This is an interesting review and a good intro to new municipalism (or what @davidjmadden calls 'socialist municipalism')

But it misses some key aspects of what makes the movement distinctive, and distinct from London's municipal socialism.
So here’s a thread on municipalism...

Municipalism is not simply “a political stance as well as an approach to shaping the built environment” (as @davidjmadden puts it) – it’s a distinctive strategic approach to democratising the local state and transforming urban economies using urban spaces as a platform…
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Municipalism adopts a ‘dual power’ strategy: 1) supporting commons and practices of commoning through which a more democratic, cooperative (and potentially prefiguratively postcapitalist) ‘solidarity economy’ can be instituted;
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...and 2) seeking to take hold of the political institutions of the local state through mobilising social movements for winning electoral office, to reimagine and transform the state from within, through guerrilla occupation of bureaucracies, in order to support 1) above.
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Means and ends are intertwined in a prefigurative politics that ‘feminises’ the state’s decision-making processes and subverts technocratic managerialism in favour of 'collective theory-building' and open-source, crowdsourced deliberative-democratic policy-making.
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Municipalism thus represents a departure from recent conventional modes of social movement organising – from ‘occupying the squares’ to ‘occupying the institutions’; working in against and beyond the state.
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This means reimagining traditional political parties as movement-led citizen platforms, energised by a ‘confluence’ of social forces in response to urban crisis and austerity urbanism, united across cultural differences around a shared commitment/interest in urban inhabitance.
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As such, it represents a challenge to the authority of the nation-state and its abstract notions of citizenship, in welcoming all who live in a city (regardless of national identity, including refugees and migrants) as citizens with a ‘right to the city’ based on inhabitance.
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Municipalism sees the nation-state as primarily the instrument of nationalism and capitalism (as one of capital's fundamental abstract social forms, alongside money and property) and thus turns towards ‘the urban’ as a more promising locus for anti-capitalist action.
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(there are obviously huge contradictions in this - whether 'socialism in one country' or 'municipalism in one city' is at all sustainable within, let alone transformable of, global capitalism... but that's another story)
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An important aspect of municipalism is trans-local organising and international cooperation, knowledge sharing and trading through 'solidarity markets' between municipalist platforms in different cities, to create networks (like Fearless Cities) capable of resisting attack.
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In sum: ‘the urban’ is not to be conflated with local government, which is seen as just another (albeit very powerful) institutional tool in a multi-scalar political strategy aiming to challenge the capitalist state.
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So this is not just about mimicking and relocating a (democratic-socialist) national state politics to the local/city level, through a “commitment to the provision of housing, infrastructure, and public space for all” (as @davidjmadden does indeed also suggest)...
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…It’s about starting with a ‘politics of proximity’ that only the urban scale can provide as the basis for organising spaces of solidarity and developing new popular institutions for political/economic democracy, like mutual aid societies, co-ops, social centres, assemblies.
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Ultimately, municipalism is about cultivating more democratic, cooperative and solidary subjectivities and social relations through these urban-institutional spaces, which enable social encounter, collective joy, popular education, knowledge sharing and movement-building.
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There's some great work out there recently published on these different aspects; all open access...

@alterurbanist's take on Fearless Cities and new municipalism as moving beyond the 'local trap' (in @antipodeonline): https://t.co/QFs7PRP3hH
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@LauCRoth, Irene Zugasti & Alejandra de Diego Baciero's
work (@rosalux_global) on the centrally important practice of feminising politics: https://t.co/a3Hu8qzvQt
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@vrupu's study of the Spanish confluences, the birthplace of new municipalism (also published by @rosalux_global):
https://t.co/y2aCmeyKNC
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...and my own paper on differentiating different 'models' of new municipalism, situated in their historical and political-economic contexts (@ProgHumGeog):
https://t.co/qL17JkkwZ3
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More from Society

I've seen many news articles cite that "the UK variant could be the dominant strain by March". This is emphasized by @CDCDirector.

While this will likely to be the case, this should not be an automatic cause for concern. Cases could still remain contained.

Here's how: 🧵

One of @CDCgov's own models has tracked the true decline in cases quite accurately thus far.

Their projection shows that the B.1.1.7 variant will become the dominant variant in March. But interestingly... there's no fourth wave. Cases simply level out:

https://t.co/tDce0MwO61


Just because a variant becomes the dominant strain does not automatically mean we will see a repeat of Fall 2020.

Let's look at UK and South Africa, where cases have been falling for the past month, in unison with the US (albeit with tougher restrictions):


Furthermore, the claim that the "variant is doubling every 10 days" is false. It's the *proportion of the variant* that is doubling every 10 days.

If overall prevalence drops during the studied time period, the true doubling time of the variant is actually much longer 10 days.

Simple example:

Day 0: 10 variant / 100 cases -> 10% variant
Day 10: 15 variant / 75 cases -> 20% variant
Day 20: 20 variant / 50 cases -> 40% variant

1) Proportion of variant doubles every 10 days
2) Doubling time of variant is actually 20 days
3) Total cases still drop by 50%

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