Beyond the Local Trap: New Municipalism and the Rise of the Fearless Cities

Russell, Bertie

doi:10.1111/anti.12520

Cited by 192 publications

(234 citation statements)

References 33 publications

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“…Leading over to our case study, the policy entrepreneurship of Barcelona to change the governance setup in refugee reception in Spain was strongly influenced by a wider "municipalist" philosophy of the city. This idea, which goes beyond a localist or decentralisation agenda, and instead sees the city "as a 'strategic front' for developing a transformative politics of scale" (Russell, 2019), has been a key concept for the political leadership of Barcelona since 2015, in areas including, but also going beyond migration and asylum policies. Municipalism is therefore the concrete manifestation of policy entrepreneurship in MLG in our case study.…”

Section: Multi-level Governance and City Policy Entrepreneurshipmentioning

confidence: 99%

Barcelona: municipalist policy entrepreneurship in a centralist refugee reception system

Garcés-Mascareñas

Gebhardt

2020

CMS

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This article is a case study of Barcelona's policy entrepreneurship in innovating refugee reception. In a context of a highly centralised and increasingly dysfunctional Spanish refugee reception system, it traces how Barcelona, after declaring itself a city of refuge, aimed to change refugee reception into a more decentralised and bottom-up system with a major role of cities. Following Minstrom and Norman, the article reconstructs the city's policy entrepreneurship and shows how the city 1) led by example in developing innovative local policies; 2) developed political arguments for change from a municipalist stance in coalition with other cities at national and EU level; and 3) worked its arguments into more technical discussions on the future of integration funding in the EU. On the basis of these developments, the article reaches two main conclusions. First, while the different registers of policy entrepreneurship cannot be directly connected to any concrete change of the multilevel setup of refugee reception, they do represent a significant step forward in cities' self-organisation beyond ideological lines and a factor contributing to a stronger recognition of cities in refugee reception in Europe. Second, while the literature on multilevel governance has an in-built bias towards more coordinated and harmonious relationships across tiers, the case of Barcelona shows that more attention should be paid to conflict and change.

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Section: Multi-level Governance and City Policy Entrepreneurshipmentioning

confidence: 99%

Barcelona: municipalist policy entrepreneurship in a centralist refugee reception system

Garcés-Mascareñas

Gebhardt

2020

CMS

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“…We see this notion of the cooperative insurgent activist-entrepreneur at work in the rise of new municipalism (Russell, 2019). In cities across the world such as Barcelona, Berlin, Bologna, Jackson and Preston, activist-entrepreneurs are beginning to experiment with more endogenous approaches to local economic development that remain alert to both social justice and future economic trajectories.…”

Section: Grounding the Concept Of Entrepreneurialismmentioning

confidence: 99%

Re-grounding the city with Polanyi: From urban entrepreneurialism to entrepreneurial municipalism

et al. 2020

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Conventional approaches to local economic development are failing to address deepening polarisation both within and between city regions across advanced capitalist economies. At the same time, austerity urbanism, particularly in the UK, presents challenges for urban authorities facing reduced budgets to meet increased demands on public services. Municipalities are beginning to experiment with creative responses to these crises, such as taking more interventionist and entrepreneurial roles in developing local economies, generating alternative sources of revenue or financialising existing assets. Rooted in a Polanyian perspective and building on the concepts of the entrepreneurial state and grounded city, we identify an embryonic alternative approach – what we call ‘entrepreneurial municipalism’ – as a policy pathway towards resolving enduring socioeconomic problems where neoliberal urban-entrepreneurial strategies have failed. We situate entrepreneurial municipalism as one strand in an assemblage of new municipalist interventions, between radical urban social movements and more neoliberal strategies such as financialised municipal entrepreneurialism. Drawing on original research on the Liverpool City Region, we explore how local authorities are working with social enterprises to harness place-based assets in ways which de-commodify land, labour and capital and re-embed markets back into society. Finally, we draw upon Polanyi as our guide to disentangle differences in approach amongst divergent forms of municipalist statecraft and to critically evaluate entrepreneurial municipalism as a possible trajectory towards the grounded city.

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“…This includes emancipatory alternatives such as democratic confederalism (see Cemgil 2016;Colasanti et al 2018) as well as radical municipalist projects that seek to avoid romanticizing the local as a scale. At this junction, we see 'fearless cities' spearheaded by municipalist citizen platforms offering a radical alternative to the particular spatial imaginaries that dictate who has the right to live safe from both political and economic violence and the impacts of climate crisis (Russell 2019). The urban, in fearless cities' definition, refers much less to a geographical or administrative unit than a specific sociopolitical and institutional setting where the historical and place-specific contexts that structure citizenship materialize (Blokland et al 2015).…”

Section: Citizenship Redefined?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Of (not) being neighbors: cities, citizens and climate change in an age of migrations

Turhan

Armiero

2019

Mobilities

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Borders are back with a vengeance. From the Americas to the Mediterranean, borders cut through the increasingly integrated world in a way that exposes the inside-outside logic of contemporary capitalism. All this happens on a backdrop where cities are becoming the key sites of contestation since borders and levees do not suffice to keep them intact. Cities are also increasingly becoming the focus of international efforts to deal with climate change and migration, where nationstates are falling short. By synthesizing the possibilities of urban belonging and right-to-the-world, we argue that new urban imaginaries are at the frontline of the mobilities debate today. Consequently, we argue for a cross-pollination of mobility justice and climate justice as urban citizenship. The main thrust of our argument is that there are viable alternatives to the isolationist fortress nation model, which can bring a new dimension to debates concerning climate change and migration. Fearless cities are but one example of these emerging alternatives. By focusing on the opportunities for a radical response to climate change and migration, we suggest that cities can respond to the burning mobility challenges of our times with a just, grounded and egalitarian urban citizenship framed as mobile commons.

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Beyond the Local Trap: New Municipalism and the Rise of the Fearless Cities

Cited by 192 publications

References 33 publications

Barcelona: municipalist policy entrepreneurship in a centralist refugee reception system

Barcelona: municipalist policy entrepreneurship in a centralist refugee reception system

Re-grounding the city with Polanyi: From urban entrepreneurialism to entrepreneurial municipalism

Of (not) being neighbors: cities, citizens and climate change in an age of migrations

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