The Bicibus: Catalonia’s most successful export since Rosalía

This Friday, the Bicibus is back in Barcelona. And in San Francisco, too! Yep, the Bicibus has made the 9,500 km journey to California, where Peter Belden, a dad inspired by the experience of Barcelona, organized the first Bike Bus through JFK Drive in December, and is planning a repeat the same day. The first…

El PEUAT o el Plan Barcelona para Vivir

Originally published in La Futura on 23/12/2021 Durante los últimos años, en Barcelona, se ha generado un nuevo consenso sobre el papel del turismo en la ciudad. Un consenso amplio que quiere poner fin a la política de barra libre, promovida durante décadas a manos de gobiernos socialistas y convergentes. Queremos que nos visiten, está…

A look back at Fearless Cities from 2021

Co-written with Júlia Miralles de Imperial. When Barcelona En Comú invited activists and organizations from around the world to Barcelona for the Fearless Cities Summit in 2017, we hoped that the event would mark a turning point for the municipalist movement. Just two years previously, our citizen candidacy had been catapulted into office on a…

Casa (i jardí) per a tothom

Cowritten with Enric Bárcena and originally published in Nació Digital on 25/09/2020 Aquests dies arriben notícies de famílies que fugen a instal·lar-se a les seves residències fora de Barcelona, mentre d'altres només desitgen no haver de reviure el malson d'haver-se de confinar tots junts en una sola habitació. Arran de la pandèmia, les desigualtats habitacionals a la…

A municipalist response to COVID-19

Originally published in the RosaLux Brexit Blog on 27/08/2020. The COVID-19 pandemic has been met by unprecedented state intervention around the world. We’ve seen lockdowns, travel bans, quarantines and state-funded furloughs instigated in an attempt to deal with both the virus and its economic consequences. In many countries, these interventions have been accompanied by the…

Municipalism in the age of COVID

Originally published on 26/06/2020 in Roar Magazine. In 2016, the political scientist and now Barcelona deputy mayor, Joan Subirats, published a book called ‘The power of proximity’ on the virtues of municipal politics. The title summed up the basic premise of municipalism: that the local scale allows opportunities for physical togetherness that have a unique…