By Staff, Red Pepper, Red Pepper
Around the world, new municipal movements are transforming the way we provide – and think about – housing. From campaigning against evictions to innovative forms of public housing to requisitioning empty properties and engaging many more people in decisions about how and where we live, municipal projects are responding to the global housing crisis, locally.
By Mark H. Burton, Steady-State Manchester
How can representatives at all levels really learn to listen, and (to use a current buzz word) to co-produce solutions with their constituents – not just members of their own party, but with the full diversity of voices, including those whose starting positions might be difficult to understand or accept?
By André Gorz, Uneven Earth
The worst thing about cars is that they are like castles or villas by the sea: luxury goods invented for the exclusive pleasure of a very rich minority, and which in conception and nature were never intended for the people.
By Sarah Freeman-Woolpert, Waging Nonviolence
Since its founding 50 years ago — when it became both the first Smithsonian museum located off the National Mall and the first federally-funded community museum in the country — the Smithsonian Anacostia Community Museum has served as an interactive space, engaging local residents in the power of neighborhood storytelling.
By Rob Hopkins, Rob Hopkins blog
For us a Playable City is specifically a human-led response to challenges for cities that are using technology in a way that connects people to each other.
By Yavor Tarinski, Resilience.org
The benefits of free public transport (FPT) are much more holistic than the atomized, privatized means of transportation that dominates the contemporary streets, and can contribute to the creation of democratic and ecological cities...
By Chuck Collins, Inequality.org
This is not the previous generation’s gentrification. The housing crisis in many of our urban areas is not the result of normal real estate market forces. Local gentrification cycles have been “supercharged” by the fact that many cities are now a global destination to park investment capital.
By Aaron Vansintjan, Uneven Earth
Radical municipalism is the idea that we can build popular assemblies and neighborhood councils, where people learn to manage their common life through face-to-face politics and develop the skills and the power to seize control: to take the city.
By Thomas M. Hanna, Joe Guinan, Open Democracy
Both the Cleveland and Preston Models represent a reinvention of a longstanding political tradition that played a significant role in the development of mass socialist politics in Europe and North America.
By Aaron Vansintjan, Uneven Earth
To get an idea of what we want the future to look like, we need to take inspiration from and learn from those already building the institutions of tomorrow, today. In the next few installments, we’ll be highlighting movements and initiatives that we think are some of the seeds of a new world, already sprouting.