Where Change Begins: Urban Politics in the Climate Emergency
With national elections polarised and inconclusive and EU decision-making stuck at its usual snail’s pace, politics today leaves many feeling powerless. Yet in a climate emergency amid the deepening crisis of inequality, renouncing collective change is not an option. Does then the city represent our best hope?
With this dilemma in mind, three French students set out this summer to discover the different realities of urban politics around Europe, exploring the municipalist wave of recent years and learning from efforts to build popular support for climate action from the street up.
Does the city have the greatest strategic potential for democratic change? What can we learn from different urban movements, their strategies and approaches to power, their strengths and weaknesses? From commons to radical democracy, are city initiatives kernels of wider transformative change?
These questions were the starting point for a journey that took Cléa Fache, Léa Legras et Hugo Chirol through 20 cities across four countries. Over the next few weeks, the Green European Journal will publish a series about what they found.
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