In this guest post, Dr Bertie Russell (Institute of Environmental Science and Technology, Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona), Dr Iolanda Bianchi (School of Sociology, University of Barcelona), and Lavinia Steinfort (Transnational Institute) describe their research on New Municipalism, a project that was supported by a Seminar Series Awards grant from the USF.
The New Municipalism, Democratic Ownership and the Politics of the Common workshop series emerged as a response to the increasing focus in municipalist movements, or what we term the radical municipalist hypothesis, both in practice and research. It specifically addresses one aspect of this hypothesis, namely the intersection of commoning practices and new approaches to democratising public ownership: i.e. common-based approaches to public ownership. These approaches include forms of self-management of public services, forms of co-ownership or participatory governance structures for public utilities. Organised as a collaboration between Dr Bertie Russell (Institute of Environmental Science and Technology, Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona), Dr Iolanda Bianchi (School of Sociology, University of Barcelona), and Lavinia Steinfort (Transnational Institute), the USF Seminar Series Awards was an interdisciplinary attempt to explore and advance understandings of these experimental practices, emphasising the importance of sharing and developing understanding between academics and those working to develop commons-based approaches to public ownership.
Participants included early-career and established scholars from 12 countries, including those working within the academy, independent researchers, and activist researchers from civil society organisations. Each participant brought their own expertise to the commons-based approach framework, bringing valuable insights from areas such as culture, waste, planning or housing. The Seminar Series took the form of two separate events – a week-long intensive seminar in Barcelona (Sept 2023), based at the Institute of Government and Public Policies School in Nou Barris, a predominantly working-class district of Barcelona, and a conference (Oct 2024) co-organised with four Catalan transformative economy organisations, the l’Observatori de Coòpolis, IDRA, La Ciutat Invisible and la XES Barcelona. More than 30 people participated in our intensive week-long seminar, with 200 participants in the final conference. One of the key outputs facilitated through the Series was a forthcoming edited book by Dr Russell and Dr Bianchi, and published with Bristol University Press (2026) entitled Radical Municipalism: The Politics of the Common and the Democratisation of Public Services.
The week-long intensive seminar (Sept 2023) included a combination of different types of sessions, including both intensive co-working, presentations, debate, early-career training, and field-trips. The event was launched with a welcome event at the offices of Barcelona en Comú, including introductory welcomes from their international committee, with an introductory framing from Prof Ismael Blanco (Universidad Autonoma de Barcelona) Attendees brought experiences and reflections from their own research cases, whilst a series of field trips to key examples of common-based approaches to public ownership in Barcelona served as key points of common reference amongst participants. These included a field trip to La Cireres and La Morada Housing cooperatives, led by Andrea Castarlenas from La Dinamo Foundation, and to Can Batlló sociocultural centre, led by Mauro Castro from the Barcelona Institute for Urban Research (IDRA). Additional research training was provided, including on the innovative use of games in qualitative research, led by Dr Keir Milburn from Red Plenty Games and Abundance.
The October 2024 conference was titled the International Conference on the Plural Economy, and a full agenda from the conference can be found on IDRA’s website. Co-organised with a number of organisations from Barcelona’s social and solidarity economy, it was hosted at Bloc4, a public-cooperative project funded by the Barcelona City Council and the regional government, the Generalitat de Catalunya, that is part of the Barcelona 2030 SSE Strategy. Co-organised and co-funded, the event was able to include a series of international speakers to share experiences on the development of alternative economic practices, including cases of common-based approaches to public ownership, reflecting on their organisation and wider political implications. These included: Ivan Miró (La Ciutat Invisible) from Barcelona, Sara McKinley (Democracy Collaborative) from Belgium, Keir Milburn (Abundance) from the UK; Geneviève Huot (Territoires innovants en économie sociale et solidaire) from Canada; Juan Lenzo (Unión Comunera de Venezuela) from Venezuela; Kali Akuno (Cooperation Jackson) from US; Andoni Egia (Hernani Burujabe) from the Basque country; and Álvaro Porro (Barcelona Activa) from Barcelona.
The discussions held across these events played an integral role in informing the analytical perspective developed further in the forthcoming edited book. As Dr Bianchi and Dr Russell argue, within the radical municipalist hypothesis, the diverse efforts to develop and apply a logic of the common to public services are leading to three distinct yet interrelated themes. Summarised here, “the first is a proposition about the scalar dimension of this radical municipalist hypothesis, which might erroneously be interpreted as being focused on ‘local’ or ‘municipal’ scale of intervention… Whilst repertoires of political action might cut across inherited political scales, their focus is on expanding and embedding collective democratic control within those processes of everyday life – the field of social reproduction – required to sustain ourselves”.
Secondly, these diverse experiences point towards the importance of “legal prefiguration”, which we suggest as a broad term “to refer to efforts to create new institutions of the common in scenarios where they are either legally foreclosed or where there is no legal precedent for their existence. In the case of the former, this emphasises the importance of ‘legal hacking’ as an approach to working at the edges of the law, finding workarounds or ‘alternative interpretations’ to enable initiatives which might otherwise be rendered legally unviable. In the case of the latter, it means working to create new institutional arrangements for which there may not be any legally recognised precedent. Both approaches are intrinsically creative and focus us on the question of the different institutional arrangements appropriate to the scale-making work of radical municipalism”.
Finally, we stress the need to adopt strategies committed to “disaggregating ownership”, by which we mean “confronting those interpretations of ownership based on dominium… Whilst working to decommodify public assets is both non-negotiable and essential, disaggregating ownership means going further to understand ownership as a bundle of different ‘rights’ – the right to disposal, the right of use, the right to control surpluses, the right to decide on how work is done, and so on. To approach this bundle of rights with the perspective of the common is to ask how each of these rights might be subjected to collective democratic control, and to leave open the question of how state institutions might ensure collective democratic rights are vested within institutions that operate at the scale of everyday life”.
To replace ownership through dominium with more collective and democratic governance practices, we also explored public-commons approaches. Acknowledging the limits of a methodology around best practices, we emphasised the need to dig into the political strategies and preconditions of public-commons practices to foster such socio-economic transformation across place and scale. In light of the runaway climate change, Lavinia Steinfort zoomed in on how public-commons strategies can, in fact, enable municipalist and other social movements to reclaim and build deeply democratic energy systems in order to cut emissions in the fairest possible way, urgently.
In sum, the New Municipalism, Democratic Ownership and the Politics of the Common series of seminars has not only advanced knowledge of common-based approaches to public ownership within the framework of the radical municipalist hypothesis—soon to be showcased in the forthcoming edited volume—but has also contributed to strengthening a network of academics and practitioners actively engaged in these approaches, fostering collaboration and shared learning.