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...

Focusing on urbanization as a key driver of environmental change in the 21st century, researchers have created a framework to understand and compare cities’ food systems and their effects on climate change, water use and land use. The research will allow planners to estimate the...

The movement Ne da(vi)mo Beograd (Don’t let Belgrade d(r)own) opposes the Belgrade Waterfront project, designed to generate private gain and by means of non-transparent procedures. The movement has fostered massive participation, thus becoming successful in promoting the involvement of citizens in the municipal politics. Photo:...

The 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...

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...

In the past decade there has been a rise of new politics that have stemmed from different political backgrounds and contexts, and although they sometimes differ significantly, each was a manifestation of the “specter of emancipation” that was haunting the world. However, this emancipatory push...

Progressive municipalist city governments in Europe have introduced important policies to promote citizen participation, public ownership of services, expanded affordable housing, and many more. But their radical democratic programmes face obstacles from both EU and national neoliberal legislation. Photo: Pixabay

If we want to create a democratic culture that invites people in, though, we can’t restrict our thinking only to big-P “Politics” as represented by elections, Westminster, and political parties. Participatory and collaborative decision making happens in all sorts of settings and places.We need a...

For Mexico, Latin America and the international left, what emerged from the Chiapan mist along with the Zapatistas was the specter of revolution with a capital R—something the Mexican autocracy of the ruling Partido Revolucionario Institucional, the PRI, believed it had killed a long time...

Even as revolutionary new technologies appear—with the potential to free our lives from drudgery and connect us to one another in ways we had never imagined possible—our undemocratic economy has deployed them as tools of disruption. Dreams of a post-scarcity technological future darken into one...

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...

Democratic socialists rely heavily on electoral strategies to bring about socialism, but elections make a poor venue for radical working-class struggles. Can electoral politics shift us from capitalism to socialism? Photo: Pixabay