Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Radical municipalism is the idea that we can build popular assemblies and neighborhood councils, where people learn to manage their common life through face-to-face politics and develop the skills and the power to seize control: to take the city.
Both the Cleveland and Preston Models represent a reinvention of a longstanding political tradition that played a significant role in the development of mass socialist politics in Europe and North America.
To get an idea of what we want the future to look like, we need to take inspiration from and learn from those already building the institutions of tomorrow, today. In the next few installments, we’ll be highlighting movements and initiatives that we think are some of the seeds of a new world, already sprouting.
Health. Energy. Climate. Crime. Education. Happiness. Water. Housing. What if it were possible
to make headway on all these issues with simple changes to our neighborhoods?
We live where we do, and we become what we are through that lived environment, organically. If there is a consequence to it, it might be best, at the very least, that it not be one already determined by a planning board, because however well-meaning, their logic is likely not to be wholly their own.
In common with other critical social movements, the community gardens presented their demands under the umbrella of the right to the city, understood not as a legal claim, but as citizens’ right to intervene in the city, to build it and transform it.
With the development of Clichy-Batignolles, the city of Paris has created a groundbreaking eco-village filled with such buildings. Begun in 2002, the massive redevelopment project is about 30 percent complete and is slated to be finished in 2020.
Rio de Janeiro is a city of extremes. Inequality is rampant, and while a small elite enjoy the “luxury” of housing, high quality education, and concentrated public funding, the majority of its citizens share the rest. The best examples of sharing are born not out of excess but from scarcity and collective problem solving.
In both Spanish and Catalan, the word ‘marea’ means both ‘tide’ and ‘powerful social movement.’ Barcelona en Comú has set high – maybe unachievable – goals for the city. But they’re not expecting to go it alone.
Identifying where our campaigning aims overlap through a fossil fuel lens will enable us to expel the industry on a grand scale, and in turn enable us to transform our city on an equally grand scale- fairly, cleanly, and democratically.
Mobility, after all, is generally less important to people than accessibility. When we go somewhere it’s not the movement that’s valuable, it’s the access to something – a school, shopping, a workplace, a friend’s house or a park – that really counts.
And so the question of “what if London were to become a National Park City?” was born. What a great question. But not content to have just come up with a great “what if?” question, he has spent the last 4 years trying to make it happen. W
