Benjamin Barber: Why mayors should rule the world | TED Talk | TED.com
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Watch the Video: Benjamin Barber: Why mayors should rule the world | TED Talk | TED.com
Is This Small City the Future of Democratic Engagement in America? | The Nation
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It’s a fine spring Sunday in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and most people in this decidedly pious city in the heart of Amish country are at home or at church celebrating the Sabbath. Even the famous Central Market—with its traditionally dressed vendors, its German delicacies, its Muenster cheeses and cured meats —is closed.1 When you’re trying to […]
How Flatpack Democracy beat the old parties in the People’s Republic of Frome | Politics | The Guardian
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‘It has to be total revolution or nothing: that was our stance’ … the 17 independent councillors who now make up Frome’s town council. Photograph: Adrian Sherratt At this year’s Glastonbury, while some people get excited about the Foo Fighters and others loll around the Healing Field, one of the events in Billy Bragg’s politics-and-music […]
How to win back the city: the Barcelona en Comú guide to overthrowing the elite | Cities | The Guardian
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In May 2015, the citizen platform Barcelona en Comú (Barcelona in Common) catapulted Ada Colau into power as the city’s first female mayor. Ten months earlier, the group didn’t even exist. With no money and little experience, just how did they wrest the city from the entrenched political caste that had been running it for […]
Clues for building the bridge to a Networked Democracy
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The advent of the Internet, the ICTs and the collective intelligence enabled by them point to the rise of a networked democracy that promises, among other things, the protagonism of the common citizen in relation to the State and to the distribution of power. In recent years, there have been a number of initiatives in […]
Barcelona Crowdsourced its Sharing Economy Policies. Can Other Cities Do the Same?
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Anna Bergren Miller: When the City Council of Barcelona asked democracy activist and researcher Mayo Fuster Morell for policy recommendations regarding the sharing economy, she suggested that the City Council take a different approach: Rather than relying on an expert to dictate policy from the top down, why not use a collaborative process to build a […]
After Brexit and Trump: don’t demonise; localise! – The Ecologist
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Both Trump and Brexit can be explained by the failure of mainstream political elites to address the pain inflicted on ordinary citizens in the neoliberal era, write Helena Norberg-Hodge & Rupert Read. In the US and the UK, working class voters rightly rejected the corporate globalisation that has created so much poverty and insecurity. But […]
Common space for exchange: cities in transition and citizen struggles | P2P Foundation
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How has activism in Spain produced new political platforms that are victorious in municipal elections? Are there stories, lessons, methods or tools that can be shared or translated to other contexts? How might these support the growing movement in France? Source: Common space for exchange: cities in transition and citizen struggles | P2P Foundation CommonsPolis […]