North America Regional Municipalist Summit

New York City July 27-29, 2018

A growing movement across the globe is seeking to democratize and feminize political institutions at the level closest to our day-to-day lives: the municipal level. Weaving together social movements, participatory tools, solidarity economy, concrete wins, and the confluence of diverse political forces into a more direct form of democracy.

Join us in New York City from July 27-29 for the Fearless Cities North America Regional Summit, the first ever municipalist summit in North America. This regional Fearless Cities will include comprehensive participation from Canada, the United States, Mexico, and the Greater Caribbean and will be rooted in the international network coalesced by last year’s Fearless Cities international summit.

Register Here

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Adrian Smith: Residents living around Plaça del Sol joke that theirs is the only square where, despite the name, rain is preferable. Rain means fewer people gather to socialise and drink, reducing noise for the flats overlooking the square. Residents know this with considerable precision because they’ve developed a digital platform for measuring noise levels and mobilising action. I was told the joke by Remei, one of the residents who, with her ‘citizen scientist’ neighbours, are challenging assumptions about Big Data and the Smart City.

The Smart City and data sovereignty

The Smart City is an alluring prospect for many city leaders. Even if you haven’t heard of it, you may have already joined in by looking up bus movements on your phone, accessing Council services online or learning about air contamination levels. By inserting sensors across city infrastructures and creating new data sources – including citizens via their mobile devices – Smart City managers can apply Big Data analysis to monitor and anticipate urban phenomena in new ways, and, so the argument goes, efficiently manage urban activity for the benefit of ‘smart citizens’.

Barcelona has been a pioneering Smart City. The Council’s business partners have been installing sensors and opening data platforms for years. Not everyone is comfortable with this technocratic turn. After Ada Colau was elected Mayor on a mandate of democratising the city and putting citizens centre-stage, digital policy has sought to go ‘beyond the Smart City’. Chief Technology Officer Francesca Bria is opening digital platforms to greater citizen participation and oversight. Worried that the city’s knowledge was being ceded to tech vendors, the Council now promotes technological sovereignty.

On the surface, the noise project in Plaça del Sol is an example of such sovereignty. It even features in Council presentations. Look more deeply, however, and it becomes apparent that neighbourhood activists are really appropriating new technologies into the old-fashioned politics of community development.

Community developments

Plaça de Sol has always been a meeting place. But as the neighbourhood of Gràcia has changed, so the intensity and character of socialising in the square has altered. More bars, restaurants, hotels, tourists and youngsters have arrived, and Plaça del Sol’s long-standing position as venue for large, noisy groups drinking late into the night has become more entrenched. For years, resident complaints to the Council fell on deaf ears. For the Council, Gràcia signified an open, welcoming city and leisure economy. Residents I spoke with were proud of their vibrant neighbourhood. But they recalled a more convivial square, with kids playing games and families and friends socialising. Visitors attracted by Gràcia’s atmosphere also contributed to it, but residents in Plaça del Sol felt this had become a nuisance. It is a story familiar to many cities. Much urban politics turns on the negotiation of convivial uses of space.

What made Plaça del Sol stand out can be traced to a group of technology activists who got in touch with residents early in 2017. The activists were seeking participants in their project called Making Sense, which sought to resurrect a struggling ‘Smart Citizen Kit’ for environmental monitoring. The idea was to provide residents with the tools to measure noise levels, compare them with officially permissible levels, and reduce noise in the square. More than 40 neighbours signed up and installed 25 sensors on balconies and inside apartments.

The neighbours had what project coordinator Mara Balestrini from Ideas for Change calls ‘a matter of concern’. The earlier Smart Citizen Kit had begun as a technological solution looking for a problem: a crowd-funded gadget for measuring pollution, whose data users could upload to a web-platform for comparison with information from other users. Early adopters found the technology trickier to install than developers had presumed. Even successful users stopped monitoring because there was little community purpose. A new approach was needed. Noise in Plaça del Sol provided a problem for this technology fix.

Through meetings and workshops residents learnt about noise monitoring, and, importantly, activists learnt how to make technology matter for residents. The noise data they generated, unsurprisingly, exceeded norms recommended by both the World Health Organisation and municipal guidelines. Residents were codifying something already known: their square is very noisy. However, in rendering their experience into data, these citizen scientists could also compare their experience with official noise levels, refer to scientific studies about health impacts, and correlate levels to different activities in the square during the day and night.

The project decided to compare their square with other places in the city. At this point, they discovered the Council’s Sentilo Smart City platform already included a noise monitor in their square. Officials had been monitoring noise but not publicising the open data. Presented with citizen data, officials initially challenged the competence of resident monitoring, even though official data confirmed a noise problem. But as Rosa, one of the residents, said to me, “This is my data. They cannot deny it”.

Thick data

Residents were learning that data is rarely neutral. The kinds of data gathered, the methods used, how it gets interpreted, what gets overlooked, the context in which it is generated, and by whom, and what to do as a result, are all choices that shape the facts of a matter. For experts building Big Data city platforms, one sensor in one square is simply a data point. On the other side of that point, however, are residents connecting that data to life in all its richness in their square. Anthropologist Clifford Geertz argued many years ago that situations can only be made meaningful through ‘thick description’. Applied to the Smart City, this means data cannot really be explained and used without understanding the contexts in which it arises and gets used. Data can only mobilise people and change things when it becomes thick with social meaning.

Noise data in Plaça del Sol was becoming thick with social meaning. Collective data gathering proved more potent than decibel levels alone: it was simultaneously mobilising people into changing the situation. Noise was no longer an individual problem, but a collective issue. And it was no longer just noise. The data project arose through face-to-face meetings in a physical workshop space. Importantly, this meant that neighbours got to know one another better, and had reasons for discussing life in the square when they bumped into one another.

Attention turned to solutions. A citizen assembly convened in the square one weekend publicised the campaign and discuss ideas with passers-by. Some people wanted the local police to impose fines on noisy drinkers, whereas others were wary of heavy-handed approaches. Some suggested installing a children’s playground. Architects helped locals examine material changes that could dampen sound.

The Council response has been cautious. New flowerbeds along one side of the square remove steps where groups used to sit and drink. Banners and community police officers remind people to respect the neighbourhood. The Council recently announced plans for a movable playground (whose occupation of the centre of the square can be removed for events, like the Festa Major de Gràcia). Residents will be able to monitor how these interventions change noise in the square. Their demands confront an established leisure economy. As local councillor Robert Soro explained to me, convivial uses have also to address the interests of bar owners, public space managers, tourism, commerce, and others. Beyond economic issues are questions of rights to public space, young peoples’ needs to socialise, neighbouring squares worried about displaced activity, the Council’s vision for Gràcia, and of course, the residents suffering the noise.

The politics beneath Smart City platforms

For the Council, technology activists, and residents of Plaça del Sol, data alone cannot solve their issues. Data cannot transcend the lively and contradictory social worlds that it measures. If data is to act then it needs ultimately to be brought back into those generative social contexts – which, as Jordi Giró at the Catalan Confederation of Neighbourhood Associations reminds us, means cultivating people skills and political capacity. Going beyond the Smart City demands something its technocratic efficiency is supposed to make redundant: investment in old-fashioned, street-level skills in community development. Technology vendors cannot sell such skills. They are cultivated through the kinds of community activism that first brought Ada Colau to prominence, and eventually into office.

Adrian Smith is Professor of Technology and Society at the Science Policy Research Unit at the University of Sussex, and Visiting Professor at the Centro de Innovación en Tecnología para el Desarrollo Humano at the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid. This blog comes from a European research project analysing the knowledge politics of smart urbanism. He is on Twitter as @smithadrianpaul

Reposted from The Guardian, with the permission of the author.

Image: Making Sense (Talking about noise in Plaça del Sol)

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The first response attempts to regain control and security through new forms of authoritarianism and protectionism. We’ve seen the return of the nation state as a reaction to global capitalism, the re-emergence of national and cultural identity, and a revival of racist and xenophobic discourses.

The second response, fuelled by techno-optimism, sees no limit to our capacity to invent our way out of global crisis through what has been described as a ‘fourth industrial revolution’. This approach is advocated by organisations such as the World Economic Forum, along with  a multitude of transnational corporations, financial powers and governments. Following a competitive logic, it suggests that individuals and societies that are better technologically adapted will prosper, whilst others will be left behind.

The third response sees neighborhoods, towns and cities around the world emerge as the place to defend human rights, democracy and the common good. Neighbours and citizens are uniting in solidarity networks to address pressing global challenges, from access to housing and basic services to climate change and the refugee crisis. This new municipalist movement seeks to build counter power from the bottom up, challenging the dominance of the nation state and capitalist markets, putting power back into the hands of people.

Fearless Cities: the municipal hope

In June we participated in the first ever international municipal summit, which was organised by Barcelona en Comú, a citizen platform whose radical politics and rapid takeover of the City Hall has inspired activists and councillors around the world.

The summit brought together over 700 mayors, councillors, activists and citizens from more than 180 cities in more than 40 countries across five continents, including representatives from roughly 100 citizen platforms, all aiming to build global networks of solidarity and hope between municipalities.

The agenda—public space and the commons, housing, gentrification and tourism, the feminisation of politics, mobility and pollution, radical democracy in town and city councils, creating non-state institutions, socio-ecological transition, re-municipalisation of basic services, sanctuary and refuge cities—was a demonstration of the common challenges we face, and far removed from the dominant logic of economic growth to which national institutions, increasingly separated from the day-to-day reality of citizens’ lives, direct their attention.

With accessible ticket prices, child care provision, a bar run by an association of the unemployed, the main talks free to the public and the opening plenary held in one of the central squares, Barcelona en Comú remained true to their values of inclusion and participation. The conference involved an incredible diversity of people, not only as participants, but also filling the panels and leading the workshops. ‘This is the first panel I have ever seen that doesn’t include a single white male,’ commented one of the participants.

The emergence of citizen platforms

Since the financial crisis in 2007-8, citizen platforms have rapidly emerged across the globe. Their rise has been particularly strong in certain countries, such as Spain, where they now govern most major cities, as well as many towns and rural areas. These citizen groups are generally composed of independent candidates or of an alliance between independents and members of progressive political parties, with members frequently having roots in social movements. Ada Colau, for example, was at the forefront of the anti-eviction group, Platform for People Affected by Mortgages (Plataforma de Afectados por la Hipoteca), before becoming mayor of Barcelona.

Some citizen platforms are elected on a particular agenda, such as Barcelona en  Comú, who came to power in 2015 promising to defend citizen rights, rethink tourism in the city, fight corruption, and radically democratise local politics. Others have crowd-sourced their agenda or don’t have an agenda at all. Indy Monmouth in Wales, for example, ran for election with the promise that they would take their lead from the community once they were elected. This desire to transform politics and put power back into the hands of people is one of the primary aims of citizen platforms and the municipalist movement.

Radical democracy and the feminisation of politics

Municipalism is concerned as much with how outcomes are achieved as with the outcomes themselves. The need to radically democratise and feminise the political space was a persistent theme throughout the Fearless Cities conference.

Barcelona en Comú described how the democratisation and feminisation of politics is key to transformation, by bringing marginalised voices into the debate; reducing hierarchy; decentralising decision making; enabling dialogue, listening and collective intelligence; re-evaluating what we understand by the term experts and seeing everyone as experts in their own day-to-day life, their neighbourhoods and their communities; placing care, co-operation, relationship and people’s lived experience at the heart of politics; and facilitating co-responsibility for where we live, for the environment and for each other.

This kind of politics has the potential to include rather than alienate, to create interdependence rather than dependence, to liberate the knowledge, experience and visions of a huge diversity of people, and empower us to act together to bring about change. It’s not glamorous but it’s potentially transformative — it’s about learning by doing, and is concerned with addressing day-to-day needs and issues, such as housing and access to basic services.

This approach dispels the idea that our political participation happens once every four years when we vote and makes everyday life a matter of politics. Starting from the grassroots we have the opportunity to build democracy at the level that government directly interacts with people’s daily lives, and where the negative effects of neoliberalism are experienced on a daily basis. It has the potential to bring us together rather than tear us apart as we build an alternative identity that is based on where we live and on our participation, relationships and collective concerns, as neighbours, friends and community, rather than being attached to our nationality, race or ethnicity.

Libertarian municipalism and social ecology

The term municipalism stems from ‘libertarian municipalism’, a type of political organisation proposed by American social theorist and philosopher Murray Bookchin. It involves neighbourhood assemblies that practice direct democracy and seek to form a confederation of municipalities, as an alternative to the power of the centralised state.

This approach sees democratic communities as the driver of change, as the means by which we can redefine how we live together and our relationship with the natural world. Offering a holistic vision, the approach recognises the interdependent and eco-dependent nature of life and sees the ecological and social crises as inseparable.

Municipalism in practice

Municipalism offers us the opportunity to redefine the political arena and return power to the grassroots, to neighbourhoods, to local assemblies, to living rooms, to citizens. We shape a new world, starting where we live. And it’s not just in theory — it’s happening in practice in towns and cities all over the world.

One of the leading lights has been Barcelona en Comú, and it’s no wonder they have captured the world’s attention—the progressive nature of their politics and the ambitious goals they are working towards are both humbling and awe-inspiring.

Some of their objectives include rehabilitating housing and sanctions against empty buildings; introducing energy efficiency criteria for new buildings; promoting urban agriculture; supporting care and care services; introducing a tourist tax; incorporating social and environmental criteria in public procurement; re-municipalisation of water supply alongside re-localisation of energy production; strengthening local trade; promoting social entrepreneurship and co-operatives; introducing independent citizen audits of municipal budgets and debt; establishing salary limits, including publication of income and assets; and supporting local initiatives such as social centres, consumer co-operatives, community gardens, time banks and social currencies.

Taking their lead from local people, decisions are made within neighbourhood groups and district assemblies. Autonomous and self-managed, these groups and assemblies deal with the issues affecting their geographical area. If you’re not able to attend, you can still get involved by using one of their many online participatory tools, and  Decidim.Barcelona was the first open source platform made with and for citizens. This digital tool has been used to develop the Municipal Action Plan, which sets out the priorities and objectives for the local government.

In this same spirit, Citizen Platform — Ciudad Futura — in Rosario, Argentina, use processes that enable citizens to imagine and build the future society they want to see. Originating from the convergence of two social movements known for their commitment to popular struggle, they gained the support of nearly 100,000 local people and managed to elect three councillors to the City Hall in 2015. They maintain one foot inside the institution and the other rooted in the social movements from which they sprung. They are transforming existing local institutions whilst also building new non-state institutions, and their motto is ‘hacer’, meaning ‘to do’ or ‘to make’ in Spanish.

But if there’s anywhere that demonstrates the potential that we have to reclaim our territories and build something new, based on principles of democracy, participation and equity, it has to be Rojava in Northern Syria.  Under conditions of unimaginable terror and oppression, they have created an independent state with decentralised self-rule. The region is made up of 130 municipalities, with populations that include many different religions and ethnicities — Kurds, Arabs, Turks, Syrians, Christians, Muslims and many more. Together, they have built their own administration based on principles of democratic confederalism and characterised by grassroots participation, ecological sustainability, protection of ethnic and religious minorities and gender equality, including the co-presidency of one male and one female president.

These are just three of the many stories of municipalist-led change that inspired us at the conference. There were numerous others from towns and cities around the world, such as Attica (Greece), Belo Horizonte (Brazil), Jackson (USA), Cape Town (South Africa), Grenoble (France), Hong Kong (China), Buckfastleigh (UK), Madrid (Spain), Naples (Italy), Valparaíso (Chile), New York City (USA) and many more.

Local limitations and the rise of a global municipalist movement

The desire to access local government powers came, in part, from the limitations of protest and a wish to transform local institutions so that they could support social movements.

Along with the many success stories, councillors and mayors also spoke of the numerous challenges that they have faced on entering local government: age-old hierarchies, systems and traditions that are deeply embedded in their institutions; cuts to their budgets and resources; and the austerity, anti-immigration and other measures imposed from above.

Bit by bit, citizen platforms and progressive local politics are making headway, opening up spaces and redistributing power, but it’s often slower than originally hoped. Alongside citizen platforms, there is strong recognition of the fundamental role that social movements and non-state institutions have to play within the municipalist movement, in order to achieve the profound social and ecological change needed. These citizen platforms need strong movements on the ground that push for change from outside of the institution.

An important next step for this movement, and one of the main aims of the conference, is to form an international municipalist network. Putting technology at its service, the movement is spanning borders and becoming an interconnected web of place-based change that includes local government, social movements and non-state institutions.This comes from the recognition that we cannot work in isolation nor within the restrictions of national borders. Many of the most pressing challenges we face, such as climate change and the refugee crisis are global in nature and we need to work together to address them.

Info & Credits

All workshops and talks from the Fearless Cities conference are available for free online.

Jenny is co-founder of School Farm Community Supported Agriculture. She has a background in local community development and environmental education. Her focus is on connecting the social and the ecological to bring about grassroots systems change.  For the past year she has been living and working in Spain.

Marcos heads up research and training at Solidarity International Andalusia, in Spain. His work focuses on strategies for building local resilience. He has a background in social and political activism.

Published in STIR magazine no.19, Autumn 2017.

Online version at stirtoaction.com

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This post is part of our series of articles on the Urban Commons sourced from the Green European Journal Editorial Board. These were published as part of Volume 16 “Talk of the Town: Exploring the City in Europe”. In this instalment, Lorenzo Marsili of DIEM25 interviews Joan Subirats, founder and director of the Institute for Government and Public Policy at the Autonomous University of Barcelona.

Lorenzo Marsili: A spectre seems to be haunting Europe: the spectre of the cities. Why do you think there is such symbolic power in what you are doing in Barcelona?

Joan Subirats: There are certainly various factors. One general factor is the transformation to a more platform-based capitalism – a monopolistic, digital capitalism – in which states have lost the ability to respond because the big players are the investment funds, Google, Apple, Facebook, and Microsoft. States are then trapped in the logic of debt and austerity policy. At the same time, the population faces increasing difficulties and there is a sense of uncertainty and fear, a feeling of not knowing what will happen in the future; what will happen to my standard of living, what will happen to my country, and what will happen to us? Many years ago, the philosopher Karl Polanyi talked about the movement towards commodification and the countermovement of protection. Where do you turn today for protection?

Many would still argue to the state.

Yes, the state is the classic place to turn to demand protection. Following a more conservative, closed, and xenophobic logic, the state is still a space where you can claim protection, in many cases by closing borders and closing societies. However, cities are different in nature because they were born to be open. “The city air makes us feel free”1, as the adage goes. Cities are spaces that gather opportunities and possibilities. The proximity of city authorities and political actors offers another kind of protection, much closer and tangible to citizens, albeit admittedly with fewer policy competences and powers than the nation-state. This means that cities seem to be a space where some things – but not everything – can change and change for the better.

Speaking of Polanyi, the philosophy professor Nancy Fraser claims that the second movement, the movement of protection, is one that historically defended primarily the male, white, Western breadwinner against women, minorities, and the Global South. And so she introduces the need for a third movement: one of autonomy and emancipation. To what extent can the ‘protection’ of the city differ from traditional state protection?

It’s a very good question, because it links in with the Ada Colau factor, the Barcelona factor, the PAH factor [Platform of People Affected by Mortgages], and the antieviction movement. There is a specific type of change happening in relation to the PAH, which I think is highly significant. When someone goes to the PAH saying they are having problems and cannot pay the mortgage, and that they will be evicted, they meet others facing the same problems who tell them: “We are not going to solve your problem. You have to become an activist, so we can solve our problems together.” This means that you are not a client of the PAH – you must become a PAH activist, so that you can change things together. And this is a process of emancipation, not a process of service provision, and it does not follow the outsourcing logic of unions or political parties: “Come and delegate your issues to us, then we will defend your ideas in your name.” This delegating approach does not exist in the PAH. The PAH involves making people more active.

How does this become institutionalised? To what extent do these processes of politicisation, of activation – which are also at the basis of the discourse on the commons in the end, with co-ownership and co-management – end up in the policies of the administration?

This is the big initiative that started in May 2015. There were four basic points in the Barcelona en Comú manifesto in the elections, and these could be adopted by other similar platforms elsewhere in Spain. The first was to give control of institutions back to the people, institutions have been captured, and they are not serving our interests. Secondly, people are being put in an increasingly precarious situation, financially and socially. Inequality is increasing, basic social protection mechanisms are being destroyed. We still need to recover the capacity to provide protection, so there is a social emergency that demands a response. Thirdly, we have to build up a more participative democracy that does not delegate. It is not easy, but we must make people more involved in the decisions that affect them. That is where you get onto co-production of policy, co-creation of decisions, etc. The fourth point is that we have to end corruption and cronyism in politics, which people perceive as privilege. Salaries need to be reduced, things have to be done transparently, mandates must be limited – in short, there needs to be more morality in politics.

And how is it going?

To start with, I would say that the most significant progress has certainly been made on the second point: making better thought-out policies to respond to the social emergency. This has in some ways restored legitimacy on the first point: recovering institutions for a different type of politics. Secondly, there are no corruption scandals anywhere in the ‘cities of change’. The rather difficult point that I think still poses difficulties is making institutions more participative, and developing co-production of policy. This is because the traditions, routines, and working methods of the institutions are a long way from this approach. Our institutions have a very 19th and 20th century approach, they are very pre-digital, and discussing ‘co-production’ involves talking about methods for including collective intelligence in such processes – it’s not easy.

There is a very interesting international debate on technological sovereignty, moving beyond a system where all data and all social interactions are monetised by the giants of Silicon Valley. What exactly are you are doing on the digital commons?

We have begun changing the base of proprietary software used by the municipal council, and ensuring that contracts made between the council and software providers do not cede the data used for those services to the companies. This also means ensuring that, in a city that is home to Smart Cities and the Mobile World Congress, technological innovation alters the city’s approach, whilst at the same time changing the thinking behind these forums, although this is no easy task. This is why we appointed a commissioner for innovation and technological sovereignty. For instance, we are working on a new contract for a joint transport card to cover trains, buses, and the underground. This card will be manufactured by a provider, and the contract should specify that the local public transport data of all the residents of Barcelona will be controlled by the public authorities. It is a debate about sovereignty – not state sovereignty, but energy, water, food, and digital sovereignty. Those are the public priorities and the needs that are being debated.

I like the concept of ‘sovereignty of proximity’ or ‘sovereignties’, as too often sovereignty is equated simply with national sovereignty. But many constitutions, such as the Italian one, state that “sovereignty belongs to the people”, not to the nation-state! Yet, in constitutional arrangements the role of cities is still very limited; their actual competences are narrow. Wouldn’t any attempt to place the city at the centre of a renewed governance require a national-level political fight to change the allocation of competences between the different levels?

I like talking about the question of the ‘level of responsibility’ of municipalities, which is high because they have very broad agendas, in terms of responding to the demands of citizens. However their ‘level of powers’ – what they are able to do – is much lower. Not everything can be solved locally, it is obvious. And surely, that is why Barcelona en Comú is trying to build a movement across Catalonia. It is called Catalunya en Comú and it works within a logic of federal alliances with Podemos. This is because if you are unable to have influence at the level of Catalonia itself – where education and healthcare policies are decided – or at the state level, you are not able to act. But at the same time, it is true that at the local level, you are able to intervene more than your powers may suggest. My political mobilisation can reach further than my powers. In other words, the conflict is not only legal, but also political. For example, you may not have powers regarding housing in Catalonia. In Barcelona, these powers are in the hands of the autonomous Generalitat or the state. But you can also take it to the streets with political mobilisations to solve housing problems, and there you can make alliances against Airbnb – with Berlin, with Amsterdam, and with New York. That dynamic will force Airbnb to respond, even though the Spanish, U.S., and Dutch states are unable to solve the problem. So I think we should not be limited by the idea that there are no legal powers.

The opposition between city and state is interesting here. We have a paradoxical situation, as you know, where many cities across Europe – Barcelona is one of them – would like to welcome refugees and yet their nation-states often block this. The Spanish government is no exception. Could we envision a disobedient act, where a city would unilaterally welcome a certain number of refugees? Interestingly, you would be disobeying the national government but paradoxically you would be obeying the European scheme on refugee relocation that the national government is itself disobeying in the first place.

Yes, that is a good example and I think it could be implemented. It would certainly have more political effect than real effect, as you would not solve the big problem of refugees. However you would be sending a very clear message that it is possible to do things at city level and that people are prepared to do things, and it would not just be rhetoric. Certainly, in other cases similar things could be done. In fact, action has been taken here, for example on the ability of property investment funds to buy buildings. The municipal council of Barcelona cannot legally break the law, but it has made it more difficult in many ways for investment funds to make those deals. In some cases it has even foiled these purchases by buying a building itself to prevent it becoming a target for speculation.

German politician Gesine Schwan is bringing forward a proposal to directly connect the European-level relocation of refugees with municipalities, by essentially bypassing the nation-state. Do you think that we need to review the institutional levels that currently govern the European Union, which are mostly organised according to a ‘nation-state to European Union’ structure, thinking instead of a ‘municipality to European Union’ structure?

Yes, I think that this is an area where we can connect existing experiences. There are organisations like EuroCities that have been created for benchmarking and learning between cities. There are working groups dealing with mobility, social policy, and so on. I think that we should follow up more on this approach of coordinating at local level, and we should look for opportunities to have a direct dialogue with the European Union, skipping the state level. I think it will not be at all easy because nation-states have captured the European decision-making structure. So even if cities had an ally in the European Union, it would not be easy, but it could be done. I believe that the European Union would be rather reluctant to take that step. I think the way would be to create a European forum of local authorities, which would grow in strength, and would be able to make the leap in this area.

Can you imagine a European network of cities of change that acts a bit as a counterpower, as much to the European Union as to nation-states?

I think it is not only possible but desirable. I think that the Barcelona municipal authority is already moving in that direction. Many years ago, Barcelona made Sarajevo its eleventh district, and there is also a strong collaboration between Barcelona and the Gaza Strip in Palestine, including a very close relationship with municipal technical officials working in Gaza. The municipality of Barcelona’s tradition of international cooperation is well-established, so building on this would be nothing new.

There seems to be a particularity about Europe, namely the existence of a transnational political structure that governs the spaces that we happen to inhabit. The political theorist Benjamin Barber proposed a global parliament of mayors – which clearly is a very interesting intellectual proposal at the global level because there is no global government. But in Europe we do have at least a simulacrum of a European government. Do you think one could envisage creating an institutionally recognised space for cities, like a European parliament of cities?

It could be done but for it to be really constructive and powerful and for it to make progress, it should not be shaped initially by institutions, bureaucrats, or organisations. It should rather work on the basis of encounters from below and building the legitimacy of mayors that have made an impact (in Naples, Madrid, Barcelona, etc.). It should be seen to be a process working from the bottom up, without any desire to make quick political capital from above. This would be much more resilient and it would ultimately be powerful.

Building a European and international role for cities is a very demanding task. Often when I go and advocate for these ideas with city administrations I notice that municipalities very often lack the staff and the offices to deal with this more political or diplomatic work. If we posit a new global or European role for cities then cities need to invest in an institutional machinery that can actually perform this work.

This is certainly true. The shortcomings that you mention could certainly be addressed if we worked with a more metropolitan approach. The term municipality does not always refer to the same thing: Madrid covers 600 km2 and Barcelona 100 km2. Paris is divided into the City of Paris and Greater Paris. If we worked to build the concept of a Greater Barcelona rather than the City of Barcelona, this would mean moving from 1.5 million inhabitants to 3.5 million. The 25 town councils that make up the metropolitan area would certainly agree to invest resources to foster international processes. Paris may already be working on this, and it has a metropolitan dimension that could be strengthened. It is certainly true that there is a lack of staff and tradition. People think in global terms without stopping to think that cities always have to go through the state to work internationally. This situation would be eased by focusing on the metropolis.

Let’s close with the global dimension proper. More than half the world’s population lives in urban areas, while the top 100 cities produce just under half the world’s GDP. In June 2017, Barcelona hosted a global summit, Fearless Cities, bringing together mayors from across the world to commit to joint initiatives to tackle precisely the global challenges that national leadership seems increasingly unable to address. How do you see this developing further? What concrete actions could be put in place?

In my opinion the best way would be to work with a concrete agenda, and to find the issues that can most easily draw cities in and connect with them. For example, the issue of redistribution, the question of the minimum wage – which has sparked debate in London, Seattle, and New York – and issues of housing, primary education, energy, and water. We could start with issues like these, that are clearly cross-cutting and global, affecting everywhere in the world, and start linking agendas across Europe in a more specific way. This would facilitate the political and institutional side, and we could make the leap more quickly. When people see the shortcomings in the area of policies, this will highlight the shortcomings in the area of polity.

The Green European Journal, published by the European Green Foundation, has published a very interesting special issue focusing on the urban commons, which we want to specially honour and support by bringing individual attention to several of its contributions. This is our 1st article in the series. It’s a landmark special issue that warrants reading it in full.

1 After ‘Stadtluft macht frei’, a German medieval dictum describing a principle of law that offered freedom and land to settlers who took up urban residence for more than “a year and a day.”

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In Spain’s municipal elections of May 2015, a constellation of new political forces emerged. For the first time in almost 40 years of Spanish democracy, the country’s major cities would no longer be ruled by either the Partido Popular (PP) or the Partido Socialista Obrero Español (PSOE), or any of the other long established political forces, but by new “Municipalist Confluences” such as Ahora Madrid, Barcelona en Comú, and Cadiz Si Se Puede, to name just a few.

While each of these Municipalist Confluences is the product of specific local contexts, with its own languages, traditions, and cultures, together they represent the possibility of a sea change in the politics of Spain and beyond. Especially in light of the existence of a strong, post-Francoist right, which has committed itself to the “culture war” of Spanish nationalism, these confluences point toward the possibility of creating a new political subject capable of breaking the impasse that has characterized so much of national politics in the age of austerity.

Bringing together political parties new and old, nationwide movements and hyper-local social initiatives, and a mass of disaffected voters with long-organized neighborhood groups, these confluences are a sort of radical experiment conducted at the municipal level. They have not only restructured established political processes and practices, but also shifted notions of power in order to grant traditionally underrepresented groups, including women, access to the political domain. The election of Ada Colau is a case in point. As the first woman to hold the office of Mayor of Barcelona, Colau’s political work highlights the connections between gender equality and other forms of social, political, and economic justice.

Author Vicente Rubio-Pueyo is a professor at Fordham University. He has written extensively, both in academic contexts and in the press, on the current social and political conjuncture in Spain, and on political forces including Podemos and the Municipalist Confluences. A Spaniard living in the US for more than ten years now, Vicente has also been active in building connections and mutual understanding between these forces and their counterparts in North America.

In this excellent study he analyzes the Municipalist Confluences, how they came to be, and where they can take politics in Spain and beyond. Drawing on a deep knowledge of history, combined with astute theoretical and political analysis, Rubio-Pueyo provides an international audience with everything it needs to know about municipalism in Spain. His work brings us up to the minute, and is sure to have value for years to come.

DOWNLOAD FULL TEXT  (English)

Photo by BarcelonaEnComu

The post Essay of the day: Municipalism in Spain; from Barcelona to Madrid, and beyond appeared first on P2P Foundation.

“We must listen and talk with the people because it’s they we must obey”
Ada Colau

Learnings, limits and opportunities of two years of the government of change in the City Council of Barcelona, explained by some of its protagonists inside and outside the institution. Visit the documentary’s webpage here.

TWO YEARS LATER

This document (download as a PDF) highlights a number of themes and questions to galvanize debate after watching “Two Years Later”. The idea is to discuss the three transversal themes that appear in the documentary:

1.  MUNICIPALISM

 The approach of municipalism is that of a democratic system based on proximity, horizontality and direct democracy. The aim of decentralizing power by having neighbourhoods and communities as the starting point underscores the pragmatic and direct methods where objectives come before party interests. The main objectives are placing day-to-day practice and remedies at the centre of the political debate, construct from the bottom and opt for collective intelligence.

Possible questions

• What examples of municipalism appear in the video?
• Do you know any municipalist projects that inspire you to trust institutional politics? If so, which are they and why?
• Should a municipalist movement go beyond its city? If you agree, how should it and why?

2.  SOCIAL MOVEMENTS AND THE INSTITUTIONS           

A large number of the people in Barcelona En Comú come from social movements. This has brought about  a new relationship with the powers, with the institutions and with these activist spheres. With an aim to readjust these relationships, the idea is that of an “open” Town Hall, an approachable organization and active heeding of challenges by a mobilized citizenship.

Possible questions

• Is it possible to defend the same from within the institutions as from without?
• How should an activist behave before an apparently like-minded government?
• How can governments  for change avoid being victims  of the expectations they themselves have brought about?

3.  FEMINIZING POLITICS

The aim of feminizing politics is to break away from male and patriarchal logic, which impose certain forms of relationships and order. It does, of course, go way beyond the essential requirement of including women in public office and work teams and the proposal involves changes in practice and policy and placing people and their concerns at the centre of institutional policy.

Possible questions

•  How is this attempt at feminizing politics apparent in the video?
• What difficulties have there been? What examples of feminist policies are shown in the video?
• How would we react to a politician if they publicly discussed their doubts, fears or contradictions? Would it be the same in the case of a man and in that of a woman?
• How would you adopt “a feminist focus to all areas of government”?

The post Two years later: A short documentary from Barcelona’s government of change appeared first on P2P Foundation.

On the second weekend in June, hundreds of people flocked to Barcelona to discuss the idea of municipalism and radical democracy, broadly under the banner of “Fearless Cities.” This event also served to commemorate two years of progressive leadership throughout many of Spain’s city halls, including Madrid and Barcelona. Activists, mayors, city council members, academics, and NGO workers came together to explore such themes as “feminizing politics,” “sanctuary and refuge,” and “anti-corruption and transparency.” Despite these weighty ideas, the event was joyous and at times jubilant. During an opening conversation that served to welcome participants, Manuela Carmena and Ada Colau, the mayors of Madrid and Barcelona, spoke of friendship and intimacy even during our dark geopolitical moment. Indeed, despite this light tone, Trump was often in evidence.

Since the beginning of their administrations, these citizens’ platforms in Spain have explicitly staked a left-leaning claim against the hard right turn of the government, particularly regarding immigrants and the question of Europe’s ongoing refugee crisis. Early on, both Madrid and Barcelona declared themselves to be cities of refuge; Madrid’s city hall has proudly worn a “Refugees Welcome” banner for the better part of two years. With Trump’s victory, presaged on this side of the Atlantic by the rise of Le Pen and Wilders, Poland’s renewed nationalism, the endless drama of Brexit, and the constant specter of Islamophobia in response to terrorism, those sentiments are important antidotes to a global turn towards fear and hate.

Spain, however, still seems far removed from Lesbos and Lampedusa, and has yet to receive an influx of refugees. At the same time, its population grows ever more diverse, and its major cities are now full of multi-ethnic neighborhoods. Wandering the Raval neighborhood in Barcelona on a Monday, I chanced upon a school getting out for lunch; the young students who streamed out were Filipino, Pakistani, and Chinese with nary a “native” face in sight. This is the newest generation of urban Spaniards. Yet despite the dramatic demographic shifts, neither “Fearless Cities” nor the broader project of Spanish municipalism has taken up the question of immigration and ethnic and racial difference as a serious component of contemporary urban governance. While Barcelona’s charismatic and charming deputy mayor (and friend of the UDL), Gerardo Pisarello, is a Latino immigrant, the ranks of Barcelona en Comu and Ahora Madrid are startlingly devoid of migrant voices. And despite having emerged in part from the multi-ethnic housing movement, these platforms often appear to treat migrants as objects of political action instead of incorporating them as fellow political subjects.

This reality was brought home during a session on initiating municipalism in the United States. As Kali Akuno of Cooperation Jackson described his organization’s efforts to reclaim an urban politics of redistribution, it was clear that historical legacies of enslavement continue to shape the present in a majority black city where whites control the vast majority of wealth. This point was driven home by Jennifer Epps-Addison from the Center for Popular Democracy, who pointed to the salience of race in contemporary urban struggles, yet its absence within a conference meant to confront injustice and oppression within the city. In a later session on the rise of White Nationalism, few non-Americans were in attendance. However as a woman from Brussels reminded the audience, racism and fear of the ethnic other infect everyday discourse and policy directives, configuring the now infamous neighborhood of Molenbeek into a dangerous cancer to be excised from the greater urban polity. In a rousing closing, the Bishop Dwayne Royster, the National Network Political Director for PICO, a faith-based organizing network, instructed the audience: “White supremacy predates America. It’s a European construct.” Indeed, while America’s tangled racial history is in many ways its own, race and racism haunt the continent. As Europe’s aging nations replenish their populations with communities born elsewhere, cities are the crucible for new forms of encounter and exchange. Thus a truly emancipatory municipalism must engage with difference—class, gender, age, and yes, race—in the pursuit of radical democracy.

Photo by Diego Sideburns

The post Fearless Cities: A Dispatch from Barcelona appeared first on P2P Foundation.

‘Municipal politics’ may raise new types of demands crucial in organising powerful social movements and improving material conditions, while orienting us towards new understandings of what is possible.

Breakout working group from a session at Fearless Cities on ‘Building non-state Institutions’. Bertie Russell.

The last decade has been a miserable decade. As the global capitalist socio-economic system continues to seize up, and as inequality deepens both between and across nations, the Global North has been met with a reactionary nationalist backlash. This backlash has been fuelled by the common narrative that it is malevolent ‘outsiders’ that are the cause of our problems – Mexicans, European migrants, the poor, the disabled, the working class, and so on. From so-called ‘moderate’ politicians to blood-baying ethno-nationalists, the response has been to empower those calling for a resurgence of the nation-state – to put up boundaries, borders and walls and to expel all those individuals and institutions allegedly intent on benefiting at our expense.

This nationalist backlash is based on a fundamental misconception – that if only it was possible to reinstate a parochial and ‘sovereign’ nation-state, it would be possible to ‘take back control’. That our collapsing wages, surging living costs, and hollowing out of social support has been a result of being ‘exposed’ to globalisation, and that if we could only reinstate some well-managed ‘good British/ American/ French capitalism’ then we’d all be enjoying our bread and roses.

All this fails to recognise that deindustrialization, the offshoring of production, exposure to cheap imports, and the emergence of huge personal debt, are not the result of the mismanagement of the economy. To the contrary, these strategies (amongst others such as installing puppet dictatorships, ‘structurally readjusting’ trade rules, privatizing social goods and ‘financialization’) are part of an ideological response to the systemic capitalist crisis of the 1970s. These are not symptoms of a system going wrong, but rather a concerted attempt to ‘offset’ crisis and restore profitability to an ailing economic system.

Those overseeing these transformations claimed that there was no alternative. This was purportedly no longer about politics, but about expert (economic) knowledge determining what was both necessary and logical. The “21st Century” – the former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair informed us – would “not be about the battle between capitalism and socialism but between the forces of progress and the forces of conservatism… within us”. This apolitical acquiescence to the ‘rules of the game’ was the supposed limit to our reality – capitalist realism, as our late comrade Mark Fisher would call it.

When the 2008 financial crisis hit, the ‘expert’ solution was to underwrite the financial system, and convert it into a sovereign debt crisis. Suddenly, the toxicity of obscure financial assets – riddled with subprime mortgage IOUs that weren’t worth the paper they were written on – had become the toxicity of public spending. Rather than an opportunity for the re-emergence of politics, the response was to apply more of the same ‘expert’ and ‘apolitical’ (of course!) adjustments to our economy. The raising of university tuition fees, the slashing of the Education Maintenance Allowance, the freeze on NHS wages and the restructuring of junior doctor contracts, the closure of Sure Start centres, the recurring huge cuts to local council funding, the sell-off of public assets, the increase to VAT, and so on and so on.

So we reach June 3, 2016, when the then UK Justice Secretary and Brexiteer Michael Gove was widely ridiculed for declaring that “people in this country had had enough of experts”. Yet the otherwise fat-tongued simpleton had got this one correct – people were sick of a political elite that had for decades proclaimed themselves as ‘experts’ presiding over a system that had left the majority of people poorer, sicker, more depressed, more scared, and less certain that the future was worth living, No clearer was this demonstrated than in the widespread rejection of the Clinton dynasty, whose failure in the 2016 US election campaign occurred despite being opposed by a misogynistic racist chauvinist fool that would soon earn the accolade of having the worst Presidential approval rating in history.

And so we reach today’s potent and almost incomprehensible mix. The nation has become mobilized as both the answer and a symbolic rejection of thirty years of ‘experts’ imposing their doctrines of structural readjustments both at home and abroad. It is underpinned by an almost romantic, yet fundamentally reactionary belief, that we can somehow return to a milieu of sovereign ‘nation-states’ in charge of their own affairs, like an archipelago of little floating islands existing irrespective and without heed to the material reality of the globally interdependent economy.

This supposedly new Glorious Nation will pride itself on lowering its corporate tax rates even further – despite the fact the UK already has the lowest corporate tax in the G20…

Yet the fallacy in all this is that there is no new political-economic model. Those ‘anti-experts’ arguing that we need to ‘take back control’ and reassert our national will are often, quite literally, the same people with the same ideas that came before. This supposedly new Glorious Nation will pride itself on lowering its corporate tax rates even further – despite the fact the UK already has the lowest corporate tax in the G20 – further enmeshing daily life into the whims of global capital. Rather than being tied through the EU into destructive trade deals such as CETA, the UK is instead desperately trying to forge its own ‘deals’ that will dismantle ecological legislation, open up the NHS to US venture capital, and sell of vast swathes of our cities to foreign investment.

In short, whilst nationalist rhetoric has a very real impact in fuelling xenophobia and racism, both on the streets and in government policy, the economic policy remains one of ‘ensuring global competiveness’ – in other words, more of exactly the same political-economic approach that has defined the past three decades.

Whilst some left-learning parties and politicians – such as the UK’s Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership, or the former Democrat presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders – promise to try and reclaim the nation-state as a more ‘humane’ institution, their strategies ultimately remain grounded in Keynesian-inspired redistributive economic logic. Whilst the rhetoric suggests these parties are part of a new leftist-strategy, the underpinning analysis remains that we can somehow return to a ‘strong’ nation-state presiding over a healthy (and controlled) capitalism that works for “the many, and not just the few”.

It is without question that we’d rather see the election of national politicians that are genuinely committed to equality and social betterment, rather than neo-fascist demagogues bent on further exacerbating inequality and hate. Yet it is not contradictory to suggest that the prospect of an archipelago of strong nation-states presiding over a ‘better’ and more equal capitalism is a fallacy. Not only is this a dream that belongs to a previous century – to a particular moment in the development of the capitalist economy – it was a dream that could only be (temporarily) fulfilled for a small minority of the worlds population, nominally a white-male population residing in former colonial states that continued to benefit from the expropriation of people and resources on a global scale.

The left ­– especially in the UK – remains without a coherent vision or a set of strategies to drive a real movement towards a world after capitalism. We need to think of a different scale for our politics, of different ways to build and exercise leverage, and of a different understanding of who can become a ‘revolutionary subject’ – those people who, through the virtue of the position they occupy in society, are in a privileged position to change how we organize our everyday lives. This doesn’t mean rejecting all that has come before, but it means recognising the need for us to generate political strategies that make sense in a world that is organized very differently to 40, 60 or 100 years before.

It means recognising the need for us to generate political strategies that make sense in a world that is organized very differently to 40, 60 or 100 years before.

We are hopeful that there are already new places to look in trying to answer these questions. To help us in our search, Plan C has established a working group on Radical Municipalism and Directional Demands, to help us explore the following hypotheses:

1. That the ‘municipal’ – whether we’re talking about towns, cities or city-regions – might be a fundamentally important scale at which, and through which, to generate progressive movements towards post-capitalism;

2. That certain types of political demands might be crucial in organising powerful social movements, helping us both improve material conditions whilst orientating us towards new understandings of what is possible.

We’ve kept these two themes together for an important reason – different types of political strategy may be possible at different scales. We’re not excited by urban-scale politics because it’s an urban scale, just as we’re not excited about directional demands in an abstract sense. Rather, we’re interested in exploring whether the municipal scale is a unique scale through which to organize a truly internationalist – a post nationalist – revolutionary politics, and whether certain types of political demand are fundamental to realizing the potential of this scale.

In what follows, we will briefly introduce what we mean by these two tendencies, and establish some of our misgivings and questions. We’re not undertaking this with a certainty that we’re correct, nor that any strategies that emerge are mutually exclusive of other political strategies. However, we’re also aware that we can’t look to anyone but ourselves to start generating forms of political activity that both overcome the unwelcome return of nationalism, and that genuinely increase the prospects for just, ecologically sound and equitable ways of organising our societies. These will necessarily be aimed at the end of capitalism and the nation-state, and towards democratically organized societies held in common.

Why/What is radical municipalism?

‘Municipalism’ is both the practices of self-government by towns, cities, and city-regions – municipalities of different sizes – and any perspective that advocates for such forms of government. Taken on its own, municipalism appears as a politically neutral concept. It’s just as possible to advocate a municipalist strategy as a way of fuelling capitalist accumulation – which is what partially underpins the logic of the UK’s current devolution policy – as it is to advocate a municipal strategy that is based upon promoting the expansion of commons and social solidarity.

At its most basic, a radical municipal strategy is thus one that recognizes the municipal scale – both in terms of the way that people’s lives are organized in these spaces, and the institutions that govern them – as a space of contestation. Rather than a depoliticized administrative unit ‘nestled’ under the nation-state, and thus of relatively ‘less’ political importance, a radical municipalist perspective asks whether there is unique revolutionary potential in organising at the municipal level.

Various radical intellectuals have previously made the case for the municipal scale being a privileged site for revolutionary organising. Perhaps most famously, Murray Bookchin – whose ideas have become influential in Rojava – argued that ‘libertarian municipalism’ was the ‘ “red button” that must be pushed if a radical movement is to open the door to the public sphere’. The Marxist geographer David Harvey has also argued that ‘rebel cities’ will become a privileged site for revolutionary movements, sharing a perspective that the ‘right to the city’ would become a clarion call for progressive communist movements. Whilst we are interested and influenced by some of these perspectives, we are not interested in this simply as a theoretical undertaking, and do not take these perspectives as ideological programmes.

We take our starting point as the actually existing practices emerging at the municipal scale.

The cities are ours. Amy Clancy (@amyclancyuk). Some rights reserved.

Rather, we take our starting point as the actually existing practices emerging at the municipal scale. Whilst far from a comprehensive list, we are interested in a number of different strategies emerging at the municipal scale:

• Riace, Italy – the small Italian town that has received global recognition for its successful open door policy towards refugees
• Jackson, MI – the American city where predominantly black working-class communities are looking to create a cooperative solidarity economy through a combination of direct action and electoral strategies under the banner of Cooperation Jackson
• Naples, Italy – where in 2016 the radicalized mayor De Magistris established a “Department of the Commons”, part of a process of protecting seven properties that had been reclaimed by social initiatives
• Rosario, Argentina – where the social movement Ciudad Futura, which has its roots in a network of different types of social reproduction, have also successfully listed a number of candidates for election to the city council
• Barcelona, Spain – alongside a number of Spanish cities with similar projects, Barcelona is seen as a ‘flagship’ of this new radical municipalist strategy, where the citizens platform Barcelona en Comú has implemented a number of progressive policies, not least promoting direct citizen involvement in policy development, and a participatory budgeting system to redistribute the excessive politicians wages to activist and community groups.

In no case is this simply a return to an electoral strategy, only conducted on a municipal rather than a national level. Rather, it’s an openness to the idea of occupying both the squares and the institutions – of exploring how best to generate power and exercise leverage to achieve social change. Each of these examples – and others – are unique, and we don’t yet know what lessons can be drawn from these for organising a post-nationalist movement towards post-capitalism.

Why/What are directional demands?

The idea of the ‘demand’ has long been at the heart of political organising. Some demands are framed as an opposition – an end to a war, the privatization of water services, the rule of a dictator, or against the closure of a local library. Other demands are framed as a demand for something – the right to vote, the 8-hour day, equal access to healthcare, a wage-increase, or for national secession. These demands are evidently different in terms of what they immediately want to achieve, yet there are also fundamental differences in the very nature of the demands themselves.

Directional-ism is the premise that we must develop and evaluate practices and processes according to… their ‘beyond-capitalism dynamics’.

Some schools of socialist organising – most notably laid out in Trotsky’s Transitional Program – recognised certain types of ‘transitional’ demands as central to any revolutionary strategy. Premised on the idea of an intellectually immature working class and the need to establish a dictatorship of the proletariat, these demands were theorized to ‘help the masses… to find the bridge between present demand and the socialist program of the revolution’ (Trotsky 1938). As such, the ultimate aim wasn’t so much to fulfill the demands, but rather to reveal the impossibility of seemingly reasonable demands being fulfilled within capitalist society. In helping to clear the ‘false consciousness of the masses’, these demands would thus hasten the capturing of the nation-state and implementing the revolutionary plan.

We agree neither with the necessity of capturing of the nation-state, nor the narrow conception of demands as simply tools for aiding the ‘transition’ to socialist rule. However, we share (at the most basic level) an understanding that ‘demands’ have concrete political effects – they help ‘create’ political identities, give expression to otherwise ‘latent’ anger, frame visions of how things could be different, and name enemies (whether that be people, processes, laws or systems). In other words, demands are interesting not only because of what’s being demanded, but because of the effects they have on the composition of social movements, the people that compose them, and what that means for making the seemingly impossible become possible.

We are only introducing the idea here – and so won’t go into much depth – but we suggest instead that we need to start thinking about political demands in terms of their direction. Directional-ism is the premise that we must develop and evaluate ‘practices and processes according not to their pro- or anti-capitalist ‘essence’ but according to their ‘beyond-capitalism dynamics’. [1] A directional demand must therefore ‘be capable of cognitively reorienting us far enough out of the present organization of social relations that some kind of critical distance is achieved and the political imagination of a different future is called to work’.[2] These are demands that, in their fulfilment and/or the struggle for their fulfilment, have a concrete effect on how we think about what is possible.

Our questions

Our starting point is that these two themes – of radical municipalism and directional demands – may be fundamentally linked. The question of “what makes municipalism radical?” might find its answer in the where, how and who of directional demands. In bringing these together, we’re suggesting that it’s at the municipal scale that we may find our best chance in producing ‘practices and processes’ that can really be considered as contributing to ‘beyond-capitalist dynamics’.

This hypothesis immediately poses a series of questions about the challenges and/or limits of what we are suggesting. Whilst some of these may have a ‘theoretical’ response – and we’ve got some ideas – we’re more interested in seeing how these challenges are addressed in practice:

• If the ‘municipal’ scale is where directional demands should be made, then who are demands made to? And who makes these demands?
• Where and how do those who don’t live in towns or cities fit into a political strategy that focuses on the municipal?
• If we accept there is a huge danger in fetishizing ‘the local’, then how does a municipal strategy resist falling into localism? How does a municipal strategy go beyond the nation-state?
• Are municipal institutions just an extension of the nation-state, or is it possible that they are qualitatively different in terms of what they can do and how they are positioned? Can we make qualitatively different institutions at these scales?
• How does ‘occupying the squares’ and ‘occupying the institutions’ work in tandem? Can we take institutions without being institutionalized? Do we even need to take the institutions?
• Given the ways municipal institutions are currently limited by nation-states – both financially and legally – can we produce new ways of building our capacity to act? How can we develop resources and the ability to use them without and irrespective of the nation-state? Can we build degrees of autonomy from the nation-state?
• How could it be possible for municipalities to seriously disobey the nation-state without being crushed?

We don’t plan to answer these in the short-term, or to answer them on our own. We hope that through organising and working with other municipalist movements we can begin to develop our understanding of what works – and what doesn’t – meaning new problems and questions will continue to emerge.

What we’re going to do

Here’s what we’re thinking of doing over the next 18 months. If you’d like to be kept in the loop, or join us in organising some events, get in touch at info@weareplanc.org

Ada Colau and Manuela Carmena open the Fearless Cities conference in Barcelona on June 9, 2017. Bertie Russell.

• Some of our members are attending the Fearless Cities meeting organized by Barcelona en Comú on June 9-11. We’ll be organising feedback meetings on whom we’ve met, and what we’ve learned. (For a taste of this event, see openDemocracy vid below.)
• We’ll be hosting a series of discussions and workshops at the Plan C Festival, held 1-3 September 2017. We intend to invite those working on radical municipalist strategies to join us.
• We’ll look to host a UK-wide speaking tour, visiting cities across the UK to discuss what it would mean to build a radical municipal movement.
• We’re thinking of conducting a series of Power Structural Analyses of our cities, helping us to understand how decisions really get made in our cities, and where we can look to exercise leverage.
• Through these activities, we’re looking to actively network together organisations interested in developing radical municipal strategies, learning from groups that already exist, and helping share lessons across cities.
• We’re hoping to organize a major gathering in 2018, which we hope will contribute to fomenting a radical municipalist strategy within UK cities. If our friends agree, we hope this will include participants from across Europe and beyond.

Writing in 1967 Robert Dahl, the then professor of political science at Yale University, suggested that ‘with each passing day it grows more reasonable to see the nation-state as a transitory historic form, to foresee that the nation-state will some day cease to exist as an autonomous unit… [However,] it will be generations before peoples have defined themselves and have arrived at that state of confident nation-hood where it becomes possible to imagine, without panic, the decline and supercession of the nation’. Fifty years on, we can no longer wait for this moment – we must develop means and methods of organising our societies that hastens the decline and the supercession of both capitalism and the nation-state.

The post Radical municipalism: demanding the future appeared first on P2P Foundation.

“We’re living in extraordinary times that demand brave and creative solutions. If we’re able to imagine a different city, we’ll have the power to transform it.”  – Ada Colau, Mayor of Barcelona.

Excellent assessment of Barcelona en Comú’s first 20 months in power. It was written by Bertie Russel and Oscar Reyes and originally published in Open Democracy.

On 24 May 2015, the citizen platform Barcelona en Comú was elected as the minority government of the city of Barcelona. Along with a number of other cities across Spain, this election was the result of a wave of progressive municipal politics across the country, offering an alternative to neoliberalism and corruption.

With Ada Colau – a housing rights activist – catapulted into the position of Mayor, and with a wave of citizens with no previous experience of formal politics finding themselves in charge of their city, BComú is an experiment in progressive change that we can’t afford to ignore.

After 20 months in charge of the city, we try to draw some of the main lessons that can help inspire and inform a radical new municipal politics that moves us beyond borders and nations, and towards a post-capitalist world based on dignity, respect and justice.

1. The best way to oppose nationalist anti-immigrant sentiment is to confront the real reasons that life is shit

There is no question that life is getting harder, more precarious, more stressful, and less certain for the majority of people. In the US and across Europe, reactionaries, racist and nationalist politicians are blaming this on two things – immigrants, and ‘outside forces’ that challenge national sovereignty. Whilst Trump and Brexit are the most obvious cases, we can see the same phenomenon across Europe, ranging from the Alternative für Deutschland in Germany through to Front National in France.

In Barcelona, there is a relative absence of public discourse that blames the social crisis on immigrants, and most attempts to do so have fallen flat. On the contrary, on 18 February over 160,000 people flooded the streets of Barcelona to demand that Spain takes in more refugees. Whilst this demonstration was also caught up with complexities of Catalan nationalism and controversy over police repression of migrant street vendors, it highlighted the support for a politics that cares for migrants and refugees.

The main reason for this is simple – there is a widespread and successful politics that provides real explanations of why people are suffering, and that fights for real solutions. The reason you can’t afford your rent is because of predatory tourism, unscrupulous landlords, a lack of social housing, and property being purchased as overseas investments. The reason social services are being cut are because the central government transferred huge amounts of public funds into the private banks, propping up a financial elite, and because of a political system riddled with corruption.

Whilst Barcelona played a leading role in initiating a network of “cities of refuge”, simply condemning anti-immigrant nationalism is not enough. In a climate where popular municipal movements are providing a strong narrative as to what they see as the problem – and identifying what they’re going to do about it – it’s incredibly difficult for racist and nationalist narratives based on lies and hatred to take root.

2. Politics does not have to be the preserve of rich old white men

Ada Colau is the first female mayor of Barcelona. She is a co-founder of BComú, and was formerly the spokesperson of the Plataforma de Afectados por la Hipoteca (Mortgage Victims Platform), a grassroots campaign challenging evictions and Spain’s unjust property laws. Colau leads a group of eleven district councillors, seven of whom are women, whose average age is 40.

BComú’s vision of a “feminized politics” represents a significant break with the existing political order. “You can be in politics without being a strong, arrogant male, who’s ultra-confident, who knows the answer to everything”, Colau explains. Instead, she offers a political style that openly expresses doubts and contradictions. This is backed by a values-based politics that emphasizes the role of community and the common good – as well as policies designed to build on that vision.

The City Council’s new Department of Life Cycles, Feminisms and LGBTI is the institutional expression of these values. It has significantly increased the budget for campaigns against sexist violence, as well as leading a council working group that looks to identify and tackle the feminization of poverty.

The changing face of the city council is reinforced by BComú’s strict ethics policy, Governing by Obeying, which includes a €2,200 (£1850) monthly limit on payments to its elected officials. Colau takes home less than a quarter of the amount claimed by her predecessor Xavier Trias. By February 2017, €216,000 in unclaimed salaries had been paid into a new fund that will support social projects in the city.

Ada Colau at a public engagement event that took place in Sants-Montjuïc on 18 February 2017. Photo by Bertie Russell. CC BY-NC-SA.

3. A politics that works begins by listening

BComú started life with an extensive process of listening, responding to ordinary peoples’ concerns, and crowd-sourcing ideas – as summarized in its guide to building a citizen municipal platform.

Drawing on proposals gathered at meetings in public squares across the city, BComú created a programme reflecting immediate issues in local neighbourhoods, city-wide problems and broader discontent with the political system. Local meetings were complemented by technical and policy committees, and an extensive process of online consultation.

This process resulted in a political platform that stressed the need to tackle the “social emergency” – problems such as home evictions on a huge scale, or the effect of uncontrolled mass tourism. These priorities came from listening to citizens across the city rather than an echo-chamber of business and political elites. BComú’s election results reflected this broader appeal: it won its highest share of the vote in Barcelona’s poorest neighbourhoods, in part through increasing turnout in those areas.

On entering government, BComú then began to implement an Emergency Plan that included measures to halt evictions, hand out fines to banks leaving multiple properties empty, and subsidise energy and transport costs for the unemployed and those earning under the minimum wage.

4. A politics that works never stops listening

Politics doesn’t happen every four years – it is the everyday process of shaping the conditions in which we live our lives. This means that one of the central tasks of a politics that works is to forge a new relationship between citizens and the institutions that we use to govern our societies.

For BComú, the everyday basis of politics means citizens and civil society organisations directly shaping the strategic plan of their city. It means not just consultation, but active empowerment in helping move citizens from being ‘recipients’ of a politics that is done to them, to active political agents that shape the every-day life of their city.

In the first months of occupying the institutions, BComú introduced an open-source platform, Decidim Barcelona, for citizens to co-create the municipal action plan for the city. Over 10,000 proposals were registered by the site’s 25,000 registered users. While that’s a small share of the city’s population, the online process was complemented by over 400 in-person meetings.

The Decidim platform is now being adapted to run participatory budgetary pilot-schemes in two districts, as well as being used in the ongoing development of new infrastructure, pedestrianisation and transport schemes. Meanwhile, the municipal Department of Participation is undertaking a systematic rethinking of the ‘meaning’ of participation, looking to move away from meaningless ‘consultations’ and towards methods for active empowerment.

This is an imperfect process – and BComú have got things wrong at times, such as the failure to properly engage when introducing a SuperBlock in the Poblenou district – but the principle is simple. To govern well, you must create new processes for obeying citizens’ demands.

At the same time, the structures that built BComú remain in place, with 15 neighbourhood groups and 15 thematic working groups providing an ongoing link between activists and institutions. No structure is perfect, and it remains unclear if these working groups can help BComú avoid “institutionalization” and remain connected to social movements, but the hope is that this model provides a basis for remaining in touch with grassroots concerns.

5. Politics does not begin with the Party

BComú is not a ‘local’ arm of a bigger political party, and does not exist merely as a branch of a broader strategy to control the central political institutions of the nation-state. Rather, BComú is one in a series of independent citizen platforms that have looked to occupy municipal institutions in an effort to bring about progressive social change.

From A Coruña to Valencia, Madrid and Zaragoza, these municipal movements are the direct effort of citizens rejecting the old mode of doing politics, and starting to effect change where they live. Instead of a national party structure, they coordinate through a “network of rebel cities” across Spain. Most immediately, this means coordinating press releases and actively learning from how one another engage with urban problems.

That doesn’t mean that BComú can reject political parties entirely. While the initiative arose from social movements, it ended up incorporating several existing political parties in its platform. These include Podemos – another child of the 15-M movement  – and the Catalan Greens-United Left party (ICV-EUIA), which had consistently been a junior coalition partner in city councils headed by the centre-left Partit dels Socialistes de Catalunya (PSC) from 1979 until 2011.

These parties continue alongside BComú, with their own completely separate organizational and funding structures. But entering BComú has forced existing parties to significantly change how they operate. Coalition negotiations encouraged the selection of new councillors (only two of the elected candidates have previously held office), and they are subject to a tough Ethics Code that considerably increases their accountability.

The fluid relationship between the new coalitions and political parties allows for multiple levels of coordination, without having to pass through a rigid central leadership. It may also be replicated in regional government, where the recently formed Un Pais En Comú seeks to replicate the city government coalition across Catalunya. On a terrain that contains a different set of politics – not least a strong national-separatist sentiment – it remains to be seen whether this latest initiative will be successful.

Upwards of 180,000 people demonstrate in favour of accepting migrants and asylum seekers in Catalonia, organised by the group Casa Nostra, Casa Vostra – 18 February 2017. Photo by Bertie Russell. CC BY-NC-SA.

6. Power is the capacity to act

BComú does not subscribe to traditional notions of power, whereby if you hold public office, you somehow ‘have’ power. On the contrary, power is the capacity to bring about change, and the ‘occupation of the institutions’ is only one part of what makes change possible.

BComú emerged after almost a decade of major street-protests, anti-eviction campaigns, squatting movements, anti-corruption campaigns, and youth movements – the most visible form being the ’15-M’ or ‘indignados’ protests that began in 2011. After years of being at a high-level of mobilization, many within these movements made a strategic wager – we’ve learned how to occupy the squares, but what happens if we try to occupy the institutions?

Frustrated by the limits of what could be achieved by being mobilized only outside of institutions, the decision to form BComú was to try to occupy the institutions as part of the same movement that occupied the squares. In practice, this is not so simple.

Politics is a messy game, full of compromises forced by working in a world of contradictions. In the most practical sense, BComú may be leading the council, but it holds only 11 of the 41 available seats. Six other political parties are also represented on the council, mostly seeking to block, slow-down or weaken its initiatives. Frustrated by these moves – and overwhelmed by the demands of the institutions – BComú formed a governing coalition with the PSC, a move supported by around 2/3 of its registered supporters. But it remains a minority government, and two left parties that refused a similar pact responded by stepping up their block on almost all legislative initiatives. The resulting political crisis delayed the passing of the city’s 2017 budget, which was eventually forced through on a confidence motion when BComú challenged the opposition to unite around another plan – which it failed to do.

While this experience has shown the resilience of BComú in the confrontational confines of the council chamber, the key lesson here is that occupying the institutions is not enough. An electoral strategy is not sufficient alone to create change. The power to act comes from a combination of occupying both the institutions and the squares, of social movements organizing and exercising leverage, providing social force that can be coupled with the potential of the occupied institutions – the power to change comes when these work in tandem. It’s been a bumpy ride, but BComú has been able to justify its budget on the grounds that it prioritizes social measures (such as building new nurseries, combatting energy poverty and focusing resources on the poorest neighbourhoods) with reference to the extensive and ongoing process of participation that it has encouraged.

One of the biggest dangers in looking to build radical municipalist movements in other cities is to mistake electoral victory with victory, to sit back and think that now we’ve got ‘our guys’ in the institutions, we can sit back and let change occur.

7. Transnational politics begins in your city

In a time where reactionary political movements are building walls and retreating to national boundaries, BComú is illustrating that a new transnational political movement begins in our cities.

To this end, BComú has established an international committee tasked with promoting and sharing its experiences abroad, whilst learning from other ‘rebel’ cities such as Naples and Messina. Barcelona has been active in international forums, promoting the “right to the city” at the recent UN Habitat III conference, and taking a leadership role in the Global Network of Cities, Local and Regional Governments.

These moves look to bypass the national scale where possible, prefiguring post-national networks of urban solidarity and cooperation. Recent visits of the First Deputy Mayor to the Colombian cities of Medellín and Bogotá also suggest that links are being made on a supranational scale.

One of the most tangible outcomes of this level of supranational urban organizing was the strong role played by cities in the rejection of the Transatlantic Trade & Investment Partnership (TTIP). As hosts of a meeting entitled ‘Local Authorities and the New Generation of Free Trade Agreements’ in April 2016, BComú led on the agreement of the ‘Barcelona Declaration’, with more than 40 cities committing to the rejection of TTIP. As of the time of writing, TTIP now looks dead in the water.

At this early stage, it remains unclear how this supranational network of radical municipalism may develop. Perhaps the most important step for BComú is to share their experience and support those in other cities that are looking to reclaim politics, helping to build citizens platforms across Europe and beyond. But the idea of a post-national network of citizens also allows us to dare to dream – of shared resources, shared politics and shared infrastructure – where it’s not where you were born, but where you live, that determines your right to live.

8. Essential services can be run in our common interest

The clue to BComú’s strategy for essential services is hidden in its name – the plan is to run them in common.

At the end of 2016, and faced with a crisis in the funeral sector in which only two companies controlled the sector and charged prices almost twice the national average, the Barcelona council intervened to establish a municipal funeral company that is forecasted to reduce costs by 30 per cent. Around the same time, the council voted in favour of the remunicipalisation of water, paving the way for water to be taken out of the private sector at some point this year.

In February 2017, Barcelona amended the terms and conditions for electricity supply, preventing energy firms from cutting off supply to vulnerable people. The two major energy firms – Endesa and Gas Natural – protested this by not bidding for the €65m municipal energy contracts, hoping this would force the council to overturn the policy. Instead, a raft of small and medium size energy companies were happy to comply with the new directive to tackle energy poverty, and stand to be awarded the contracts if a court challenge from the large firms proves unsuccessful. BComú is also actively planning to introduce a municipal energy company within the next two years.

However, it’s important to recognize the major difference between the public and the common. As Michael Hardt argues, our choices are not limited to businesses controlled privately (private property) or by the state (public property). The third option is to hold things in common – where resources and services are controlled, produced and distributed democratically and equitably according to peoples need. A simple example of what this could look like was the proposal – that narrowly failed only due to voter turnout – for Berlin to establish an energy company that would put citizens on the board of the company.

This difference underpins the Barcelona experience. This is not a traditional socialist government that thinks it can run things better on behalf of the people. This is a movement that believes the people can run things better on their own behalf, combining citizen wisdom with expert knowledge to solve the everyday problems that people face.

Photo by BarcelonaEnComu

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Anna Bergren Miller: When the City Council of Barcelona asked democracy activist and researcher Mayo Fuster Morell for policy recommendations regarding the sharing economy, she suggested that the City Council take a different approach: Rather than relying on an expert to dictate policy from the top down, why not use a collaborative process to build a sustainable set of institutions and practices that would draw strength from the grassroots?

Fuster Morell crowdsourced a sharing economy policy framework through a series of in-person and online interactions with a range of stakeholders, including city residents, representatives of sharing economy initiatives, and municipal authorities. From the 120 policy recommendations initially drafted, Barcelona’s city council has since developed a collaborative economy action plan and provided funding to specific projects. Meanwhile, the broader conversation on the sharing economy in Barcelona continues through organizations including Procomuns, which started in March 2016 as a policy brainstorming forum.

I spoke to Fuster Morell recently about the process behind and the prospects for the Barcelona policy recommendations. We talked through what Fuster Morell calls Barcelona’s collaborative economy “ecosystem,” the status of the collaborative economy plan, and the replicability of the Catalan capital’s particular approach to sharing.

Anna Bergren Miller: You were instrumental in helping craft a series of policy recommendations regarding the sharing economy in the city of Barcelona. How did the policy recommendations come to be? Specifically, how did you involve city residents in the process?

Mayo Fuster Morell: Barcelona City Council asked me to advise them about what to do regarding the collaborative economy. I suggested that we build an ecosystem of public policies involving the different stakeholders. This way, even if there is a change of government in the next election, the city will have a structure of actors and relationships already in place.

At the City Council of Barcelona there is a lack of expertise in this matter. They don’t know about the technologies, or the companies involved because it’s pretty new. We have an historical tradition of commons production in the city. But until this government, there hasn’t been an institutional interest in supporting collaboration.

We built the stakeholder ecosystem in layers. The first layer is BarCola, a coworking group between the city council and the sector. To join BarCola as an initiative, you have to be active in Barcelona. We privilege organizations that take a commons approach, which means that they are based on cooperatives, foundations, or enterprises that have a democratic government system. We prioritize projects that are based on open source or open data, that are connected to social challenges in the city, and that have socially inclusive policies.

BarCola meets every month or month and a half. We also communicate frequently on a mailing list and Telegram. Our main concern is promotion. For example, we are not so much about penalizing Airbnb, as about how we build an incubating system and funding for new initiatives, to promote the modalities that we are more in favor of. The second layer of the ecosystem is Procomuns, which started as an event in March to open the proposals for policy recommendations for the city council. Four hundred people participated, and spent three days discussing how the city council can do support a commons development, and a collaborative economy. The event resulted in the Procomuns declaration with 120 policy recommendations. We sent it to Barcelona City Council, obviously, but also to European Commission and other organizations.

Now Procomuns is a monthly Meetup. At each meeting, we address different issues. We are going to do another big event at the end of June, in Barcelona. Out of the initial 120 policy recommendations emerged the third layer of the ecosystem, which is Decidem Barcelona. Decidem Barcelona is a participatory democracy platform for citizens to provide feedback on municipal policies in every area. Using Decidem Barcelona, we selected the policies that were more supported by Barcelona residents. With that, we defined the Barcelona collaborative economy plan, which has 80 percent of the 120 policies generated by Procomuns. It doesn’t have them all, because there are some areas that are not under the competency of Barcelona City Council.

Now we have a final layer of the ecosystem. We created an inter-area body inside of the city council, which coordinates what we are doing regarding transport, housing, tourism, and labor. This layer operates solely within the municipal government.

Tell me more about the city council’s response. Was creating a collaborative economy plan something that they were encouraging you to do, or did you bring it to them? How receptive were they, and where have they taken it since?

The current Barcelona government started 18 months ago as a citizens’ candidature with many non-professional politicians. For example, our mayor Ada Colau was very active in the housing movement. All of them were very much in support the idea of injecting the citizens into the policy process. There was not resistance.

But some of the city council, when they think about the collaborative economy, they only think about Uber or Airbnb. They are not aware of the other movements. So the first step actually was a bit hard. We had to say, okay, the collaborative economy is not only the big for-profit actors.

What is the current status of the Barcelona policies?

The city now has a collaborative economy plan and budget. The plan is not available online, but to give you some examples of the measures involved: We created a program of entrepreneurship on the collaborative economy. We did a call for new initiatives, and we selected 30, to which we will provide mentorship, legal advice, and match funding. Like with BarCola, we prioritize the initiatives that are more connected to the commons. We have also been mapping the city council’s underutilized infrastructure resources, starting with computers, in order to put them to collaborative uses by the citizens. We have also begun a €100,000 match funding program, and are designing a collaborative economy incubator.

We support a lot of events. We provide funding for OuiShare; we provide funding for the local annual meeting of the social economy. We support the annual meeting of the city’s cooperatives. We also supported an event about do-it-yourself technology. We have a study underway on the level of participation in the collaborative economy within Barcelona. We are also developing a framework for understanding its impact.

What’s the timeline for the study?

The study will be ready in July.

A lot of what you’ve been able to do seems specific to Barcelona, to the political climate and the history and culture there. But have you heard from other cities that have wanted to model your process? Or were you looking at other cities as examples?

I think it’s very unique to Barcelona, this element of believing that collaborative economy policy should be built collaboratively. We also have a very clear position regarding which initiatives are the best models to promote. But we are not unique in providing some programs of support. For example, Seoul has put a lot of resources into promoting the collaborative economy. Also, Amsterdam is providing a lot of resources, but with a different perspective.

The geographer David Harvey has recently written and spoken about so-called “Rebel Cities.” Barcelona has been identified as part of a nascent network of Rebel Cities. What is a Rebel City? Why do they matter now? And what evidence is there that they are beginning to work together?

In the context of Spain, “Rebel Cities” refers to the cities that are governed by citizens’ candidatures as of the last municipal elections. In each case, a unique coalition won power — so they have their independence. But, recognizing the affinities between then, we built a network of Rebel Cities in order to exchange experiences and learn from each other. We recently suggested a similar process, building on Spain’s experience, for Rebel Cities in the United States.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Header photo of the city of Barcelona by Bert Kaufmannvia Flickr. 

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