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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Carlos Delclós, a sociologist and lecturer at Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, and an activist in the 15M Movement, writes about new generation of activist-politicians advancing the municipal agenda in Spain.

What the Spanish media ignore about this new generation of activist-politicians is why they became famous enough to put on a ballot in the first place: their roots in prominent local struggles and their willingness to spearhead radical democratic participation.

On Sunday, May 24th, the two parties that have ruled Spain since the country’s transition to democracy in the late 1970s were dealt yet another substantial blow, this time in regional and municipal elections. Nationwide, the ruling Popular Party saw support fall from the nearly 11 million votes they received in 2011 to just under 6 million this year. But while much has been written about the impact emerging parties like the anti-austerity Podemos or the right-wing Ciudadanos have had on the established parties, what makes Sunday’s results so remarkable is not what those parties did on their own, but what happened between several political actors at the municipal level.

In Barcelona, the prominent anti-evictions activist Ada Colau won the city’s mayoral race. In Madrid, once a stronghold of the Popular Party, the former judge Manuela Carmena also has a chance to govern, depending on whether her platform and the deteriorating Socialist party are willing to strike a deal. In the four largest cities, it is quite possible that the mayor will belong to neither of the two major parties. The same is true in Galicia’s major cities, Santiago and A Corunha. In Cádiz, Spain’s unemployment capital, another new, anti-austerity platform finished a close second.

Much of the right-wing Spanish press is already attributing these spectacular results to a cult of personality around the people leading these platforms, accompanied by the typical references to populism and Venezuela, with an occasional shout-out to North Korea for extra flavour (as if the resort to these arguments weren’t the epitome of populist rhetoric). What they ignore is why those faces became famous enough to put on a ballot in the first place: their roots in prominent local struggles, their independence with respect to the established parties and their willingness to spearhead bottom-up processes seeking a confluence between new or smaller parties, community organisations and political independents around a set of common objectives determined through radical democratic participation.

The Spanish hub of the Doc Next Network’s Radical Democracy: Reclaiming the Commons project has been documenting this process since it began, through video and other media. Below, you can see a helpful infographic that shows just some of the ingredients with which the new municipalist candidacies Ahora Madrid (Now Madrid) and Barcelona En Comù (Barcelona in Common) cooked up their municipal recipes. They include more obvious reference points like the indignados movement, but also feminist struggles, the copyleft movement or the Zapatistas of Chiapas, Mexico, among many others.

Image by Maria Castelló Solbés

Radical municipal politics is not an altogether new concept, especially not in Spain. In Catalonia, the Popular Unity Candidacies of the left-wing independence movement have had a notable presence in smaller towns for several years (they also quadrupled their 2011 results on Sunday, for what it’s worth). At the southern end of the country, the Andalusian village of Marinaleda is a well-documented experiment in utopian communism that has been going on for over three decades now.

In fact, the so-called father of libertarian municipalism, social ecologist Murray Bookchin, was strongly inspired by the Spanish municipal politics of the 19th and early twentieth century, as well as the Swiss Grey Leagues and the New England townships, when he wrote his influential “New Municipal Agenda”. While he hardly intended to prescribe a one-size-fits-all solution—especially not in large urban belts and port cities—in the text, Bookchin outlined four main coordinates: a revival of the citizens’ assembly, the need for confederation with other municipalities, grassroots politics as a school of genuine citizenship and the municipalisation of the economy. Underlying all of these coordinates is “a recovery of a new participatory politics structured around free, self-empowered and active citizens”.

All of these coordinates chime with the program and praxis of the new municipalist candidacies. In the newspaper they handed out as part of their campaign, Barcelona En Comù used almost as much space describing their process (30,000 signatures asking them to run for election, 1,000 campaign volunteers, 200 events organised by self-organised neighbourhood assemblies, 100 meetings with various community organisations in just 10 months of existence) and their vision (“a standard-bearer of social justice and democracy”) as they do outlining their program. The program itself includes 600 measures, ranging from modest but much-needed reforms (e.g., opening up more bike lanes, more social housing), to more radical ones (a guaranteed municipal income, coining a municipal currency).

Several questions remain about the conflict between the ambitions of the new municipalist candidacies and the daunting, path-dependent inertia of an institutional reality that threatens to swallow them whole. Many of those questions are addressed by some of the candidates themselves in the film Municipal Recipes, which you can watch below.

In it, they discuss the thought process that led them to make the jump into the electoral arena, how they hope to care for the city, how to make it liveable, the relationship between citizens, social movements and institutions, and the pitfalls of representative democracy, among other key issues. It’s a fascinating glimpse into a remarkable process. Tellingly, one of the most frequently used words in the film is “tension”. As Pablo Carmona of Ahora Madrid puts it, regardless of whether they achieve something like Bookchin’s New Municipal Agenda, they have opened up “a new model of social conflict” in Spain.

Recetas municipales. Una conversacio?n sobre el cuidado de las ciudades from ZEMOS98 on Vimeo.

(Click CC for English subtitles)

Municipalrecipes.cc is a campaign carried out by Lucas Tello, Nuria Campabadal, Mario Munera and Guillermo Zapata, coordinated by Sofía Coca.

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Carlos Delclós is a sociologist and lecturer at Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, and an activist in the 15M Movement.

Lead Image by Jordi Boixareu

The post Towards a new municipal agenda in Spain appeared first on P2P Foundation.

First up is this inspiring video, originally shared by Cecilia Barriga on Vimeo and featuring an impassioned Ada Colau (who’s running for mayor in Barcelona) describing the buzz created around her Madrid-based municipalist counterpart, Manuela Carmena.

Madrid, It buzzes for the people from cecilia barriga on Vimeo.

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