Making power emerge: municipalism and the right to the city

Abstract

Although the end of 2019 will be remembered by many as a time of failure, the last few years have also been a time of hope. This article draws lessons from the internationalist municipalist movement, and frames these experiences through the concepts of autogestion and the Right to the City. Municipalist political strategies can provide a radical re-articulation of this hope: to argue for a municipalist politics is to argue for place-based strategies that transform our relationship to our territories, with a focus on making new forms of power emerge. It is not an alternative to national and international perspectives, but rather the development of new ways of acting on these perspectives. Establishing the difference between progressive local government policy and a municipalist agenda, the article concludes by offering five propositions for the development of a municipalist coordination in one British city - Manchester.