilities for a...

Coronavirus 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...

For some activists on the Labour left, municipal politics may now offer a constructive outlet and an opportunity to play a useful political role by using town halls as a base for action and agitation, linking up with trade unions, tenants’ unions, social movements and...

In 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...

An interview with Bernardo Gutierrez, responsible for the Innovation Laboratories of MediaLab Prado de Madrid at the Our Common City conference held in Budapest (February 22 & 23, 2019). Part one:   Part two:   Photo: Joel Filipe

Selection of ROAR’s coverage over the past years of the Rojava Revolution, a struggle for autonomy in northern Syria initiated in July 2012. Photo: Miriam Espacio

Urban movements, borne out of civic activism in the first decade of the twenty-first century, function beyond the frameworks of official Polish urban development institutions and policies. In the recent years they have managed to enter the political debate, some of them morphing into a...

The 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