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