The New Municipalism

There has been an upsurge of recent interest in Britain in what Cynthia Cockburn in 1977 called “The Local State” – best exemplified by John Benington’s “Local Government becomes Big Business” which I used to be able to download but am no longer able to. So I’ll have to fall back on one of the last CDP’s publications - Gilding the Ghetto” (1977) to give readers a flavour of the critical challenge the radicals of the day were posing to the Labour government of the time. Little did they realise what was waiting for them with Margaret Thatcher! Sadly, local government has become a mere shadow of itself as a result of Tory government austerity and the severe budget cuts this has inflicted on municipalities since 2010. For readers wanting to have a sense of the  damage this has done, I would recommend Reclaiming Local Democracy – a progressive future for local government by Ines Newman. It may be a decade old but it is a very clearly written celebration of the ethical importance of this body which contains a useful glossary.

As far as the idea of a new wave of radical municipalism is concerned, the best article is probably Whatever happened to municipal radicalism? by Matt Thompson (2023) which is a very useful overview of the literature on MR which focuses particularly on cooperatives, social enterprise and the Plymouth and Preston examples

Other Recommended Background Reading

Cake and Ale – the role of culture in the new municipalism M Banks and K Oakley Cultural Trends vol 33 2024 Glasgow was one of the first cities to gain the award of of European City of Culture and this is an article on the relative neglect of culture in the municipalist movement

Radical Municipalism in Crisis Roch, Russell and Thompson; Urban Studies vol 60 issue 11 2023 which delves into what are identified as four salient dimensions marking this terrain – economic reorganisation, democratisation of political decision-making, feminisation of politics, ecological transformation – as a multi-dimensional lens through which to introduce, and situate within the wider literature.

Strategies for a New Municipalism Russell et al Urban Studies journal 2023 A rather academic article arguing that while recent contributions on new municipalist practices have focused on a wide range of themes – including technopolitical participatory innovations (Charnock et al., 2021), municipal energy democracy (Angel, 2021), water remunicipalisation (Popartan et al., 2020), participatory governance (Bua and Bussu, 2021), care regimes (Kussy et al., 2023), urban food policy (Morley and Morgan, 2021), refugee reception (Garce´s-Mascaren˜ as and Gebhardt, 2020) and electoral platforms (Blanco et al., 2020) – there has been little focus on the issue of land, and the role that alternative approaches to land ownership and stewardship may play in municipalist strategy.

Bridging Bureaucracy and Activism Urban Studies 2023 An interesting article which looks back at the work of the GLC in the 1980s

Placing the Foundational Economy “Environment and Planning” journal; B Russell et al (2021)

an excellent analysis of recent Labour thinking about the FE which I posted about here

Community Business in Scotland – an alternative vision of enterprise culture 1979-1997 
 G Murray 20th Century British History vol 30 number 4 (2019) A fairly definitive and 

overdue review of a rather different approach to the local State which developed in 

Scotland in the recent past  

From self-help to class struggle – revisiting Coventry CDP in the 1970s M Carpenter etc Community Development Journal 2017. An excellent assessment of one the various phases of the first of several community-based projects funded by a Labout government

The Limits of Local Power – a Sheffield Case study (1986); the thesis of Alan Cochrane, one of the key writers about local economic development

Community Business Works Gulbenkian 1982. An important report which leftists have tended to ignore