A committee meeting in Qamishlo, Rojava
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Fearless cities and neighbourhoods for a living planet: from Sheffield to Rojava

This is Part 3 of Research for Action’s blog and podcast series based on Fearless Cities, a summit we co-organised in November 2024. Held in Sheffield and attended by over 400 people, Fearless Cities 2024 explored how local movements are building power in their communities and generating long-term, systemic change towards directly democratic local institutions. This is known as municipalism.    By Steve Rushton     Note: The Rojava Revolution (featured below) is a women-led multi-ethnic society of millions of people in North and East Syria. At the time of writing it is being invaded and destroyed by the Syrian... [continues]
Photograph of various posters by A Commune in the North, saying things like 'health is wealth', and 'liberation,ecology,anarchism'
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Co-operation at the cutting edge – two perspectives

Cooperation seems to be an idea whose time has come for grassroots movements in the UK. Drawing on the Fearless Cities summit session: ‘Building autonomy through a cooperative economy’, we share two interviews with people doing cooperation beyond the traditional worker/housing cooperative form. Cooperation Town and Co-operation Manchester. What does cooperation mean to people right now? What are the relationships between the theory and practice of cooperatives and other tools for organising, like citizens' assemblies and mutual aid groups?   First, we invite you to listen to an interview with Shiri Shalmy, who helped set up Cooperation Town, a movement... [continues]
Fearless Cities against racism and fascism
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Fearless Cities against racism and fascism

  This is part 1 of Research for Action’s blog and podcast series based on Fearless Cities, a summit we co-organised in November 2024. Held in Sheffield and attended by over 400 people, Fearless Cities 2024 explored how local movements are building power in their communities and generating long-term, systemic change towards directly democratic local institutions. This is known as municipalism. Municipalism is about acting locally and looking beyond the nation state as the main theatre for politics. It requires global thinking, co-creating democratic power, inside or in opposition to local democratic structures or by creating autonomous alternatives.Fearless Cities summits... [continues]
Posted inAudit and Accountability Current fearless cities

Research for Action and rethinking local democracy 

This is an edited version of FJ’s speech at the opening panel at the municipalist summit Fearless Cities, which took place 2-3 November 2024 in Sheffield. The summit, which we co-organised with Opus Independents, Citizen Network, Care Full and Steve Rushton, aimed to consolidate a movement in Britain for claiming community assets, building communities and creating new forms of democratic decision-making, as well as to find our place in the global ‘municipalist’ movement that works on those themes. The programme consisted of four strands: Neighbourhoods of Care; Reimagining the Commons; Rethinking Governance & Local Democracy; and Municipalist Futures. Research for... [continues]