Akademisches Jahr 2022/23

Fearless politics. Municipalist movements and the difficulty of the plains
A joint study project of the universities of Barcelona, Weimar, and Zadar

Semester: Summer semester 2023

M.Sc. European Urban Studies, 2. FS. Study Project

Type of Course: Project / 8 SWS / 12 ECTS

Number of participants: max. 15

Language: English

Teacher: Dr. Timmo Krüger (Bauhaus-Universität Weimar)

Co-teacher(s):
Dr. Federico Demaria (Universitat de Barcelona)
Dr. Sc. Karin Doolan (Sveučilište u Zadru)

                                                                                           here you can download the Booklet PDF

The challenges of the socio-ecological crisis are immense and affect basic structures of modern societies. Questions of social justice and effective climate change mitigation cannot be considered independently of questions regarding the hegemonic mode of living. To what extent can and should growth-based norms of production and consumption be maintained? Who can or should give up privileges of the imperial mode of living? Whose interests can or should be particularly respected? Given these distributional implications, it is not surprising that conflicts over social transformation processes are increasing. At the same time, European societies are increasingly experiencing a crisis of democracy. Input, throughput and output legitimacy of representative democracies are eroding. In their criticism of pluralistic democratic institutions (e.g., minority rights and freedom of the press), right-wing authoritarian movements and parties tie in with these crisis phenomena and at the same time exacerbate them. On the other side of the conflict spectrum, social movement actors link the demand for (climate, social) justice with the demand for the expansion and intensification of democracy.

In this context, municipalist movements stand out because they pursue both parliamentary and extra-parliamentary strategies to orient urban infrastructures and institutions towards a common good approach. It is precisely this duality of exercising power through pressure from the streets and through government policy that is a strength of municipalist movements, but it also leads to internal negotiations and strategy discussions. With the electoral successes of Barcelona en Comú (2015), Zagreb je NAŠ! (2021) and other municipalist movement parties around the world, new understandings of politics have entered local politics and urban planning. Thus, municipalist movement parties who are in government strengthen grassroot democratic elements and strive for "obedient governance" to create a new relationship between local politics, social movements and city dwellers. This is already evident in the names of the movement parties – e.g. "Barcelona en Comú" could be translated as "Barcelona in Common" and "Zagreb je NAŠ!" as "Zagreb is OURS!". In addition to the demand for political participation, the names also reveal an explicit focus on the scalar level of the municipality. It is an urban setting in which municipalist movements seek answers to socio-ecological and democratic challenges. Municipalist movements thus hold the promise of opening up the political scope for imaginative (urban) visions, while at the same time testing very concrete transformative urban policy and planning tools.

The selected comparative cases of Barcelona and Zagreb share similarities, e.g., a municipalist movement party in charge of governance, a city in Southern Europe, but have also some differences. In Barcelona, the municipalist movement has been active and in power for a comparatively long time. Barcelona en Comú stands for a courage to implement concrete utopias, which the movement carries into the world with its congress "Fearless Cities" (2017) and the network of the same name. In this respect, Barcelona en Comú is a role model for many actors. Zagreb je NAŠ! also explicitly follows the example of Barcelona en Comú, but in part faces completely different challenges and is looking for locally appropriate strategies. A special focus of Zagreb je NAŠ! is the systematic linking of environmental protection and justice issues. In the Study Project we deal primarily with the very current developments in Zagreb, the destination of the study-trip. Barcelona, however, is an important case of comparison for us, as it is for the protagonists of Zagreb je NAŠ! themselves.

In the Study Project we will examine very specific planning projects, tools and programs from Zagreb and Barcelona and investigate the following questions:

• What is the relationship between city administration, local politics, and civil society initiatives? What tensions and conflicts, but also new forms of productive cooperation can be observed?
• How does Zagreb je NAŠ!’s and Barcelona en Comú’s intensive engagement with the challenges of the democracy crisis affect their day-to-day government and administration? To what extent (and by which actors) are the measures taken democratize of urban planning and local politics considered to be successful?
• With which politics of scale do the municipalist movements in Zagreb and Barcelona react to the interdependence of global and local causes and consequences of the socio-ecological crisis? To what extent and by what means is the ambition to deal with socio-ecological challenges at the municipal level extended to phenomena of supra-regional and global crises (climate change, etc.)? And with which strategies are local effects of global socio-ecological crises addressed by influencing supra-regional to transnational scales?