Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
For a council to have called a ‘climate emergency’, commonly advanced guidelines say that they must have: used these specific words in a motion or executive decision; they must set a target date to reduce their local climate impacts consistent with the IPCC report; they must set up a working group to report within a short timescale; and they must engage with a cross section of the community.
The population covered by local governments that have declared a climate emergency now approaches 50 million citizens in 8 countries – and this movement of movements is growing.
In reality, the municipalism of the Fearless Cities means that winning local governments and making them stronger is only part of a broader political strategy based on building power from the bottom up, both within and outside formal institutions.
Continuing our discussion of the potential pitfalls of radical municipalism, we want to address this toxic strain of localism – what we’ve termed dark municipalism – and why it is so dangerous. If a diverse, egalitarian, and ecological local politics is to be successful, it must develop strategies for addressing and combating these tendencies.
In moving together, municipalist movements are already demonstrating internationalism — in the “old” sense of working together across boundaries. Yet this internationalism provides the crucible for working towards internationalism in a “new” sense…
The Right to the City is a core ingredient in the radical municipalist movement now spreading across cities worldwide, driven by local issues.
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.
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.
For many years the left has struggled with the question of how to bring our ideas, of equality, economic justice and human rights, to fruition. And my father’s political trajectory is instructive for the argument that I want to make: that municipalism isn’t just one of many ways to bring about social change — it is really the only way that we will successfully transform society.
Blurring the lines between social movement and local governance, these municipalist experiments organize on the basis of existing municipalities or districts, demanding socially just and ecological solutions to issues that concern the community as a whole.
CommonsPolis— a civil society initiative to create dialogue between progressive municipalist movements and city governments, and European citizens — held an encounter described as “a common space for exchange; cities in transition and citizen struggles” in Paris on November 24, 2016…
A new film explains why Spain’s right-wing press reflections on the elections are wrong: they fail to understand where the new leaders really come from.
