We have created this resource for all of us to use, to help others understand the key thinking behind this transformative politics. We actively encourage you to use it yourselves and share it with others. We hope you find it useful in lectures, at conferences, on educational programmes, on your website, in your news stories, or simply to share over your social media.

Find out more at cura.our.dmu.ac.uk

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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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Gillis presents a compelling explanation for the ineffectiveness of many political organizations, focused on some of the inescapable artifacts of human communication. Paraphrasing some of the salient points:

• Knowledge problems: language is a lossy codec for communicating our internal experiences to other agents, leaving an immense gap between words and meanings.
• Computation problems: tools like wikis and markets are subject to the massive efficiency gains of concurrency as they decentralize communication both in time and space. But most radical organizations prefer consensus meetings, which are severely constrained by the extremely low bandwidth channel of sequential one-at-a-time utterances.
• Tribalism: in organizations, the cognitive biases and psychological needs of most humans act as a constant pressure to prioritise the self-preservation of our collective identities ahead of measurable progress towards shared aims.

However, while the critique is illuminating, I found myself unsatisfied, wishing that they had offered more light at the end of the tunnel. Frankly, I don’t care for critique without reconstruction.

Through my work at Loomio I’m connected with social movements around the world, as they use our collective decision-making software. These international connections give me great optimism, as I see new developments in organizing strategy and digital technology overcoming the limitations outlined in Gillis’ talk. Optimism is more fun when you share it, so I wanted to document two cases that I think are worth emulating.

The movements I’m most inspired by are inspiring precisely because of their combined competencies in organizational and technological development. Namely, they’re:

1. The international municipalists informally headquartered in Spain.
2. The conservative anarchists building new democratic forms in Taiwan.

Organized citizens in Spain have made an extraordinary demonstration of the necessity of making uncomfortable coalitions (they talk about “complicated majorities”). You see this when distinct organisations temporarily coordinate in service of one shared issue, disbanding after victory. Radical leftists are working shoulder-to-shoulder with organised labour, with immigrant groups, with progressive politicians and social entrepreneurs. Stacco Troncoso credits this practice of coalition-building as the primary factor in keeping the far right mostly out of action in Spain. It’s hard to fuel the hate-fires between tribes when they are being continuously reminded of their shared interests, and continuously invited into acts of mutual aid (e.g. the old unemployed factory worker loses some of his xenophobia when the immigrants show up to prevent his home eviction).

Another uncomfortable coalition you see in Spanish cities is the collaboration between A) the people who understand the state apparatus as a means of redirecting civil unrest it into channels that support the status quo, and B) the people who understand the state apparatus as one of the most effective levers in catalysing social change. In most parts of the world, this is a boring argument between radicals and liberals, an endless ping pong match where each team claims to have the One True Strategy while the Evil Others are undermining the struggle. In Spain activists have made peace with this tension, courageously taking the reins of institutional power while maintaining the grassroots mandate and accountability. For example, the most radical political conference I’ve been to was mindblowing not just because the speakers were incredible, but especially when you consider the event was hosted by the same people who run the Barcelona city government.

To name this tension between street movements and institutional power, in Madrid they coined the term extituion: “If institutions are organizational systems based on an inside-outside framework, extitutions are designed as areas where a multitude of agents can spontaneously assemble.” (The same author has named Cooperation Jackson as a U.S. example of the same phenomenon.)

All of this extremely promising organisational innovation is enmeshed with technological innovation. I’m immensely encouraged by the deep collaboration between political scientists and computer scientists that I’ve seen in Spain, which holds a rigorous critique of proprietary “sharing economy” and “smart cities” software, while also prototyping tools for direct democracy.

Similarly, you see elements of the same “organizational + technological innovation” recipe at play in Taiwan. In 2014 their occupy movement won. Since then they’ve been dramatically reformatting the government, moving beyond political parties, and deploying technology for mass citizen participation in law-making. This 4-minute video from queer open source hacker turned movement spokesperson turned digital minister Audrey Tang is a great introduction.

In Taiwan as in Spain, the credibility of the new political actors is rooted in the streets. Second, those actors have deployed a rigorous political strategy, systematically making allies throughout the public & private sectors, and civil society. The folks from vTaiwan told me how they interviewed every state official they could find and used the results to map out which government departments were most ready to concede decision-making power to citizens. Then they used those early engagements as leverage, playing departments off each other in a competition for who could be the most participatory. That is the kind of strategic genius that could be repeated the world over.

On the tech front, you see a dual strategy: comprehensive research of existing tools, plus regular hackathons for developing new tools. Perhaps the best-documented example of this approach is the vTaiwan Uber case, where Uber drivers, taxi drivers, citizens, and officials efficiently found the region of their agreement using a combination of face-to-face deliberation and digital sentiment mapping using .

Perhaps most importantly, these processes are being hosted by people who appreciate the immense skill required to facilitate multi-stakeholder deliberation, who are up-to-speed with the palette of tools available, and who are pre-emptively mitigating the risks of “open-washing”.

In 4 years of hobby-horsing, I’ve met exactly 2 other westerners who were familiar with the Taiwan story before I told them about it. I realise I sound like a stuck record. I feel like I’m in a little bubble where nobody seems to care much about these stories. I don’t know who else is capturing the lessons, building the transnational networks, and remixing strategies into their local context. So I’m confused, like, am I an early adopter way ahead of the curve, or am I making a mountain of a molehill, or am I just hanging out with the wrong people?

Photo by speedbug

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• June 8th 2018 19:30 – 21:30
• Location: IHECS Brussels School for Journalism and Communication, Stoofstraat 58, Brussel, Brussel, België
• Category: Evenementen denktank

Will cities change the world? At least, cities are becoming a new and hopeful transnational governance level. They are organizing themselves in a whole tissue of networks (Fearless Cities, Fabcities, …), working together in domains like climate policy, renewable energy and urban economy.

At the same time, citizens are developing a whole range of urban commons, based on co-operation and an ethics of care. Tired of only being a powerless consumer or a passive citizen, we get active as maker, urban farmer, solidarity volunteer, user of shared resources, civic or social entrepreneur, etc. This goes along with the establishment of new organisations and infrastructures like fablabs, energy co-ops, co-working spaces, urban food production plots, etc.

Recent years, we have seen cities like Ghent and Bologna moving a step further, establishing structures and processes that aim at building synergies between the public and the commons domain. This is part of a new political vision, the Partner State. So, a partner city sustains and gives incentives to alternative civil and economic institutions, like the commons and cooperatives. Taking these developments of collaborative city-making together, we see the emergence of a prototype of transformative cities, that could be the driving force towards socio-ecological societies.

Thanks to these transitions institutions, research groups and organizations where created to investigate how commons could be sustainable integrated in the vivid networks of cities.

How can a commons transition in cities be realized to create sustainable Eco-Cities? Experts from different projects and institutions will inspire you with their knowledge and findings about sustainable commons in cities. At this conference you can get inspired and motivated to start, or strengthen, your own project, common initiative or cooperation.

KEYNOTE SPEAKERS

Michel Bauwens

Founder and director of the P2P Foundation and expert in peer production, governance and property. Bauwens is a well-known public speaker and thought leader. In 2017 he wrote the Commons Transition Plan for Ghent, after a similar project for Ecuador.

Elena De Nictolis

Research associate at LabGov, the LABoratory for the GOVernance of the City as a Commons. She prepares a Phd thesis on public policies for urban co-governance and the relation with the quality of city democracy at LUISS University of Rome.

Photo by Dominic’s pics

The post Creating Eco-Societies through Urban Commons Transitions, with Michel Bauwens and Elena De Nictolis appeared first on P2P Foundation.

379 mayors representing more than 68 million Americans said they would implement the Accord regardless of the head-in-the-sand attitude of the country’s president. More significantly, given the weakness of the Paris agreement, more than 40 cities have gone further and committed to 100% renewable energy no later than 2050.

This practical defiance highlights how the city in our globalised world is emerging as a place of resistance, alternatives and solutions to our world’s multiple crises.

Cities are privileged places

Cities have a long history as cradles of social transformation, whether it was the urban revolts in Budapest, Stockholm and other European cities in 1848, the municipal victories and participatory budgeting experiments of the Workers Party in Brazil in the late 1980s or the emerging municipalist movement in Spain and other regions more recently. Cities constitute a privileged place to organise collectively and to imagine new ways of living and working together, spaces where bodies and minds interact and where ideas spread quickly and have unparalleled impact.

This is not to over-romanticise them. Cities, as other human constructions, have their own structures of concentrated power, inequality and exclusion. Greek city-states framed ideas of democracy that we still use today, but their societies were based on slavery and patriarchy. Medieval city-states were laboratories of modern liberal democracies and welfare systems based on taxation, but they were also the places where capitalism, colonialism, international finance and unfair trade relations emerged. Cities have a long history of providing privileges to their inhabitants, while extracting wealth from those outside its boundaries. Cities have a long history of providing privileges to their inhabitants, while extracting wealth from those outside its boundaries.

Nevertheless, cities have noticeably emerged as a critical arena for many recent social struggles from the Arab Spring in Tahrir square, Cairo or the Umbrella Revolution in Hong Kong. It has happened at time when cities for the first time in history now house more than 54% of the world’s population (expected to reach 67% by 2050).

For social movements, the cities are a strategic place to organise, not only practically but also politically. More than two decades of neoliberalism have succeeded in entrenching corporate power within national and international institutions and international legal frameworks – making it ever more difficult terrain for people’s movements, who have to defeat powerful interests and appeal to a deliberately disempowered electorate. Cities by contrast offer a more level playing field where people power can still take on and defeat corporate power and thereby prove that political mobilisation can deliver results.

Participation and power

The political theorist, the late Benjamin Barber, argued that cities are capable of reconnecting “participation, which is local, with power, which is central”. While nation states used to play that role, he argued they have become too large (and we would add also too captured by corporate capital) to sustain the kind of “bottom-up citizenship, civil society and voluntary community” that is essential to democracy.

Across the world, social movements are actively seizing this potential power,advancing important social demands, whether for dignified work, sustainable food systems, green energy or racial justice. Much of this transformation takes place under the radar, as mainstream largely corporate media continues to focus all its attention on the happenings in the national corridors of power.

Even we were surprised in 2015 when our organisation, the Transnational Institute, decided to look at the number of municipalities who had brought water services back under public control and discovered 235 cases in 37 countries of cities and communities remunicipalising their water. Given the power of transnational water companies like Suez and Veolia – and the grip that the ideology of privatisation has on national and international water policy – this was nothing short of a silent revolution. 235 cases in 37 countries of cities and communities remunicipalising their water… – nothing short of a silent revolution.

A follow-up report earlier this year that broadened its focus to include energy and housing unveiled 835 examples of (re)municipalisation of public services involving more than 1,600 municipalities in 45 countries. TNI researcher, Satoko Kishimoto, says “What is most important about these cases is that they kill once and for all the myth that ‘there is no alternative’ to neoliberalism. They show that not only is there a clear alternative to privatisation, but that it also has the potential to both improve services and transform society and environment for the better.”

An alternative to neoliberalism

In many cases, the experience of resisting corporate capital and defending rights, such as those of access to water or housing, has itself been transformational. It has helped activists reconnect with those alienated by neoliberalism, and also opened up peoples’ imaginations to think of new ways of organising work, services and social needs. The energy and dynamism that is released is palpable, captured in documentary films such as Demain (Tomorrow)

The experiences of trying to set up green businesses in Totnes in the UK, for example, eventually led to an international project, Reconomy, that seeks to build local economies that are sustainable, equitable and anchored in wellbeing, rather than tied to economic growth at any cost. An initiative by the New Delhi government to set up hundreds of small free health clinics to do diagnostics and simple treatments has inspired health activists across the world. In Barcelona, the experience of resisting house repossession inspired some activists to fight and win municipal elections based on a participatory platform of policies that include fining banks that speculate on empty homes, creating a new municipal energy company and providing sanctuary to refugees.

Barcelona’s new city council is now helping to foster a movement of ‘fearless cities’ committed to the same principles of participation, openness and social and environmental justice. Their first gathering in Barcelona in June 2017 attracted more than 600 participants representing more than 100 municipalist platforms from around the world.

The feminization of politics

Municipal activism is also an opportunity to put feminism and the feminization of politics at the forefront. As Laura Roth and Kate Shea Baird have argued “the feminization of politics, beyond its concern for increasing presence of women in decision-making spaces and implementing public policies to promote gender equality, is about changing the way politics is done.” In practice, this means leaving aside patterns of our patriarchal society such as competition, dominant leaderships, vertical organizations, egoism and structures that have typically excluded women from politics. It is noticeable how many of the new leaders in the municipalist movement are women.

Perhaps the proximity, scope and nature of the political conflicts at the city level, such as struggles for access to water and housing, rather than monetary policy or military alliances, also provide an arena where non-patriarchal modes of political action are better suited.

Vandana Shiva, philosopher and activist, at Fearless Cities, June 9 – 11, 2017. Flickr/Barcelona En Comú. Some rights reserved.

Transformative Cities Initiative: a unique participatory award

These successful experiences around the remunicipalisation of public services and the rising municipalist movement have inspired TNI to launch the Transformative Cities Initiative. Our goal is to build an atlas of real utopias, make these experiences viral, and to share the learning that comes from implementing these experiments. This month, we are launching a unique participatory award to recognise transformative experiences. In the first year, the focus will be on water, energy and housing. In future years, the initiative will expand its focus to other areas such as migration and solidarity, territorial food governance and drugs harm reduction.

We are encouraging both social movements and cities to use this opportunity to share your story. We plan to bring participants together, to learn from and systematise these experiences, in order to inspire and accelerate the process of transformation in other regions and places. We are giving special attention to experiences from the Global South, whose experiences are not adequately focused on or shared in global debates. We are giving special attention to experiences from the Global South, whose experiences are not adequately focused on or shared in global debates.

At a time when our current political framework offers most people a choice between neoliberal globalisation and authoritarian nationalism, between the global mall and the border wall, it is critical that the real alternatives coming from social movements are fertilized and strengthened.

A strategy that only seeks to resist increasingly authoritarian national governments, defending an ever-shrinking civic space, is demoralising and self-defeating. Similarly a strategy that articulates national and international alternatives that have no chance of realisation is equally disempowering.

Cities offer the chance to break with the dichotomy of despair – they give us a chance to trial out transformative change at a local level, and in so doing providing the building blocks for the global transformation that is so desperately needed. As the Fearless Cities gathering put it, “The local was where democracy was born; it is now where we will recover it.”

About the authors

Originally published in Open Democracy

Lead image:  Some rights reserved by Overpass Light Brigade

The post The power of a transformative city appeared first on P2P Foundation.

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

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Try: feminised politics, proximity, ecology and community. As we turn off ‘post-truth’ politics, face-to-face meeting, listening and community-building supported by safe technologies are some of the salves for human-scale democracy. While New Zealand is facing a national election, it’s worth considering other forms of democracy, namely engaged local politics, currently being called municipalism in Europe.

Jump to Barcelona in June — where 700 people from 180 countries converged in inaugural Fearless Cities summit on municipalism — organised by the current political movement, Barcelona En Comu.

If you’re not one for party politics, municipalism is attractive — it’s about designing a process of involving all citizens in the self-organising of their communities, towns or cities, not so much about creating new policies and group think from the top down. My interests: developing self-empowered societies, commons-building and in art processes that develop communities. After registering and paying 20 Euros online, I found myself connected to and hosted by the Corbella family who — mother, sister, son, father are all involved in the movement of people-driven democracy.

The summit was hugely powerful — not only connecting us to a major international network but giving visibility to residents, activists and councillors who have been elected from the ground up — from Europe and North America, Middle East and Africa, all encouraging us to continue work with people to eliminate fear that divides citizens. All the summit sessions can be found at You Tube here.

I attended sessions on non-state institutions, on sanctuary cities and on municipalism in towns and rural areas, thinking always, how might New Zealand might relate to this new movement?

Try these recurring themes from the summit:

1. Feminised politics. The new municipalisism is radicalising the process of representation and it is female-led. It will grow from those experienced in listening to their communities. Barcelona City Councillor, Laura Perez Castaño suggested that no matter how we look at it, women’s needs are different to men’s. Issues such as mobility and working hours are different for women and our political positions different. New Zealand knows about historic suffrage; and we should start to recognise the new community-driven leaders who are women.

2. Proximity is a key asset when it comes to municipalism. Having access to all the members of our small communities allows for genuine engagement. We talk about New Zealand’s ‘2 degrees’ social geography and this is powerful. The traditional elite have used proximity in recent times and it can be just as easily employed. Recommended reading: Joan Subirats on Proximity (included here the book Cities in the 21st Century).

3. Ecology and people are connected. Legendary Indian activist Vandana Shiva spoke about forests self-organising and that the natural state for people too is also to self-organise within their urban ecosystems. To quote US activist Debbie Bookchin, “We can’t address ecological problems without resolving our addiction to domination and hierarchy.” We know this in New Zealand: the mauri of the land is connected to the mauri of the people. That means the people and land stay well together.

4. As community organisers, don’t rely on the mainstream media to reach your people or reflect your community. Organising at community level is the way to connect where you are dealing with people at a personal level. It’s time consuming -get used to it. Barcelona En Comu was largely ignored by the TV and newspapers until the election. Trust your community networks and not the media.

Leading European examples

Barcelona En Comu started out as movement of self-organising groups and Barcelona’s Mayor Ada Colau is one of the more public faces of it. Back in 2014 she was part of organisation, Platform for Mortgage Victims, working to stop people being evicted from their homes by banks.

Barcelona Mayor Ada Colau at #FearlessCities

Connecting with other groups, the Platform members became more politically active when they realised that it wasn’t just about tackling banks — that public institutions had to change too. Running for Barcelona Council, initially under the banner Guanyem Barcelona (We will win Barcelona) they didn’t meet in secret or in members’ sitting rooms. They held meetings in the squares, in the streets, and in all neighborhoods. For more history see this Guardian piece How to win back the city.

Although Barcelona en Comu evolved to become a political party, their connection between the people and political process continues fluidly. Oriol Corbella, one of my young hosts, sent me a message as he was attending a recent meeting in his neighborhood with the elected members of Barcelona En Comu, reporting back after two years in Council. He described how the room was separated into five circles (each circle a subject), with the respective politicians explaining “the goals we had accomplished, the difficulties and the future. There are many difficulties for the ones in government to communicate what they do to the people from the party.” But intention is there.

Participatory democracy is fast-shaping the operations of other local governments over Europe, and it may be that smaller towns are easier to manage than cities. At the session Municipalism in towns and rural areas I learned that in the UK, in Buckfastleigh, Devon, Pamela Barrett, Mayor of Buckfastleigh, was elected once her community collectively developed 8 new initiatives and Council raised rates by 1 pound a week (equating to an 100% rise) without backlash. Buckfastleigh runs its meetings in football clubs, in parks and the streets, and allows members of the public to contribute in a Roman-style ‘polis’.

In Torrelodones, Spain, Marina Vicen, Councilor for Youth and Education, spoke of how the Council has established a drop in centre to deal with issues immediately — same day if possible.

In Celrá, we heard from Mercè Amich Vidal, Popular Unity Candidacy (CUP), Councilor for Youth and Equality at Celrà City Council where their constituency asked them to ring the elderly residents every morning to wish them good morning and will check-in on them personally if they don’t respond. They call this the Bon Dia service.

In Celrá, 10o% of local budget (outside of Council staffing) is allocated participatorily. The town has since been trialing an online app — Celrà participa — which will assist.

Municipalist Councillors from Spain and UK: Marina Vincen, Mercè Amich Vidal, Pamela Barrett

In London, the Right to the City campaign started before the UK general election and has similar principles to municipalism, with a certain pick up especially since the tragedy of Grenfell Tower. Yet it feels as if class and power issues could take a while to be fully shaken from the English psyche — see Caroline Molloy’s damning piece on UK local politics.

Surely it’s possible for those of us in NZ to leave behind the colonial psyche of ‘us’ and ‘them’?

New Zealand community-driven politics?

Our New Zealand local governments are generally approachable. I’ve found Councils responsive and Councillors increasingly open minded. In Wellington I often see our Councillors in community events, football games, coming readily to invited meetings through my varied involvement in several community-driven planning programmes. The organisation I co-direct, Letting Space, for example, has worked with Wellington City, as well as Dunedin City, Masterton District, and Porirua City on a platform for community voice — the Urban Dream Brokerage*, a place for all-comers to suggest good ideas for vacant city spaces.

And in terms of political advocacy the work of New Zealand organisation Action Station has begun to reveal the possibility of crowd-sourcing support for specific causes. It’s work is driven by what people want to see happen and has had huge effect in selected areas.

There are many groups who see themselves as legitimate voices of the land, and thousands of Friends’ groups who inadvertently become the main caretakers for the rivers, streams and wilder habitats of our country. Many of recent our environmental victories have been thanks to our nation of volunteers. Yet these groups are at arms length from politics. We’re just playing in the shallows with what is possible. We need to connect voice and ideas with real politics.

Perhaps we don’t perceive the need for radical transformation in New Zealand like those in bigger cities and countries. Perhaps we don’t perceive we have an issue with corruption or access to power.

And yet we still have major problems — hugely disempowered communities and those whose needs are not being met. We’ve seen the rate of homelessness at world-beating levels, of cities too expensive for average wage earners to live in, increased mental illness, youth suicide at record levels and huge disenfranchisement in society. Many of these problems lie in Central government policies. But some issues can be met in our local towns and cities.

With the majority of the New Zealand population saying they think that traditional parties and politicians don’t care about them, we need to find new ways for people to have a voice.

Political commentator Bryce Edwards suggests:

“The idea of participatory and decentralized ways of doing politics are particularly apt for contemporary New Zealand, because the political system has become the opposite of that — it’s currently very centralized and elite. Few people are involved in the political process, and power is highly concentrated. So, we desperately need to be talking about and trialing ideas like municipalism.

“Municipalism might well be a philosophy and practice tailor-made for contemporary politics in New Zealand…People are increasingly either disenchanted with how politics currently works, or at least highly suspicious about democracy and authorities in general. There is a backlash forming against the status quo of how decision-making occurs, and about who has the power. That means that people are particularly open to new ideas about running society — and so concepts like municipalism have a very good chance of resonating with a wide variety of people. It could indeed resonate with many of those on both left and right, with young and old, and with many different types of communities (rural, provincial, urban, etc).”

The movement toward municipalism in Europe tells us that it is at the local level that we can really address peoples’ needs. Cities and towns have more connection with our daily lives. It is not the direction that New Zealand has been heading with recent attempts at reforms.

What would full municipalism look like in New Zealand? Listening and working collectively requires open-mindedness. It would require people to put aside their cynicism and their egos. Would it be more Āotearoa hui-style politics that we adapt? It needs people who are disempowered being given the platform to speak openly and for those with more resource to listen and finding solutions together, from the ground up.

Could we imagine ourselves like Celrá, where our local Councils fund services that we ourselves have prioritised? Imagine — if it were not just our elderly but also the unwell and fearful being phoned every morning to see how they were. Could we imagine participatory budgeting at a large scale, to decide what we spent our money on?

Imagine regular, official Council meetings in our parks and squares (or vacant sites if the weather is bad) where our communities come to talk about their local needs for, say good local food, or cheaper activities or safer traffic and these were addressed directly by the neighborhood representative? Engaging Maori tikanga would be vital and important- hui are the ideal reference point for the practice of listening hearing each other.

Barcelona en Comu have a step by step guide about how to organise a municipalist driven culture. Is New Zealand is ripe for a truly people-led approach to politics?

For more writing on the Fearless Cities summit, I recommend fellow Wellingtonian Richard Bartlett’s snapshot How a Global Network of #FearlessCities is Making Racist Colonial Nation States Obsolete.

Author Sophie Jerram in Barcelona

*My experience has been in the transformation of space from private to public. We need more spaces to debate and meet in. We’ve witnessed first-hand the submission of hundreds of new ideas for public life. Often all is needed is space and encouragement.  has helped people launch ideas, taught new skills, redistributed resources, connected property owners with creative makers, and moreover given people the chance to practise their ideas in public space free of commercial pressure. I’ve been in Europe talking with the local city of Helsingør about how this ‘radical’ programme handing over spaces to people with ideas could be adapted to Danish life.

*

Photo by BarcelonaEnComu

The post What Municipalism and #FearlessCities could mean for New Zealand 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

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