Politicising proximity: Radical municipalism as a strategy in crisis

What’s so radical about radical municipalism?

New municipalism is a marker in time, connoting an entirely novel reinvention, or more continuous renewal, of a broad historical trend, a theory and a praxis called municipalism. Predominantly, this has meant drawing on histories that have taken the local level as the site for pushing towards a radicalised political, economic and social agenda. In the case of Spain, where the term has most frequently been used, the prefix ‘new’ is meant to distinguish recent experiments from a long municipalist tradition (Orduña Rebollo, 2005). In some places, new municipalism – sometimes called ‘neo-municipalism’ (Mocca, 2021; Pirone, 2020) – is all too easily misinterpreted as a rediscovery of 19th- and 20th-century municipal socialism (Leopold and McDonald, 2012) and international municipalism (Clarke, 2012; Saunier, 2002) for the 21st century (e.g. Association for Public Service Excellence [APSE] , 2018; Centre for Local Economic Strategies [CLES], 2019).

Some scholarly discussions of the recent global remunicipalisation phenomenon, for example, have pronounced this the return of a ‘pragmatic municipalism’, apparently oblivious to the wider new municipalist movement with which it shares its name (Warner, 2023). In practice, while attempts at (re)municipalisation are frequent features of new municipalist movements (e.g. Angel, 2021; Becker et al., 2015; Paul and Cumbers, 2023), this rescaling of the delivery of services remains a creature of the state, with perhaps just as much in common with the ‘new state capitalism’ (Alami et al., 2023; Peck, 2023) as with the new municipalism. At whatever scale we care to look, the state’s recently rediscovered interventionist role in the proactive management of capitalism is a marker of a conjunctural turning point away from previous iterations of neoliberalism and towards some sort of new state capitalism, whose rise, Peck (2023: 2)notes, ‘signals a significant geohistorical moment (maybe not a new “era” as such, but a notable inflection point for sure)’. At the local level, this might translate into or at least accommodate certain new municipalist approaches. Yet these kinds of municipalism – pragmatic and entrepreneurial, invested in managing local economies in more-or-less progressive, though nonetheless state-capitalist, directions – are decidedly not what we are looking at here, nor what this special issue is about.

We can see the rise of the city as a political actor as another misguided example of new municipalism where radicality is absent. The conventional approach to municipal planning and policy innovation – promulgated by the likes of C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group, Rockefeller Foundation’s 100 Resilient Cities, the Global Covenant of Mayors and United Cities and Local Government, all plugged into philanthrocapitalism and the global non-profit industrial complex, and championing discourses and methodologies such as ‘resilience’ and ‘design thinking’ (Angelo and Wachsmuth, 2020; Barnett, 2022) – is increasingly celebrated as best practice and enrolled in fast policy model mobilisation in a growing assemblage of inter-city and transnational urban policy and mayoral networks united by the belief that ‘cities can save the planet’ (Angelo and Wachsmuth, 2020: 2212). This municipalist-adjacent approach frames the city as the privileged site of experimental solutions to – as well as the source of – ‘wicked problems’ (complex problems resisting simple technical resolution), not least climate breakdown (Barnett, 2022). This constitutes the liberal-capitalist flipside to radical municipalist translocalism: likewise promoting inter-urban cooperation, knowledge sharing and solidarity, but within a merely ‘progressive’, accommodative, technocratic frame that fails to challenge the radical root of these problems.

Radical municipalism, by contrast, seeks to make a clear break both with the state-led municipalist imaginaries of the past and present, and with the simplistic championing of the ‘urbanising’ or ‘localising’ of policies. It points instead towards a more radical tradition devoted to constructing an alternative polity to that of the nested, hierarchical, patriarchal liberal-democratic capitalist state. This radical tradition is rooted in the communist – or, rather, ‘communalist’ (Bookchin, 1987, 2015) – imaginary of the commune inspired by the Paris Commune. Radical municipalism ultimately aims to build alternative polities based on the commune to replace politics that reproduce the nation-state, patriarchal power structures and colonial capital accumulation.

Radical municipalism is thus not simply ‘progressive policies happening in cities’ or economies that have been municipalised – conflated with this though it sometimes is (for a critique, see Thompson, 2021a). Rather, it is a particular orientation to, and process of, transformative social change in which the municipal scale is approached as the privileged ‘strategic entry point’ (Russell, 2019: 991). First and foremost this is about ‘radical’ as opposed to merely ‘progressive’ change – pursuing structural transformation from the root, rather than incremental reforms in accommodation with hegemony (for distinctions between radical and progressive, see Beveridge and Naumann, 2023; Thompson, 2023). Typically emphasising the ‘prefigurative’ nature of radical transformation – that is, ‘anticipating or representing something that will happen in the future’ (Monticelli, 2022: 17) – radical municipalist interventions attempt to embody in present practices, and condition the possibilities for, a democratically envisioned future society. They are – at least ideally – committed not only to certain goals, policies, and concrete outputs but also to a specific way politics is done. These experimental practices typically embody what Bookchin (1987, 2015), the theorist of libertarian municipalism and communalism, envisaged as ‘non-hierarchical forms’ that subvert ‘coercive hierarchies’ and structures of domination, including: class power (property-owners over property-less), state power (officials over citizens), patriarchy (men over women), racial supremacy (white over black), gerontocracy (old over young), imperialism (core over periphery) and anthropocentrism (humans over non-human nature) (see Shelley, 2022). Prefiguration across these domains informs radical municipalist principles, policies and practices, from the feminisation of politics (Roth et al., 2020) to degrowth or postgrowth transitions (Schmid, 2023; Vansintjan, 2018) to radical forms of democracy (Roth, 2019a; van Outryve d’Ydewalle, 2019).

The core of radical municipalist strategy, then, is its ambition to transform citizen subjectivities and ideological ‘common sense’ through prefigurative experimentation alongside institutional innovation (Russell and Milburn, 2018). This entails shifting both the definition of power and its distribution: from a top-down ‘power-over’ to a bottom-up ‘power-with’ model (Roth et al., 2020). Interdependence and everyday relations are key to building power in politics, economy and society. The strategy is committed to interventions that more-or-less work within present constraints but that simultaneously create ‘transition pathways’ (see Chatterton, 2016) to alternative futures. This places radical municipalism very much in the realm of lived experience, everyday life, and the ‘urban everyday’ (Beveridge and Koch, 2019) – a realm of daily rituals, libidinal energies and private as well as collective desires. For Bookchin (1987, 2015), accessing this immediate, phenomenological level of human life is fundamental for municipalist transformation, as the ‘hierarchical mentality’ of capital, state and other forms of domination is embedded in society at a ‘molecular’ level. The enduring allure of face-to-face, non-hierarchical, deliberative dialogue in popular assemblies for the reformation of civic character and political subjectivities through confrontation with the desires and rationalities of others underpins radical municipalism (Bookchin, 2015; Roth, 2019b; Shelley, 2022); a school in the art and craft of collective self-government.

Though important, the radical municipalist hypothesis is more than the sum of prefigurative politics. We find some commonality here with Erik Olin Wright’s (2010) theorisation of the interrelation between three mechanisms of systemic change: ‘ruptural’ (revolutionary struggle); ‘symbiotic’ (reform of existing structures); and ‘interstitial’ (prefigurative alterity in the interstices). In crude terms, symbiotic and interstitial mechanisms respectively reflect the two poles of radical municipalism’s ‘dual power’ approach: taking (and transforming) existing state power by ‘occupying institutions’; and building alternative counter-powers ‘in the shell of the old’, centred on the commune (Bookchin, 2015). As interstitial practices grow in strength and number, and as symbiotic reforms contribute to shifts in socio-economic and political possibility, viable ruptural change may eventually be possible. Radical municipalist experimentation with new institutional forms or hacking existing ones – blending symbiotic and interstitial approaches – has also produced some interesting results. For instance, municipalist collectives have often created citizen platforms that use the form of the political party to bring social movements into public institutions (Monterde, 2019), combining the symbiotic and interstitial in innovative ways that can be adapted to the local circumstances and legal regulations. In the domain of the commons, it has generated hybrids between existing state power and municipalist, communalist or ‘commonist’ counter-power: public-common partnerships (Russell et al., 2023), commons-state institutions (Bianchi, 2023) and a wider trajectory of ‘becoming-common of the public’ (Mendez et al., 2021). This is where municipalist strategy intersects with the commons and commoning as a movement mobilised ‘in, against and beyond’ capitalism and the state (Chatterton and Pusey, 2020; Cumbers, 2015; Thompson, 2021b) – the in, against and beyond, here, somewhat analogous to symbiotic, ruptural and interstitial change, respectively. In contrast to more traditional forms of municipalism, we view radical municipalism as harnessing symbiotic action primarily to help achieve and protect interstitial, prefigurative change in the here-and-now, with ruptural revolution as its long-term horizon.

There is, no doubt, a need for greater theoretical and strategic clarity as to what this means in practice, recognising we are not starting from a position of consensus amongst those working with the radical municipalist hypothesis. Strategies differ, according to the local circumstances, and so do the long-term goals – more or less radical, depending on the case. Across this plural terrain of transformation, there are debates and divergences over what, exactly, constitutes transformative or radical change of social and institutional forms. How far can the capitalist state and liberal-bourgeois law, for instance, be transformed from the inside or out – by developing creative, experimental and performative practices to ‘prefigure’ a new kind of state or law (Cooper, 2017; Thorpe and Morgan, 2023).

There are many ‘boundary cases’ documented in this special issue – examples of municipalist praxis that fall short, in one way or another, of their radical prefigurative or ruptural promise but which nonetheless cast light on the contours of the field, its boundaries with adjacent practices, or on the barriers it needs to surmount in order to be successful (Joubert, 2023; Thorpe and Morgan, 2023). Up against the definitions advanced here, most if not all of the cases in this special issue – even of the most paradigmatic new municipalisms of Barcelona, Zagreb and Naples – struggle to live up to this radicalism. This speaks to the limitations of drawing such conceptual definitions – intended merely as a heuristic to understand ideal-typical topographies, geohistorical connections and political potentials – as much as to the difficulties and challenges faced by municipalist struggles under severe crisis conditions.

Paradoxically, perhaps, struggling to ‘live up to the radicalism’ is itself one of the enduring features of radical municipalism. Rather than a timeless or contextless theory, one that seeks to stand resolutely in the face of all those who challenge it, the radical municipalist hypothesis ought to be understood as an intrinsically ‘open’ process. In putting this hypothesis into practice, there is a certain inevitability of coming up against limits, challenges, contradictions and failures: of elected platforms becoming ‘institutionalised’, of participatory practices running out of steam, or of autonomous initiatives becoming isolated, ossified or co-opted. Yet it is better to understand such failures (and successes) neither as verification or refutation, but as political acts that enable a process of ‘collaborative theory building’ (Russell, 2019); something akin to a giant collective action-research cycle. This special issue is one contribution to such a cycle, an effort to keep the radical municipalist hypothesis moving forward through an engagement with a broad set of practices and initiatives from substantially different contexts.

The spatiality of radical municipalism

Running through all of this is the wager –apuesta, as used in the Spanish context (Observatorio Metropolitano, 2014) – that the best way to begin precipitating system-wide shifts is through towns and cities. However, taken at surface level this can be misleading. When groups such as Observatorio Metropolitano identified the municipality as the place ‘we can make a democracy worthy of the name a reality’, this was premised on the proposition that ‘democracy is either a democracy of proximity, “among equals”, or it lacks any basis whatsoever’ (2014: 143, our translation). Central to understanding the spatiality of the radical municipalist hypothesis is recognising that this starting point is not based on an erroneous claim that ‘the local scale is assumed to be inherently more democratic than other scales’ or ‘more sustainable, just or culturally diverse’ – a perspective which Purcell (2006: 1921, 1924) calls the ‘local trap’. Such a perspective can lead to claims that cities have some form of fundamentally progressive character or ‘natural urban aptitude for piecemeal and episodic collaboration’ that renders them ‘likely building blocks for a viable global order’ (Barber, 2013: 148); to a belief that ‘cities can save the planet’ (Angelo and Wachsmuth, 2020).

The priority radical municipalism gives to towns and cities is not, then, derived from some essential character of the built environment. Rather, it is a result of the contradictory scalar urban processes that produce these environments and which give rise to ‘the paradox of social existence under contemporary capitalism: [that] never [before] have human beings been more social in their existence, but more individualised, privatised, in the apprehension of their existence’ (Read, 2012: 120). While our lives are infinitely enmeshed with others, other places, other people, other ecologies, our experience of this enmeshment is predominantly anti-social. The radical municipalist hypothesis works with the perspective that this enmeshment is typically at its most intense within urban spaces, which act as the ‘hinges’, ‘knots’ or ‘joints’ that mediate between scales and levels, between structure and agency, historical movements and conjunctural contingencies, global forces and local particularities (see Goonewardena, 2018, for a Lefebvrean reading of the urban as mediation; and Leitner et al., 2019, on a conjunctural analysis of the urban).

From this perspective, the strategic-spatial proposition of radical municipalism is twofold. Firstly, although concerned with fomenting system-wide transformations, the wager is that the most productive entry points are where our (anti)social enmeshment is at its most intense, and thus where the greatest latent potential exists for a becoming-social of this enmeshment. Radical municipalism is thus not defined primarily by a commitment to ‘local’ politics, but to a ‘politics of proximity’ (Subirats, 2016), one that is most often but not exclusively possible within towns and cities. Secondly, radical municipalist interventions – whatever their thematic or sectoral focus – are focused on both intensifying our proximity to other people, places, and ecologies, and on a becoming-social of these proximities. It is for this reason that an expansive understanding of democracy runs so deeply through radical municipalist agendas.

Two further observations arise from this reading of radical municipalism as a politics of proximity. Firstly, it is perfectly plausible to have progressive and redistributive local government policy that has little to do with the radical municipalist wager, which speaks to the distinction between radical and the wider new municipalisms outlined above. This demands articulating with greater clarity the link between particular concrete interventions and their radical character. For example, building and improving access to public housing is one of the essential global imperatives of our time, and local and regional governments often play a key role in this. While there are approaches to the collective provision of housing that can be understood as part of a radical municipalist wager (see Ferreri, 2021; Ferreri and Vidal, 2022; Holm et al., 2022), there is not an inherent relationship with radical municipalism. The same can be said whatever the thematic area or sector we focus on. Indeed, a useful distinction might be made between a ‘municipal pragmatism’ which ‘centres on a specific ethos of engagement with the policies and practices of local government’ (Barnett et al., 2020: 507), and a radical municipalist orientation where the policies and practices of local government are tangential to the central focus.

Secondly, if the built environment of the city is understood not as the essential substrata of a radical municipalist politics, then a radical municipalist agenda appears plausible in ostensibly rural or peri-urban locations, although this will likely have different strategic implications. As Subirats (2019): 168, our translation) suggests, ‘it is necessary not to restrict oneself to the confines of what has traditionally been understood as “city”, with its logic of local administration and limited territorial and political space’. Nonetheless, however small, peripheral or ‘rural’ are the urban sites for radical municipalism, they are still in some way premised upon the logic of proximity, encounter and assembly – key formal characteristics of the municipality, the polis and the commune, and underlying dynamics of the urban. The obvious practical implication here is the expansion of radical municipalism as a research agenda that looks beyond cities (certainly beyond local governments); that works outside of narrowly-defined disciplinary boundaries. The radical municipalist hypothesis does not share ‘the long-entrenched obsession among many urban scholars with demarcating a neat boundary between city and non-city spaces in a world of increasingly generalised urbanisation and rapidly imploding/exploding urban transformations’ (Brenner, 2018: 574). This calls for a consideration of the strategic differences in pursuing a radical municipalist politics across contexts, both in terms of the particular forms these interventions take, and what this means strategically with respect to identifying ‘productive entry points’ to wider systemic transformations.

Municipalist strategy in crisis?

If radical municipalism exists as a hypothesis, then a key feature – and source – of its praxis is seeking to take advantage of conjunctural crises as opportunities for systemic change. Radical municipalism is a set of strategies, often born out of crisis conditions, which attempt to prise open and exploit the fissures, fractures, fault lines, the state and market failures, the weaknesses of patriarchal ways of organising, and the intersectional class antagonisms and systemic contradictions that these crises make patent and intensify. First, radical municipalist interventions are in some sense reactive ‘contestations’ to crises, made possible by a conjunctural opening in politics, which in the contemporary European context is often traced back to the 2008 global financial crash (Featherstone et al., 2015). These are contestations to crises across multiple domains – from the ‘financial’ crisis of asset devaluations, escalating debts, mortgage defaults and foreclosures and the ‘urban’ crisis of austerity, privatisations of the urban commons and accumulation-by-dispossession (Russell et al., 2023), through the ‘social reproduction’ crisis of care (Kussy et al., 2023), the ‘governability’ crisis of ‘the public’ (Bianchi, 2023) or of urban regimes (Bua and Davies, 2023, Milan, 2023, Sarnow and Tiedemann, 2023) and the ‘political’ crises of representation and of ‘legitimation’, in which traditional social-democratic parties are in freefall and party politics in radical realignment (Béal et al., 2023; van Outryve d’Ydewalle, 2019, 2023) to the ‘ecological’ crises of climate breakdown, resource exhaustion, environmental pollution, and ecosystem degradation (Sareen and Waagsaether, 2023, Schmid, 2023).

Radical municipalist struggles are in some sense just that: struggles – much like comparable contestations that work in, against and beyond neoliberalism and austerity, capital and the state (Cumbers, 2015; Featherstone et al., 2015). But that is not all they are. Radical municipalism is not simply a knee-jerk reaction to protect against the intersectional crises of ‘cannibal capitalism’ (Fraser, 2022); rather, it is a positive vision and proactive strategy – an apuesta, or speculative wager – to cohere a transformative movement driven by the fundamental principle of expanding collective self-governance. As such, the four dimensions of radical municipalism that we identify and discuss in what follows – economic reorganisation; democratisation of political decision-making; feminisation of politics; ecological transformation – can each be understood as affirmative responses to correspondent conjunctural crises: of capitalist accumulation and of social reproduction; of the state and representative decision-making; of patriarchal rules of privilege and domination; and of ecological and climate breakdown. In this way, radical municipalism has a dialectically generative relationship with crisis.

It is in this double-sense of crisis that we originally conceived the theme of this special issue as Municipalist Strategy in Crisis? – crisis understood as both shaping the historical conditions for and, increasingly, the practical operations of radical municipalist strategy itself. In seeking, at least in some cases, to ‘break the glass ceiling’ (Roth, 2019a) of traditional social movement organising – making the decisive move from ‘occupying the squares/streets’ towards ‘occupying/building new institutions’, explicitly and visibly challenging the state and capital (Blanco et al., 2020) – radical municipalist strategy is especially vulnerable to getting knocked and bruised along the way, not least by hitting hard up against a hostile state machinery, the limits of capital’s accommodation and a deeply patriarchal culture. There is a sense in which radical municipalist strategy is frequently crisis-riven, faltering at hurdles or falling down altogether when running against intransigent partisan, capitalist and patriarchal logics.

Several of the articles in this issue describe this ‘crisis of municipalist strategy’ either explicitly (Bua and Davies, 2023) or implicitly (Béal et al., 2023; Sarnow and Tiedemann, 2023). Bua and Davies (2023) recount a Galician activist’s metaphor of a broken car representing the state machinery that activists are attempting to re-engineer – weighed down by ‘loading the vehicle with more luggage’ before sufficient progress is made with ‘fixing the engine’. This captures the problem of focusing too much on progressive policies – the luggage – to the detriment of institutional transformation. The inverse problem occurs in France, where, as documented by Béal et al. (2023), ‘weak’ municipalist citizen lists focus their energies on instilling participatory procedures – a proceduralism denounced by some as ‘citizen washing’ – at the expense of ‘reaching working-class neighbourhoods’ or of constructing a common ideological project of distributive justice capable of building a counter-hegemonic base. In Zagreb, municipalist activists have become so bogged down in unravelling and reversing the privatised, patronage-based, corrupted and clientelistic public procurement contracts of the previous, right-populist administration – while strenuously enforcing transparency, accountability, and due process by, for instance, demonstratively not appointing their own people to key strategic positions in the state machinery, in paranoid pre-emptive appeals to an inimical media – that they undermine their own capacity to follow through on either participatory procedures or policy promises (Milan, 2023; Sarnow and Tiedemann, 2023). The crisis dynamics this produces between movement members and vanguard officials weakens the connection between symbiotic and interstitial power and places further stress on those in government, tightening the screw.

Economic reorganisation

To say that that radical municipalist theory and practice is concerned with economic reorganisation is to purposefully leave it open to a breadth of heterodox economic perspectives and forms of action, while also providing some clear orientation. To talk of re-organising the economy is a fruitful starting point, invoking ideas of a ‘Polanyian countermovement’ and to posit something akin to an ‘antagonistic economy’ that ‘goes beyond building alternatives’ to also ‘make challenges’ (North et al., 2020: 335) to hegemonic understandings of what ‘the’ economy is and the policies and governance structures – within both the state and enterprises – that reproduce it. As articulated by contributors to a recent edited collection published by Fearless Cities – the international network that arguably catalysed new municipalism (Russell, 2019) – this is an orientation that understands that ‘the promises associated with perpetual economic growth (jobs for everybody, good money for all, and general well-being) turn out to be a fantasy’, that we must find ways to ‘transition… into a pluriverse of alternatives’, whilst ‘rethinking ideas like “work” and “prosperity”, for instance, are good starting points to widen these conversations’ (in Miralles-de-Imperial, 2022: 98, 101).

Numerous conceptual frames can be brought into conversation within this dimension; more visibly the social and solidarity economy (Eizaguirre Anglada, 2021; Thompson et al., 2022) the common(s) (Bianchi et al., 2022), diverse or community economies (Gibson-Graham, 2006) and degrowth (Schmid, 2023; Vansintjan, 2018), along with certain interpretations of the foundational economy (Russell et al., 2023) and community wealth building (Thompson, 2023) among others. Each of these conceptual fields have their own internal diversities and debates, intersections and overlaps with one another, and are mobilised differently in different localities. Yet differences between these conceptual frames should not be overstated. What matters is that organised communities are using whichever concepts they find useful in cohering the practices of an antagonistic economy; not to pursue the creation of a ‘social’ economy that runs parallel to the public and private sector (see Amin et al., 2002; Thompson et al., 2022 for critiques), but to further the relationship between the interstitial, symbiotic and ruptural mechanisms alluded to above (Wright, 2010).

Nonetheless, certain recurring themes are particularly salient to the radical municipalist hypothesis of re-organising the economy. The first is a fundamentally feminist view of ‘the economy’ and what counts as economic activity, one that confronts the narrowness of productivist economics and the ‘capitalocentrism’ of orthodox Marxist and neoclassical schools (Gibson-Graham, 2006), and calls for particular attention to strategies that can collectively intervene and remodel collective social reproduction (Federici, 2020). This means those things which are ‘foundational’ to living well – housing, food, mobility, education, water, energy, care, and so on – are at the centre of an antagonistic economic strategy. In areas such as care, this specifically requires ‘a transformation of the current division between care and wealth, as well as between the economic sphere and the reproductive one’ (Kussy et al., 2023: 2049). The intersection between the pressures of tourism and affordable housing, and the challenges in navigating such issues when faced with entrenched regime interests, are a recurring theme (Bua and Davies, 2023). It also extends to areas such as the development of ‘counter logistics’ – new forms of popular supply chains and infrastructures of production in sectors such as food. That such projects are ‘seeking ways of problematizing what we understand as public, a terrain where the State motorizes and finds allies in administering the commons’ (Minuchin and Maino 2023: 2091) reflects the radical municipalist focus on how a politics of the common can intersect and remake our understanding of the public (Bianchi, 2023, Russell et al, 2023).

What some have referred to as a becoming-common of the public, this entails ‘fighting to recover, through collective self-organisation, the decision-making spaces of those resources necessary to satisfy our fundamental needs’ (Mendez et al., 2021: 8, our translation). Here the common does not refer to individualised economic arrangements, but a political horizon in which the ‘sovereignty’ of the public shifts away from state organs and towards organised communities. This entails a diversity of experiments in which organised communities engage directly with state bodies (and municipal bodies in particular) to guarantee the (re)production of foundational goods, whilst simultaneously looking to enhance and expand social autonomy. This puts an emphasis on ‘the importance of legal innovations in the development of mechanisms capable of recognising concrete experiences of communalization’ (Mendez et al., 2021: 9), and a prefigurative understanding of the law as flexible, performative and reconfigurable for ends counter to the liberal-bourgeois capitalist nation-state (see Thorpe and Morgan, 2023).

A number of paradigmatic cases are emerging in this field. Bianchi (2023) highlights the ongoing development of Barcelona’s Patrimoni Ciutadà (Citizen Assets) programme, exploring how it stems from the possibility that ‘what is public (a municipal asset) can become a common (citizens’ asset)’ (Castro and Forne, 2021). The case of Can Battlo, a former factory site brought under community management, is particularly emblematic here (Asara, 2019) and demonstrative of ‘an alternative way to understand the city and the relationships between citizens and institutions’ (Parés et al., 2017: 190). In Naples, efforts to establish the Acqua Bene Comune service similarly demonstrate ‘the multiple configurations that common–state institutions can adopt’ (Bianchi, 2023: 2125). Work on ‘public-common partnerships’ is explicitly theorised as a radical municipalist approach in which ‘the expansion of democratic control of resources in the present simultaneously enhances our capacity to push for change that goes beyond the limits of what is currently politically possible’ (Russell et al., 2023: 2152). This goes to the core of an antagonistic approach to re-embedding the economy, where ostensibly economic interventions are ‘a social gear of radical transformation that makes possible the becoming-common of the public, and the subordination of the market to society’ (Mendez et al., 2021: 8–9, 24, our translation).

Democratisation of political decision-making

Participation is arguably the empty grand signifier of our age – increasingly mobilised alongside ‘sustainability’, ‘democracy’ and ‘resilience’ by global mayoral networks and urban policy innovators (Barnett, 2022). Radical municipalism, by contrast, seeks not to enrol citizens in participatory processes and technocratic consultation exercises (Baiocchi and Ganuza, 2017), but rather to institute new forms of decision-making and cultivate new subjectivities that deepen democracy across all domains and levels of society. The cell-form of this real democratisation is the popular assembly, although radical municipalism has embraced diverse institutional forms. In Bookchin’s (2015) thought, the institution of the assembly lies at the heart of the commune form that radical municipalists wager will supersede the capitalist nation-state. Based on a number of historical precedents – from the Athenian polis to the Paris Commune – the assembly enables direct, face-to-face, deliberative democratic decision-making in which desires and decisions are shaped by confrontation with others’ preferences, and policies are decided through conflict, consensus and voting. Technocrats and experts are kept at arms-length from politics and made wholly accountable to the assembly; while delegates are mandated (and fully recallable) by the assembly to merely administer popular decisions at ‘higher’ scales of confederated regional assemblies. The distinction between politics proper and the ‘logistical’ operations of ‘statecraft’ is central to Bookchin’s understanding of libertarian municipalism – a salient distinction which Minuchin and Maino (2023) explore in relation to logistics.

The commune effectively constitutes one pole of the ‘dual power’ approach that defines certain strands of radical municipalist strategy. Building on Lenin’s original strategy of developing worker-controlled soviets as a counter-power alongside communist party rule of the state as a transitional stage to communism, municipalist dual power seeks to develop prefiguratively democratic institutions and practices, centred on assemblies, as interstitial counter-power to the nation-state, while also attempting to take (local) state power itself, through mobilising social movements as citizen lists and non-party platforms to contend for election, leveraging local government resources, if successful, to support counter-power (Bookchin, 2015).

The question of how these theories of the assembly play out in practice, where democratic principles run up against the compromised realities of electoral representative politics, is taken up by many of the contributions to this special issue. They chart how, in recent years, radical municipalists have tried different ways of building political power from below: presenting activists as candidates in local elections; supporting candidates but remaining autonomous; creating local assemblies completely autonomously from the local state; advocating for the transformation of local institutions towards participatory decision-making – amongst many other proposals. One shared assumption is that representative democracy based on the nation-state is in decay; that popular political power cannot be shared (or built) within this framework and that national and regional political parties together with public officials (and through them all kinds of interest groups) remain the key obstacle to really democratic decision-making. This hollow democracy is now facing a crisis of legitimacy. The citizen platforms created in 2014 in Spain were deeply impacted by the no nos representan discourse of the 15M (Roth et al., 2019). In Naples, Zagreb or Belgrade, an anti-establishment sentiment was key to the justification of bringing power back to people (Milan, 2023, Pinto et al., 2023). The form of the local assembly where citizens participate directly and not through representatives – strongly advocated by Bookchin (2015)– was on the table in the French local elections of 2020 (Béal et al., 2023, van Outryve d’Ydewalle, 2023), but also more generally in the Fearless Cities network (Barcelona en Comú et al., 2019). Radical democracy has been the most salient element of radical municipalist experiments, and it includes two principles: making democracy less representative and more participatory; and devolving power to the local level, where face-to-face interactions and the immediate scale makes possible more horizontal decision-making mechanisms (Roth, 2019a). The aim is not, however, to parochialise politics, but to create new networks and confederations of municipalities where power flows from below.

Although the Spanish recipe of uniting social movements in a confluencia, drafting a code of ethics to limit professionalisation, deciding on a manifesto through open participation and running for elections, proved very successful in electoral terms in 2014 (Monterde, 2019), Bua and Davies (2023) show to what extent a real regime change is possible. They analyse the cases of A Coruña and Santiago de Compostela and explain that (in addition to some conjunctural factors) both the resistance of the hegemonic regime (the administration and the existing political parties) and the expectations of the social movements generated a situation where the margin for manoeuvre was severely restricted. The case of Naples differs from Spain’s in that here social movements have opted for staying neither inside nor outside formal institutions. Pinto et al. (2023) argue that radical municipalism stile napoletano is not based on a procedural view of participatory democracy, but on a more political, conflictual model. Despite the apparent benefits of spontaneity – adapting to the local culture and avoiding institutional sclerosis – the limitations of this approach are revealed as an incapacity to endure.

Van Outryve d’Ydewalle (2023) studies the case of Commercy to show yet another limitation of municipalism: when focused overtly on procedures, the project can lose steam and fail electorally. Here, the distinctly Bookchinean strategy was to build an autonomous citizen assembly and then run for elections. But with almost no policy content to discuss, the assembly weakened, and the candidates were left with little support. The very same problem is analysed across four French cases by Béal et al. (2023). Strong participatory agendas met resistance from the political party system, which, although itself facing a strong crisis of legitimacy, nonetheless remained a formidable force in structuring the political field. Milan (2023) describes the paths taken by municipalist activists in Belgrade and Zagreb, reflecting on the limitations of their projects. Her focus is not so much on the how, but on the why of these decisions, in a political context marked by authoritarian-populist trends. She argues that local activists have been inspired by the radical municipalist experiences of other places and by the Yugoslavian self-managed socialism of the recent past.

If these papers focus on the participatory aspect of building counter-power, Thorpe and Morgan (2023) bring new attention towards the expansion of local power vis à vis the state. By analysing the case of Sydney, they argue that though ‘prefigurative legality’ might not be radical, merely progressive, this nonetheless presents a tool for reconfiguring the state form and redistributing its power. Slowly and progressively, the boundary case of Sydney shows a possible pathway to radical municipalism, deploying legal prefiguration alongside or in the absence of more familiar tactics.

Feminisation of politics

The fact that the first female mayor of Barcelona, Ada Colau, is one of the leading figureheads of the new municipalist movement worldwide reveals deep roots in feminist theory and practice (Roth et al., 2020). But feminising politics goes far beyond gender balance, as argued by Lovenduski (2005) in her famous essay. Municipalism’s ‘feminisation’ – or ‘feministisation’ – of politics is concerned with a radically divergent form and content of politics to the liberal-bourgeois representative processes of the patriarchal, imperialist capitalist-nation-state. Feminisation begins with dispelling masculinist-capitalist ideology that power is allocated through competition, regulated through confrontation, and maintained through domination; rather, power is not a zero-sum game but a generative force for world-building and cooperation, and it is necessarily a collective enterprise. This alternate politics is based not on abstract proceduralism and due process codified in juridical law and enforced by the state’s monopoly on violence (although structure is important to avoid domination by informal institutions) but rather on cultivating open, honest and cooperative subjectivities based on horizontal face-to-face interactions, dispositions to change, and trust (Roth et al., 2020).

What this means in practice is a more collaborative and distributed form of leadership widely shared and conditioned by democratic dissensus. Feminisation of politics goes further than Hardt and Negri’s (2017: 18) inversion of traditional leadership – ‘strategy to the movements and tactics to the leadership’ – to radically democratise even tactical decision-making. One approach to this is the distinctively municipalist form of the assembly, in which wholly-recallable delegates – not elected representatives – are mandated by popular decisions made by the assembly through deliberative and consensus-based decision-making (van Outryve d’Ydewalle, 2019, 2023). As Caren Tepp, of Ciudad Futura in Rosario, Argentina, has remarked: ‘a leader is not the coach of a football team. She’s more like a captain, who plays alongside the others, who knows them and is there for them. She can make mistakes and be called into account like any other’ (Roth et al., 2020: 47). This rejects traditional masculinist ‘boss’ politics in which a ‘strong man’ – almost always a man – destroys his opponents, upholds hierarchies and centralises power through a deeply personalised and patronage-based politics.

Such an ingrained culture comes under close scrutiny by contributors to this special issue, not least Sarnow and Tiedemann’s (2023) deconstruction of the masculinist state machineries in Barcelona and Zagreb, intersecting with corrupt, clientelistic, neoliberal networks. They draw attention to the ‘masculinist grammars’ embedded in the state through the patriarchal social relations of capitalism, and evaluate the difficulties encountered by municipalist activists in rewriting these codes. Here, we find resonances with Joubert’s (2023) account of the ‘prosaic’ practices navigated by the radical-feminist ‘activist state workers’ of the Greater London Council (GLC) of 1981–86. In some respects, the feminisation of politics might come unstuck in upholding a prefigurative ethics to the detriment of winning and maintaining power as conceived and instituted under national-state-capitalism; abandoning confrontation even with hostile opponents may undermine strategic efficacy just as it prefigures an alternative. The historical example of the GLC, eventually outgunned by the masculinist repertoires and superior powers of Margaret Thatcher, suggests the immense strategic difficulties, scalar contradictions and irreconcilable trade-offs inherent in attempting to ‘prefigure’ a different, more feminist kind of local state within the rules of the game set by the capitalist nation-state (Cooper, 2017; Joubert, 2023). The feminist principles of non-violence and peaceful protest – alongside non-punitive and collaborative forms of governance within movements – may suffer a similar fate, when up against deeply hostile and powerful capitalist and nationalist forces.

The case of Zagreb reveals how such masculinist grammars become inscribed in social policy and, in turn, the materialities and imaginaries of urban everyday life (Milan, 2023). Up until the municipalist platform Zagreb je naš won power in 2021, the city was ruled for over a decade by a patriarchal-populist-authoritarian mayor, Milan Bandić, who diverted public funds away from substantive socially-reproductive capacities, notably childcare, towards symbolic ethno-nationalist projects such as war monuments (Sarnow and Tiedemann, 2023). Since coming to power, Zagreb je naš activist state workers are trying to shift municipal policy in the other direction, to support social reproduction and care. This example illustrates how a feminist ethics of care infuses both the process of radical municipalist politics itself and the socio-economic policies and practices it advocates for. Much of this endeavour is about ensuring gender equality in both the political domain – in electoral lists, board members, mandated delegates – as well as in the wider spheres of production and social reproduction.

Municipalist efforts in social reproduction focus on accounting for and making visible tasks traditionally performed by women, such as domestic labour in capitalism’s ‘hidden abodes’ (Federici, 2020; Fraser, 2023; Gibson-Graham, 2006), as well as improving labour conditions and instituting social justice in the formal economic sectors of health and social care. This is precisely what Kussy et al. (2023) document with respect to Barcelona en Comú. Clearly, a formal righting of wrongs in quantitative terms is not enough: a wholescale ‘molecular’ transformation of value and social relations (Bookchin, 2015) is required to materialise the feminist imaginary of the ‘caring city’ – through what Kussy et al. (2023) characterise as ‘care municipalism’, building on Tronto’s theory of ‘caring democracy’ and advancing notions of collective wellbeing, psychological support, mutual aid and socio-ecological balance.

Ecological transformation

One of the central theoretical inspirations for radical municipalism is Bookchin’s (1987, 2015) ‘social ecology’, founded on the compelling intuition that human domination of non-human nature is dialectically embroiled with our domination of each other – that the capitalist-colonial plunder and degradation of ecologies is rooted, ultimately, in hierarchical and dominating social relations in all their intersections. Bookchin’s related ideas for ‘libertarian municipalism’ suggest a radical new polity based on democratically-confederated self-governing eco-socialist bio-regions, in which ecological systems such as watersheds and biomes are the basis for territorial organisation, reconfigured in symbiotic relation with environmental metabolisms. Food and water and other foundational ecosystems are important here. The ‘democratic confederalism’ of the autonomous region of Rojava is an interesting materialisation of these ideas (Knapp et al., 2016), as are the efforts to translate ideas of Latin American water communities to territorially-grounded water remunicipalisations in Catalunya (Planas and Martínez, 2020).

A key concept within social ecology is metabolism – connecting with recent scholarship in Marxist political ecology (Moore, 2015) – understood as the mediating infrastructure through which matter from nature is converted into energy for societal organisation and functioning. Such ideas are beginning to influence social movements related to municipalism, with a ‘right to metabolism’ articulated in the name of degrowth and ‘habitability’ (Savini, 2021). Indeed, radical municipalist movements are deeply conscious of their power to reconfigure the shape of human settlements in ecologically reparative ways. In this special issue, Sareen and Waagsaether (2023) evaluate municipalist interventions in Barcelona and Madrid in terms of urban transitions to sustainability – bringing these two fields into conversation for the first time. They find a number of flagship policies – such as Barcelona en Comú’s signature ‘Superblock’ masterplanning, creating car-free green micro-neighbourhoods (see also Kussy et al., 2023), its remunicipalisation of energy services for 100% localised renewable energy (Angel, 2021), and Ahora Madrid’s Low Emission Zone, including electric bus routes – all contributing towards addressing the challenge of transitioning to low-carbon sustainable urban metabolisms. However, such policies are merely progressive programmes often imitated and initiated the world over by local governments, whether municipalist or not.

What, then, makes radical municipalism distinctive when it comes to urban sustainability transitions? The discourses of degrowth and post-growth – close relations of municipalism – might suggest an answer. There is a ‘scalar gap’, argues Schmid (2023: 2) ‘between the (envisioned) institutionalisation of post-growth’ – deemed to be the national and international regulatory scales – ‘and the spaces in which post-growth transformations are most actively practised and negotiated’ – that is, prefigurative practices in everyday life. Municipalism, here, can act as the hinge and play the role of mediator between community-led experiments and systemic transformation, which remain polarised in the degrowth literature. However, the only contributions to have explored synergies between municipalism and degrowth are Schmid’s (2023) recent assessment, building on Vansintjan’s (2018) sketch of a ‘degrowth municipalism’ (see also Thompson, 2021b). Degrowth is also a major oversight of this special issue – a gap we briefly address here.

In reorienting urban metabolism away from capital’s ‘growth dependencies’, degrowth radically expands the project for urban sustainability transitions from the narrowly technical and low-carbon focus to encompass the entire apparatus of capitalism, understood as a ‘world-ecological’ system (Moore, 2015) – not just mode of economic production – that ‘cannibalises’ its own ‘background conditions of possibility’, including political, ecological, racial and social reproduction (Fraser, 2022). If it is the expansionary, propulsive power of capital – embodied in interest-bearing finance and the ‘mute compulsion’ to produce for profit, enforced by fierce market competition (Mau, 2023) – that ultimately catalyses unsustainable resource depletion, ecosystem degradation and climate breakdown, then the solution lies not simply with transitioning to zero-carbon urban infrastructures, but reorienting the entire socio-ecological-economic apparatus – our metabolism – away from growth dependencies towards more circular, regenerative and reparative systems.

First, this means socialising, localising and reconfiguring the capitalist global supply chains that enforce integration into unsustainable, exploitative and extractive petrochemical-fuelled planetary production – for a ‘counter-logistics’, as Minuchin and Maino (2023) document in Rosario, Argentina, specifically for food. Second, it calls for re-engineering monetary, credit and financial flows away from interest-bearing, debt-based capital, towards alternative circuits based on social and ecological value. Degrowthers and municipalists alike thus see great value in experimentation with alternative currencies, time banking, mutual credit systems, LETS, and Universal Basic Income (UBI) as interstitial and symbiotic transformations of money; indeed, UBI experiments have been initiated at the city scale by various municipalists, such as in Spain (Bua and Davies, 2023), while UBI Labs are being set up to campaign for city pilots of UBI across the UK and internationally by quasi-municipalist activists (Thompson, 2022). Third, such reconfigurations are rendered by Russell et al. (2023: 2140) as part of the ‘self-expanding circuit of the commons’ – or, rather, ‘the common’ (for this important distinction see Bianchi, 2023) – which also includes innovations in labour organisation and land ownership, such as community land trusts and worker-owned cooperatives. The municipalist wager, here: expanding circuits of the common can begin to decouple human metabolism from capitalist growth dependencies.