Books by Matthew Thompson
Reconstructing public housing: Liverpool’s hidden history of collective alternatives, 2020
Extended epilogue exploring the contradictory dynamics of discourse, art, curation, spectacle, pa... more Extended epilogue exploring the contradictory dynamics of discourse, art, curation, spectacle, participation, commodification, professionalisation and class in the production of collective alternatives to capitalism.
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Liverpool University Press, 2020
Open access book available to read here: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv153k6cx and
https://ww... more Open access book available to read here: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv153k6cx and
https://www.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/books/id/53192/
From the back cover:
Reconstructing Public Housing unearths Liverpool’s hidden history of radical alternatives to municipal housing development and builds a vision of how we might reconstruct public housing on more democratic and cooperative foundations. In this critical urban history, Matthew Thompson brings to light how and why this remarkable city became host to two pioneering social movements in collective housing and urban regeneration experimentation. In the 1970s, Liverpool produced one of Britain’s largest, most democratic and socially innovative housing co-op movements, including the country’s first new-build co-op to be designed, developed and owned by its member-residents. Four decades later, in some of the very same neighbourhoods, several campaigns for urban community land trusts are growing from the grassroots – including the first ever architectural or housing project to be nominated for and win, in 2015, the artworld’s coveted Turner Prize. Thompson traces the connections between these movements; how they were shaped by, and in turn transformed, the politics, economics, culture and urbanism of Liverpool. Drawing on theories of capitalism and cooperativism, property and the commons, institutional change and urban transformation, Thompson reconsiders Engels’ housing question, reflecting on how collective alternatives work in, against and beyond the state and capital, in often surprising and contradictory ways.
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Papers by Matthew Thompson
Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society, 2024
This article conceptualises the circular economy as a space of immaterial, as well as material, m... more This article conceptualises the circular economy as a space of immaterial, as well as material, metabolic flows mediated by capitalism and planetary urbanisation. World-ecology provides us with the critical lens to view the circular economy as part of an emergent regime of accumulation that may supersede neoliberalism. However, if each regime entails new frontier zones for appropriating cheap natures and dumping wastes, then the circular economy-as a strategy for revalorising waste-presents a possible structural limit to capitalism's further expansion. Moreover, when combined with notions of degrowth and doughnut economics, the circular economy may provide an imaginary and set of prefigurative practices that point towards a postcapitalist economy. Through a case study of Amsterdam-a city aiming to be fully circular by 2050-we examine this contradictory crossroads, problematising the idea of circularity within capitalism and exploring the potential of postcapitalist alternatives within the circular economy.
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Competition & Change, 2023
Through what kind of spaces might postcapitalist planning emerge? How will the process of wrestin... more Through what kind of spaces might postcapitalist planning emerge? How will the process of wresting collective control over the relations of production and reproduction, and over our metabolic exchange with the rest of nature, unfold through struggle? In seeking answers to such questions, this article reviews the literature on democratic economic planning beyond capitalism and makes the case for a renewed engagement with issues of space and the urban through a closer reading of Henri Lefebvre's work on planetary urbanization and the production of space. We argue that, to date, the economic planning literature has tended to focus on overcoming abstract labour time rather than abstract spacean oversight that prevents us from fully apprehending the urban form through which capitalism produces and reproduces its conditions of possibility and carries the seeds of its own destruction and potential supersession. Engaging with recent critical theorizing on the logistics revolution and the logistical state, we argue that postcapitalist forms of planning will arrive through an urban revolution, through struggles over urban everyday life. We suggest that future investigations into the possibilities for a democratic economic planning beyond capitalism should attend to actually existing empirical struggles over the urbanas the mediator of capitalist relationsand look for inspiration to historical and contemporary examples of municipalist praxis aiming to reinvent the commune.
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Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 2023
What can the municipal state do to radically transform urban economies? Local government in count... more What can the municipal state do to radically transform urban economies? Local government in countries such as the UK has been historically tasked with delivering public services; rarely extending its remit to economic development, let alone community-led forms promoting economic democracy, at least not since 1980s municipal-socialism. But times are changing, and the UK case provides some telling examples of what is now possible. Community wealth building, cooperative development and foundational economy approaches are fast gaining traction in municipalities across the UK, through emergent public-common-philanthropic partnerships with progressive think tanks, cooperative development agencies, community enterprises, foundations, and charitable trusts. This article explores complexifying relations between the state, the cooperative movement and the non-profit industrial complex in the pursuit of sustainable and generative economic development as playing out differently in urban policy experiments in the English cities of Preston and Plymouth. The article contributes to current debates on local state restructuring, municipal statecraft and urban entrepreneurialism by critically comparing these place-based variegations of municipal-cooperative development with previous waves, and with more financialised and extractivist forms of statecraft, drawing out implications for praxis.
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Stir to Action, 2023
Pre-print version of article published in Stir to Action #40 (Winter 2023)
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Economy and Society, 2022
This paper explores universal basic income (UBI) in relation to crisis, from COVID-19 to techno-e... more This paper explores universal basic income (UBI) in relation to crisis, from COVID-19 to techno-economic disruptions to work and prospective postcapitalist transition. Critical debates around automation, wage labour and post-work are brought into conversation with emerging trends in urban political economy around foundational infrastructure, smart cities and platform capitalism. To deliver the socioeconomic transformations promised by UBI's advocates, it is argued that more radical structural interventions in capitalist asset ownership and property relations, alongside democratized state investment in technological development, universal basic services and infrastructure, are necessary counterparts to any sufficient UBIthat is, if we hope to construct new systems of collective coordination capable of contending with complex epidemiological, economic and ecological crises.
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Frontiers in Sustainable Cities, 2021
While the commons and commoning are generally associated with community-based ecosystems at the l... more While the commons and commoning are generally associated with community-based ecosystems at the localised scale of the neighbourhood, ambitious reinterpretations explore possibilities for scaling up commoning as a collaborative and sustainable form of urban governance engaging multiple stakeholders through the quintuple helix. Inspired by the City as Commons approach first imagined and formulated in Bologna, Italy, this paper presents original findings from a transdisciplinary action research project for studying and cultivating commoning-as-governance in a politically disaffected and economically marginalised inner-city neighbourhood in Liverpool, England. It examines the social relations (re)constituting an urban ecosystem for commoning and asks how such initiatives for designing collaborative programmes for transforming urban environments through public-civic partnerships might work in contexts in which the material and affective resources for commoning have been exhausted by post-democratic privatisation and neoliberal austerity. Drawing on theories of radical democracy and post-politics, the City as Commons approach is critically evaluated and argued to be insufficient to the challenging task of engendering commoning in the disintegrating urban neighbourhoods that would arguably benefit most from such activities. The paper tells the story of how this transdisciplinary project ultimately failed in its aims and, through engagement with recent interventions on the politics of failure in the neoliberal university, reflects on the implications for future action research on commoning.
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Town Planning Review, 2022
Social, economic and environmental aspects of building sustainable communities receive ample acad... more Social, economic and environmental aspects of building sustainable communities receive ample academic and policy attention; far less is paid to finding financially sustainable models of urban regeneration. This case study of the Hattersley Estate in Greater Manchester, England, provides insights into an innovative approach to financing estate regeneration via novel mechanisms of planning gain, stock transfer, and tenure diversification, influenced by the Mixed Communities agenda. In the context of enduring spatially-concentrated deprivation, state withdrawal of regeneration funding, and residualisation and neglect of public housing stock by an absentee landlord-together rendering estate renewal too expensive for conventional stock transfer-regeneration partners have instead sought to leverage local land values for a 'self-financing' method of regeneration. This article describes how a novel business model and financialisation fix were conceived and implemented for Hattersley's relatively successful estate regeneration; explores the political-economic implications and contradictions of this financialised approach for urban development trajectories; and draws critical connections between research on financialisation, land value capture and municipal entrepreneurialism.
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United Nations Research Institute for Social Development , 2020
Report for United Nations Research Institute for Social Development in a series on Promoting the ... more Report for United Nations Research Institute for Social Development in a series on Promoting the SSE through Public Policies: Guidelines for Local Governments
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Urban Studies, 2020
This article revisits debates on the contribution of the social economy to urban economic develop... more This article revisits debates on the contribution of the social economy to urban economic development , specifically focusing on the scale of the city region. It presents a novel tripartite definition-empirical, essentialist, holistic-as a useful frame for future research into urban social economies. Findings from an in-depth case study of the scale, scope and value of the Liverpool City Region's social economy are presented through this framing. This research suggests that the social economy has the potential to build a workable alternative to neoliberal economic development if given sufficient tailored institutional support and if seen as a holistic integrated city-regional system , with anchor institutions and community anchor organisations playing key roles.
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Progress in Human Geography, 2020
New municipalism is a nascent global social movement aiming to democratically transform the local... more New municipalism is a nascent global social movement aiming to democratically transform the local state and economy-but what, precisely, is so new about it? I situate new municipalism in its geographical, political-economic and historical contexts, by comparison with earlier waves of municipal socialism and international municipalism, arguing that it re-politicises traditions of transnationalism, based not on post-political policy mobilities but on urban solidarities in contesting neoliberal austerity urbanism and platform capitalism. This article identifies three new municipalisms-platform, autonomist, managed-whose characteristics, contradictions , interconnections and potentials are explored in terms of state-space restructuring, urban-capitalist crisis and cycles of contention.
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Heseltine Institute Policy Briefing, 2020
Heseltine Institute Working Paper exploring the social, economic and political implications of im... more Heseltine Institute Working Paper exploring the social, economic and political implications of implementing some form of Universal Basic Income, both as an immediate response to the Covid-19 crisis and as a more permanent policy solution to a number of problems, from rising poverty and inequality to the transition to a more automated economy with fewer jobs.
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Rethinking Marxism, 2020
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Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 2020
Conventional approaches to local economic development are failing to address deepening polarisati... more 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 municipal-ist 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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International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 2018
Innovation is perhaps the buzzword in local economic development policy. Associated narrowly with... more Innovation is perhaps the buzzword in local economic development policy. Associated narrowly with neoliberal ideas, conventional notions of innovation – like its capitalocentric counterparts, enterprise and entrepreneurialism – may promise higher productivity, global competitiveness and technological progress but do not fundamentally change the ‘rules of the game’. In contrast, an emerging field reimagines social innovation as disruptive change in social relations and institutional configurations. In this article, I explore the conceptual and political differences within this pre-paradigmatic field, and argue for a more transformative understanding of social innovation. Building on the work of David Graeber, I mobilise the novel constructs of ‘play’ and ‘games’ to advance our understanding of the contradictory process of institutionalising social innovation for urban transformation. This is illustrated through a case study of Liverpool, where diverse approaches to innovation are employed in attempts to resolve longstanding socioeconomic problems. Dominant market-/state-led economic development policies – what I call the ‘regeneration game’ – are contrasted with more experimental, creative, democratic and potentially more effective forms of social innovation, seeking urban change through playing with the rules of the game. I conclude by considering how the play-game dialectic illuminates and reframes the way transformative social innovation might be cultivated by urban policy, the contradictions entailed, and possible ways forward.
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This article explores the historical development of two different
collaborative housing models: L... more This article explores the historical development of two different
collaborative housing models: Liverpool’s housing co-operative
movement of the 1970s, when public tenants successfully struggled
for collective dweller control in designing, developing and managing
their own housing; and, today, Liverpool’s nascent urban
community land trust (CLT) movement. The genesis and institutionalization
of each is analysed through mobile urbanism, policy
mobilities and planning histories perspectives. Both Liverpool’s coops
and CLTs are shown to have been mobilized through ideas
adapted from elsewhere, mutating upon exposure to contextual
factors embedded in place. Contemporary CLT campaigns can be
traced back to various sources: CLT experiments by professional or
arms-length state agencies; and previous periods of collaborative
housing activism, notably the 1970s co-ops. The article situates
these movements within a collaborative housing conceptual framework
and draws out the implications of these genealogical findings
for the further development of collaborative housing.
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Book chapter in 'From Conflict to Inclusion in Housing: Interaction of Communities, Residents and... more Book chapter in 'From Conflict to Inclusion in Housing: Interaction of Communities, Residents and Activists'. http://www.ucl.ac.uk/ucl-press/browse-books/from-conflict-to-inclusion-in-housing
Description from Editor's Introduction:
"Matthew Thompson’s ‘Contesting “dilapidated dwelling” ’ picks up on the work of Patrick Keiller, specifically his film The Dilapidated Dwelling, to discuss social and economic issues related to housing provision in the UK, with particular emphasis on Liverpool. Using Keiller as a springboard from which to explore the issues raised by art-led housing projects in Liverpool such as Homebaked, and less directly, the award-winning projects of Assemble at the Granby Four Streets, he weaves into the art discourse on housing the political underpinnings and conflicts that have existed for decades in this particular city. Referencing the writing of Henri Lefebvre in this artistic–political conceptualisation of housing, his chapter integrates many of the issues raised across the book, from the politics of housing to questions of finance, community and resident activism in conditions of contestation. As such, it is an ideal chapter with which to bring the volume to a close and through which to encourage continued crossdisciplinary engagements with the often conflictive issue of affordable housing provision and its community and social importance in the UK and internationally."
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The Routledge Handbook of Henri Lefebvre, the City and Urban Society
Earlier draft of book chapter in soon-to-be published The Routledge Handbook of Henri Lefebvre, t... more Earlier draft of book chapter in soon-to-be published The Routledge Handbook of Henri Lefebvre, the City and Urban Society.
This chapter explores how Logos and Eros – together representing an animating polarity in Lefebvre’s dialectical thought – infuse different perspectives on dwelling. Drawing on the fundamental insight of John FC Turner and Colin Ward – that dwelling is not simply a noun but also a verb – I show how Lefebvre shares many affinities with these anarchist writers, and outline two opposing approaches to housing, seen as either a fetishized product or a lived process. This is illustrated through an empirical case study of Liverpool’s post-war history of addressing housing deprivation, focusing on a comparison between the 1970s housing cooperative movement, influenced by the ideas of Ward and Turner, and the Militant Tendency’s municipal socialist project, which opposed and attempted to ‘municipalise’ the co-ops. Lastly, I consider what these divergent approaches might mean for Lefebvre’s utopian-socialist revolutionary concern with constructing ‘experimental utopias’ that transcend the dichotomy between ends and means, between spatial closure and temporal openness.
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City: analysis of urban trends, culture, theory, policy, action, 2017
Building on recent critical contributions towards conceptualising neighbourhood change as sociall... more Building on recent critical contributions towards conceptualising neighbourhood change as socially produced and politically 'performed', this article takes a closer look at the work of Henri Lefebvre to understand the (social) production of urban space as a deeply political process. A common critical characterisation of neighbourhood change occurring through a grand Lefebvrean struggle between 'abstract space-makers' and 'social space-makers' is critically examined through an in-depth historical case study of the Granby neighbourhood in Liverpool. Here, these forces are embodied respectively in technocratic state-led comprehensive redevelopment, notably Housing Market Renewal and its LIFE and ZOO zoning models; and in alternative community-led rehabilitation projects such as the Turner Prize-winning Granby Four Streets Community Land Trust. By tracing the surprisingly intimate interactions and multiple contradictions between these apparently opposing spatial projects, the production of neighbourhood is shown to be a complex, often violent political process, whose historical trajectories require disentangling in order to understand how we might construct better urban futures.
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Books by Matthew Thompson
https://www.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/books/id/53192/
From the back cover:
Reconstructing Public Housing unearths Liverpool’s hidden history of radical alternatives to municipal housing development and builds a vision of how we might reconstruct public housing on more democratic and cooperative foundations. In this critical urban history, Matthew Thompson brings to light how and why this remarkable city became host to two pioneering social movements in collective housing and urban regeneration experimentation. In the 1970s, Liverpool produced one of Britain’s largest, most democratic and socially innovative housing co-op movements, including the country’s first new-build co-op to be designed, developed and owned by its member-residents. Four decades later, in some of the very same neighbourhoods, several campaigns for urban community land trusts are growing from the grassroots – including the first ever architectural or housing project to be nominated for and win, in 2015, the artworld’s coveted Turner Prize. Thompson traces the connections between these movements; how they were shaped by, and in turn transformed, the politics, economics, culture and urbanism of Liverpool. Drawing on theories of capitalism and cooperativism, property and the commons, institutional change and urban transformation, Thompson reconsiders Engels’ housing question, reflecting on how collective alternatives work in, against and beyond the state and capital, in often surprising and contradictory ways.
Papers by Matthew Thompson
collaborative housing models: Liverpool’s housing co-operative
movement of the 1970s, when public tenants successfully struggled
for collective dweller control in designing, developing and managing
their own housing; and, today, Liverpool’s nascent urban
community land trust (CLT) movement. The genesis and institutionalization
of each is analysed through mobile urbanism, policy
mobilities and planning histories perspectives. Both Liverpool’s coops
and CLTs are shown to have been mobilized through ideas
adapted from elsewhere, mutating upon exposure to contextual
factors embedded in place. Contemporary CLT campaigns can be
traced back to various sources: CLT experiments by professional or
arms-length state agencies; and previous periods of collaborative
housing activism, notably the 1970s co-ops. The article situates
these movements within a collaborative housing conceptual framework
and draws out the implications of these genealogical findings
for the further development of collaborative housing.
Description from Editor's Introduction:
"Matthew Thompson’s ‘Contesting “dilapidated dwelling” ’ picks up on the work of Patrick Keiller, specifically his film The Dilapidated Dwelling, to discuss social and economic issues related to housing provision in the UK, with particular emphasis on Liverpool. Using Keiller as a springboard from which to explore the issues raised by art-led housing projects in Liverpool such as Homebaked, and less directly, the award-winning projects of Assemble at the Granby Four Streets, he weaves into the art discourse on housing the political underpinnings and conflicts that have existed for decades in this particular city. Referencing the writing of Henri Lefebvre in this artistic–political conceptualisation of housing, his chapter integrates many of the issues raised across the book, from the politics of housing to questions of finance, community and resident activism in conditions of contestation. As such, it is an ideal chapter with which to bring the volume to a close and through which to encourage continued crossdisciplinary engagements with the often conflictive issue of affordable housing provision and its community and social importance in the UK and internationally."
This chapter explores how Logos and Eros – together representing an animating polarity in Lefebvre’s dialectical thought – infuse different perspectives on dwelling. Drawing on the fundamental insight of John FC Turner and Colin Ward – that dwelling is not simply a noun but also a verb – I show how Lefebvre shares many affinities with these anarchist writers, and outline two opposing approaches to housing, seen as either a fetishized product or a lived process. This is illustrated through an empirical case study of Liverpool’s post-war history of addressing housing deprivation, focusing on a comparison between the 1970s housing cooperative movement, influenced by the ideas of Ward and Turner, and the Militant Tendency’s municipal socialist project, which opposed and attempted to ‘municipalise’ the co-ops. Lastly, I consider what these divergent approaches might mean for Lefebvre’s utopian-socialist revolutionary concern with constructing ‘experimental utopias’ that transcend the dichotomy between ends and means, between spatial closure and temporal openness.
https://www.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/books/id/53192/
From the back cover:
Reconstructing Public Housing unearths Liverpool’s hidden history of radical alternatives to municipal housing development and builds a vision of how we might reconstruct public housing on more democratic and cooperative foundations. In this critical urban history, Matthew Thompson brings to light how and why this remarkable city became host to two pioneering social movements in collective housing and urban regeneration experimentation. In the 1970s, Liverpool produced one of Britain’s largest, most democratic and socially innovative housing co-op movements, including the country’s first new-build co-op to be designed, developed and owned by its member-residents. Four decades later, in some of the very same neighbourhoods, several campaigns for urban community land trusts are growing from the grassroots – including the first ever architectural or housing project to be nominated for and win, in 2015, the artworld’s coveted Turner Prize. Thompson traces the connections between these movements; how they were shaped by, and in turn transformed, the politics, economics, culture and urbanism of Liverpool. Drawing on theories of capitalism and cooperativism, property and the commons, institutional change and urban transformation, Thompson reconsiders Engels’ housing question, reflecting on how collective alternatives work in, against and beyond the state and capital, in often surprising and contradictory ways.
collaborative housing models: Liverpool’s housing co-operative
movement of the 1970s, when public tenants successfully struggled
for collective dweller control in designing, developing and managing
their own housing; and, today, Liverpool’s nascent urban
community land trust (CLT) movement. The genesis and institutionalization
of each is analysed through mobile urbanism, policy
mobilities and planning histories perspectives. Both Liverpool’s coops
and CLTs are shown to have been mobilized through ideas
adapted from elsewhere, mutating upon exposure to contextual
factors embedded in place. Contemporary CLT campaigns can be
traced back to various sources: CLT experiments by professional or
arms-length state agencies; and previous periods of collaborative
housing activism, notably the 1970s co-ops. The article situates
these movements within a collaborative housing conceptual framework
and draws out the implications of these genealogical findings
for the further development of collaborative housing.
Description from Editor's Introduction:
"Matthew Thompson’s ‘Contesting “dilapidated dwelling” ’ picks up on the work of Patrick Keiller, specifically his film The Dilapidated Dwelling, to discuss social and economic issues related to housing provision in the UK, with particular emphasis on Liverpool. Using Keiller as a springboard from which to explore the issues raised by art-led housing projects in Liverpool such as Homebaked, and less directly, the award-winning projects of Assemble at the Granby Four Streets, he weaves into the art discourse on housing the political underpinnings and conflicts that have existed for decades in this particular city. Referencing the writing of Henri Lefebvre in this artistic–political conceptualisation of housing, his chapter integrates many of the issues raised across the book, from the politics of housing to questions of finance, community and resident activism in conditions of contestation. As such, it is an ideal chapter with which to bring the volume to a close and through which to encourage continued crossdisciplinary engagements with the often conflictive issue of affordable housing provision and its community and social importance in the UK and internationally."
This chapter explores how Logos and Eros – together representing an animating polarity in Lefebvre’s dialectical thought – infuse different perspectives on dwelling. Drawing on the fundamental insight of John FC Turner and Colin Ward – that dwelling is not simply a noun but also a verb – I show how Lefebvre shares many affinities with these anarchist writers, and outline two opposing approaches to housing, seen as either a fetishized product or a lived process. This is illustrated through an empirical case study of Liverpool’s post-war history of addressing housing deprivation, focusing on a comparison between the 1970s housing cooperative movement, influenced by the ideas of Ward and Turner, and the Militant Tendency’s municipal socialist project, which opposed and attempted to ‘municipalise’ the co-ops. Lastly, I consider what these divergent approaches might mean for Lefebvre’s utopian-socialist revolutionary concern with constructing ‘experimental utopias’ that transcend the dichotomy between ends and means, between spatial closure and temporal openness.
Town Planning Review (2015). 86(4): 483-485. DOI:10.3828/tpr.2015.29
Organised by the Heseltine Institute for Public Policy, Practice and Place, University of Liverpool
Hosted at Sensor City, Liverpool, 9 March 2020
In this talk I’m going to present some very recent and provocative thinking on an emerging mode of production based on information and digital data – what the critical theorist McKenzie Wark christens as ‘vectors’ – which is arguably replacing capitalism. Vectors are lines of economic activity connecting producers and consumers extensively across space through intensive technologies of storage and processing. They are increasingly abstract and digitally-mediated through the internet, smart phones and the sensors and devices of the smart home and the smart city. I’m going to argue that this abstraction and the concentration of control over vectors in an emergent class of ‘vectoralists’ – epitomised by the tech giants Google and Amazon and including urban platforms like Uber and Airbnb – has major implications for how we think through and shape the future of the smart city, and presents particular problems for the realisation of a democratic smart city.
New municipalism is a nascent global social movement aiming to democratically transform the local state and economy-but what, precisely, is so new about it? I situate new municipalism in its geographical, political-economic and historical contexts, by comparison with earlier waves of municipal socialism and international municipalism; arguing that it re-politicises traditions of transnationalism, based not on post-political policy mobilities but on urban solidarities in contesting austerity urbanism and platform capitalism. This article identifies three new municipalisms-platform, autonomist, managed-whose characteristics, contradictions, interconnections and potentials are explored in terms of state-space restructuring, urban-capitalist crisis and cycles of contention.