Written by Elisée Reclus in 1895 To look at our enormous cities, expanding day by day and almost hour by hour, engulfing year by year fresh colonies of immigrants, and running out their suckers, like giant octopuses, into the surrounding country, one feels a sort of shudder come over one, as if in presence of […]
Read More The Evolution of Cities
Written by Dimitri Roussopoulos When we think of cities, especially the basis upon which we can undertake building a movement for radical social change in cities, we have to research and think hard about the political economy of cities. In the global economy, both among the major multinational corporations and certain rich governments, we currently […]
Read More Take the City – Social Ecology in Practice
Written by Jordi Borja, Emeritus professor at the Open University of Catalonia. The present article was published in the book Advancing Urban Rights: Equality and Diversity in the City (2022). I. And the right to the city became real when it was reinvented by active citizenship The ideas First came the creator god of the […]
Read More The Right to the City: From the Streets to Globalisation
The following text is an excerpt from the book Municipalism in Practice: Progressive Housing Policies in Amsterdam, Barcelona, Berlin, and Vienna ( RLS-Cities: April 2022). Every year hundreds of thousands of people are evicted in Europe. National governments and courts systematically leave citizens unprotected against displacements fuelled by real estate interests. Cities like Amsterdam, Barcelona, […]
Read More Anti-Eviction Strategies as an Instrument of Municipalist Housing Policies
Capitalism is driving urban planning and architecture towards building ‘big and tall’, which is an approach that benefits the rich, while making city life worst for everyone else. Below are three videos that underline the inherent problems of capitalist urbanism’s doctrine. The first one deals with the general problem (and irrationality) of building ‘big […]
Read More The problem with capitalist urbanism’s ‘big and tall’ doctrine
Written by Murray Bookchin. Originally published as a chapter of the book “The Next Revolution: Popular Assemblies & the Promise of Direct Democracy” (2015) Libertarian municipalism constitutes the politics of social ecology, a revolutionary effort in which freedom is given institutional form in public assemblies that become decision-making bodies. It depends upon libertarian leftists running […]
Read More Cities: The Unfolding of Reason in History
The so called Prosfygika, located at the heart of the city of Athens, is a complex of buildings that was built in the mid-1930s to house refugees from Asia Minor. Since 2011 the area has been functioning as a self-organized urban community with the creation of Assembly of the Occupied Prosfygika, from which many grassroots […]
Read More Communıty of Squatted Prosfygıka – an autonomous neighborhood at the heart of Athens
Written by Jemma Neville I live on Constitution Street in the Leith area of Edinburgh, northeast Scotland, United Kingdom. Maybe you know the street, maybe you don’t. That doesn’t particularly matter for the purpose of the story I want to share with you. For certain, you will know another street well. Maybe it’s the street […]
Read More Rights Begin in the Small Places Closest to Home: A Story from Constitution Street
Written by Diana Bogado, Noel Manzano and Marta Solanas Introduction The phenomena of squatting and occupying currently constitute global methods of resisting the “neoliberal” dynamic of the global metropolis. We use the term occupy to refer to housing occupations that seek to guarantee shelter for populations without resources, and the term squat to allude to […]
Read More Squatting as Claiming the Right to the City
Written by Yavor Tarinski To take no part in the running of the community’s affairs is to be either a beast or a god! ~Aristotle[1] When exploring social change, one has to examine all aspects of it. Developing strategies and institutions that will help facilitate the coming into being and functioning of a democratic and […]
Read More Re-Embedding Citizenship in Revolutionary Politics