From citizens of nations to citizens of cities

Written by Yavor Tarinski [C]itizens today no longer even approximate the high and eminently human standard of citizenship that was established in the Hellenic world—a meaning that must be recovered, as well as the personal and social training, or paideia, for producing citizens. ~Murray Bookchin[1] Often, when people advocate for the reinvigoration of citizenship in […]

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The Evolution of Cities

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 […]

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July 2, 2023

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Take the City – Social Ecology in Practice

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 […]

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The Right to the City: From the Streets to Globalisation

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 […]

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Anti-Eviction Strategies as an Instrument of Municipalist Housing Policies

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, […]

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The problem with capitalist urbanism’s ‘big and tall’ doctrine

  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 […]

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August 24, 2022

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Cities: The Unfolding of Reason in History

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 […]

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Communıty of Squatted Prosfygıka – an autonomous neighborhood at the heart of Athens

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 […]

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Rights Begin in the Small Places Closest to Home: A Story from Constitution Street

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 […]

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Squatting as Claiming the Right to the City

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 […]

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