This week I had the privilege of joining the Fearless Cities conference, hosted by Barcelona en Comú, a citizen platform founded by 15M and PAH activists in 2014.

The conference announced a global municipalist network, featuring delegates from more than 100 cities around the world.

Municipalism is a movement of cities taking power from states, and using that power to transform politics from the bottom up. For a good intro, check out this recent article from Kate Shea Baird: A new international municipalist movement is on the rise — from small victories to global alternatives.

The conference named two goals for the municipalists:

• to feminize politics — developing new ways of organising based on horizontal collaboration, collective intelligence and the politics of everyday life, and,
• to stop the far right — combating the politics of hate and fear with local policies that reduce inequality and promote the common good.

The speakers were hugely inspiring. To give you a taste, I’ve extracted quotes from the four sessions I attend.

Democracy from the Bottom Up: Municipalism and other Stories

I found myself nodding along with everything shared by Debbie Bookchin, daughter of the original municipalists, Beatrice and Murray Bookchin:

All ecological problems are social problems. We can’t address ecological problems without resolving our addiction to domination and hierarchy. We need to fundamentally alter our social relations. How do we bring an egalitarian society into being? The municipality is a logical arena to start. […]

Social change won’t occur by voting for the candidate who promises a minimum wage, free education etc., only an activated citizen movement can transform society. […]

Local assemblies transform citizens. We are made new humans by participating. We grow beyond capitalist modernity.

Ritchie Torres from the NYC Council, opened with two questions about the US context:

• How do we achieve progressive municipal governance in a world of federal divestment?
• How do you bring participatory politics while so deeply entrenched in two-party politics?

They said their greatest achievement in NYC “is that we’ve brought into mainstream a new idea of municipal government. It’s common sense now that local government is not just for filling potholes, it can be a force for equity. […] We’re not just a legislature, we’re a vehicle for community organising. Being merely a legislature, you will be undermined by legislative and financial activism from the right. But if you’re organising communities, you can make headway.”

Sinam Mohamad was greeted by a standing ovation from the crowd, inspired by stories from Rojava, the autonomous region in the north of Syria:

We in Rojava have built decentralised, democratic self-rule in an extremely difficult situation. Economic embargo, besieged, terrorist attacks, chauvinist mentalities… In spite of all this, we built our municipalism. […]

Kobanî faced an attack from ISIS; a city full of fear, everyone frightened by the attack. Fear means you are dying while you are alive. Turkish bombs in our cities, villages. Children sleeping with fear. Mothers afraid for their families. We struggled for peace, which we have achieved now. We built a democratic administration together. Not just Kurds but a mosaic of religions and nations: Turkmen, Arabs, Syrians, Assyrians, Muslim, Yezidi, Christian, and so on. All agree to coexist in this area. This is our aim, to live together without fear. All the people come together and agree to the social contract.

If you don’t have an organisation that is very well organised for equal gender, you won’t have a free society. Free women = free society. Constitutionally we have equal genders, 50–50 participation. Co-president system means we have Mr and Mrs Presidents.

See my full notes from that session here.

Sanctuary and Refuge Cities

On Sunday morning, we joined a panel on Sanctuary and Refuge Cities. Speakers included city officials from Barcelona, NYC, Berlin, Kilkis (Greece), and Paris. Some highlights:

Daniel Gutierrez from Interventionistische Linke in Berlin explained how they created an anonymous health card so migrants can access services without fear of deportation. The same is happening in Barcelona and parts of France. Ignasi Calvó explained that the Barcelona ID is a municipal (not national) register of citizens, so they can bypass the racist laws of the Spanish state, but it still carries state validity, conferring automatic rights to anyone carrying it in the EU. He warned though, “If you’re going to use civil disobedience, you have to ensure the consequence will be on the city, not on the migrant.”

Each of the speakers reiterated the same simple point: that everyone should have access to the same rights. They argued against categorical distinctions between migrants, refugees, and other residents, as these categories create exclusion.

Amélie Canonne from Emmaus International explained how the state fuels radicalisation: “Repression creates radicalisation, both within migrant communities and in the activists working in solidarity with them. In EU, food distribution is banned, activists are arrested, trialled, radicalised.”

Comments from the audience revealed the huge intelligence in the room. For instance, one commenter shared their concerns about the elephant in the room: the question of race. “This has been a colourblind discourse, forgetting the racial aspect, treating migrants as foreigners rather than people of colour. In the US, white nationalism is one of the main drivers working against migrants.” For more on this, see my recent article on white nationalist militias resisting migration from Latin America.

A city councillor from Philadelphia agreed, explaining how systemic bias is compounded against people with intersecting identities, not just “people of colour”, but “low income, migrant, people of colour.”

A Lebanese participant shared some broader context: “We have been receiving refugees for 60 years, maybe 2 million of them. We have a lot to say about the experience! Are these European cities connecting with the history of refugees in Lebanon? We have made so many failures, and success stories too. Many European cities are coming at this for the first time, learn from us!”

It was inspiring to hear so many cities taking radical steps to resist the racist policies imposed at the national level. See my full notes from that session here.

For the closing plenary, Kali Akuno shared razor-sharp analysis from their experience in Jackson, Mississippi.

“In Jackson we talk about the “Syriza trap” — thinking that our leftist forces can manage the contradictions of capitalism. Thinking we can transform capitalism without transforming society. Where has that ever happened? We need to transform society from the bottom up in a participatory way.”

They reiterated “proximity”, a theme woven throughout the conference:

“Direct contact with your neighbour. Find out their interests, hopes, desires, fears, then organise for what you want, and to not be subject to those fears. You will have to confront racism, sexism, xenophobia: you can overcome that at the local level and create a practice to open your neighbourhood to new people.”

The map of participants shows the global extent of this emerging movement

We then heard updates from delegates from around the world. The UK delegate received enthusiastic applause throughout their short speech:

“Use political office as a resource to support the transformation from below. We’ve learned the lessons from feminism, we change the order when we refuse to participate.”

A panel discussion with no white men. How has this never happened before?

Finally, at the end of the day we enjoyed a one last panel — a furious, joyful, incendiary lineup of speakers. I took fairly comprehensive notes, which you can read here.

Yayo Herrero was one of the most incredible speakers I’ve ever seen. Their transformation recipe is worth quoting in full (that is, my transcription of the English translation of the recipe):

“Acknowledge the very clear reality: that material reduction is not catastrophe. It is a catastrophe to not address this with equity and justice.

“We are obliged to think about freedom and a framework of rights that is not just individual but has a relational sphere.

“We need to imagine an ecologist feminist alternative that is anchored in the land, and in our bodies. Put life and sustainability as a political and economic priority. Expel markets as the centre of the political logic. Challenge the perverse logic that if we don’t keep on feeding this exploitive system we won’t grow wellbeing.

“We need a different way of science and technology. We need to expel the part of science that is based on fantasy, promoting things that are not possible, or only possible for a few. Put science in the service of life.

“We need social organisation where men and women and institutions are co-responsible for care. Life must be cared for, it’s not just a job for women.

“We need alliances that allow us to organise a sabotage to this historic plan. Feminists, entrepreneurs, ecologists, trade unions… build a complicated diverse alliance of majorities.”

Activist philosopher Vandana Shiva spoke last, concluding beautifully:

“Nature is intelligence, diversity, and self-organisation. Municipalism is self-organisation at the level of cities.”

And with that, we were ejected out into the warm Barcelona evening. Reviewing these notes, I’m stunned by the quality of all these speakers. The conference felt very much like a sequel to last year’s Democratic Cities conference in Madrid, where I was first introduced to the idea that cities can offer hope in an age of hopeless states.

The conference organisers got a couple of simple things right which made a profound difference to the mood and the content: they made the event accessible with €20 tickets, and they ensured the majority of speakers were women.

However, with respect, I do want to offer a criticism: every session I attended shared the same linear format, with one person speaking, and a room full of intelligent, engaged, creative people simply listening. We can do so much better than this! As Vandana said, municipalism is self-organisation at the scale of the city — I’m hungry for self-organisation at the scale of the conference. We can use horizontal collaboration structures like “Open Space Technology” to unlock the collective intelligence of all the participants. We can intentionally design for relationship-building, rather than hoping for it to emerge passively in the hallways and lunch breaks. This Thursday my partner Nati and I are hosting a workshop on self-organising at the scale of 10s to 100s of people; perhaps we can convince some of the conference organisers to join us and the next Fearless Cities event will have a format to match the content.

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From 9 – 11 of June, mayors, local councillors and activists from over 40 countries will meet in Barcelona for the international municipalist summit ‘Fearless Cities’. The event will bring together, for the first time, a network of municipalist platforms that has been expanding around the world, to relatively little fanfare, over recent years.

Nathan Law Kwung Chun of Demosisto during Hong Kong legislative election, 2016. Wikicommons/Iris Tong. Some rights reserved.

The municipalist movement is made up of an ecosystem of organizations working within and beyond electoral politics at local level. It’s a movement defined as much by how it does politics as by its goals, and it is this insistence on the need to do things differently that gives municipalism its unique strength in the current context.

Municipalism works at the local scale. In an age of xenophobic discourses that exclude people based on national or ethnic criteria, municipalism constructs alternative forms of collective identity and citizenship based on residence and participation. Municipalism is pragmatic and goal-based: in a neoliberal system that tells us ‘there is no alternative’, municipalism proves that things can be done differently through small, but concrete, victories, like remuncipalizing basic services or providing local ID schemes for undocumented immigrants. Municipalism allows us to reclaim individual and collective autonomy; in response to citizen demands for real democracy, municipalism opens up forms of participation that go beyond voting once every few years.

The global municipalist map today

The municipalist movement has already made significant inroads in some areas of the world. Perhaps the most profound contemporary expressions of municipalism are found in the Kurdish movements in the Middle East. Against the most inhospitable background of conflict and repression, the Kurds are building feminist, assembly-based models of stateless democracy, most notably in the self-governing region of Rojava in Northern Syria.

Municipalism is also flourishing in Southern Europe. In Spain, citizen platforms govern most major cities, including Barcelona and Madrid. These platforms followed in the footsteps of the municipalist Popular Unity Candidacies (CUP), which gained significant representation in the 2007 and 2011 local elections in Catalonia.

Spain’s ‘cities of change’ are reversing austerity measures, remunicipalizing basic services and integrating an explicitly feminist perspective into public policy. As a network, these city halls are also playing a significant role in challenging central government policy on issues like migration and housing. In Italy, Cambiamo Messina dal Basso was an early example of what is known as “neo-municipalismo”, taking office in the Sicilian city in 2013. In Naples, a municipalist coalition has developed innovative ways of democratizing the urban commons and stood up to the central government over urban development plans under the leadership of Mayor Luigi Demagistris. Citizen platforms have seats on city councils in Bologna and Pisa, while in other cities, like Padova or Verona, platforms are running for office in the local elections on June 11.

Elsewhere, municipalism is being explored as a strategy for the future in response to the failures and limits of national politics. In France, for example, activists from the Nuit Debout movement that occupied city squares in 2016 are considering replicating the municipalist path taken by some of their indignados counterparts in Spain at the 2020 local elections. The citizen-left-green alliance, RCGE that governs in Grenoble with mayor Eric Piolle, and Autrement pour Saillans in the small town of Saillans could serve as potential sources of inspiration closer to home. In the wake of a presidential election that presented a choice between a neoliberal and a far-right candidate, the time is ripe in France to prove that there are alternatives at local level.

In the wake of a presidential election that presented a choice between a neoliberal and a far-right candidate, the time is ripe in France to prove that there are alternatives at local level. 

Similarly, in the USA, the victory of Trump has provoked reflection among supporters of Bernie Sanders about the potential of towns and cities as sites of resistance and transformation. Sanders himself has said that the next step for his movement is to organize locally and stand candidates for local office. The Working Families Party, which endorsed Sanders in 2016, is actively working to harness the energy of his movement in local and state primary races. In the US, as in France, there are isolated cases of municipalist platforms – Richmond for All in California, and the People’s Assembly in Jackson, Mississippi – that could serve as models for a broader movement.

In Hong Kong, the city council has become a key site of conflict between the pro-democracy movement and the Chinese government: elected councillors from the Demosisto and Youngspiration parties face repression and state prosecution for their role in pro-democracy protests inside and outside the council chamber.

In Poland, another country governed by the authoritarian right, a municipalist movement has been brewing for a number of years. 2011 saw the founding of the Congress of Urban Movements, bringing together diverse organizations working at local level. A number of citizen platforms from the congress stood in the local elections in 2014, picking up seats in six city councils and on district councils in Warsaw, and winning the mayoralty in Gorzow Wielkopolski. Municipal elections in 2018 should see this movement make further advances, in alliance with local branches of the national party, Razem.

Municipal elections in 2018 should see this movement make further advances, in alliance with local branches of the national party, Razem.

In Latin America, too, municipal movements are providing glimmers of hope against a backdrop of national stagnation or crisis. In 2016, Áurea Carolina de Freitas of citizen platform Cidade que Queremos won more votes than any other candidate for city council in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, while Jorge Sharpe, a former student activist supported by a citizen platform, won the mayoralty of Chile’s second city, Valparaíso. In Rosario, Argentina, Ciudad Futura has spent over ten years creating non-state institutions outside city hall and just over two using its three councilors to push for change from within it.

A new political space?

Up until now, international connections between these movements have been mostly limited to bilateral exchanges on organizing tactics or policy debates. But the possibility of articulating a new political space among these diverse experiences is tantalising. The response to the invitation from Barcelona en Comú to Fearless Cities – to which over 600 participants from more than 180 towns and cities have registered – suggests that there is already the latent awareness of a common municipalist identity, and appetite to deepen global collaboration.

This matters, because the consolidation and expansion of municipalism globally could determine the ability of any individual platform to meet its goals over the long-term. After all, one of the greatest limits of municipalism is the difficulty it faces in responding to forces and interests that cross borders: transnational speculation in urban land and housing markets, the threat posed by multinationals to local economic and environmental sustainability, displacement and forced migration. Only a strong, networked response will be capable of providing a counterweight to central government and corporate power in these areas.

It will be up to municipalist movements themselves to define a blueprint for an internationalism for the twenty-first century. An internationalism that moves beyond formal bureaucratic structures and harnesses the ways of working that define municipalism itself: concrete and goal-based, feminist and collaborative, radical yet pragmatic. Only in this way, through infinite acts of bravery, through faith in the cumulative effects of a thousand small victories, can we build a global alternative to a world in crisis.

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