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The Politics of Democratic Municipalism
by Murray Bookchin
From Urbanization to Cities is a sweeping history of the city, not as a destination for capitalist exchange and individual gratification but as a locus for directly democratic politics.
Just as ecosystems rely on participation and mutualism, so must cities—and their citizens—rediscover these qualities, establishing harmonious and ethical social relations. Democratic municipalism is an emancipatory philosophy of self-determination, where politics becomes an everyday act in which ordinary people and local communities take the power of decision making into their own hands. From the Paris Commune to the Kurdish-led revolution in northeast Syria, democratic municipalism is a tool for wresting power from the nation-state, allowing capitalist urbanization to give way to humanly scaled, ecological, and egalitarian societies.
"Bookchin gives us a useful history and a call for action." —New York Times
"This carefully reworked edition introduces a new generation of readers to Murray Bookchin's historically informed case for reclaiming cities as the front-line of participatory democracy and ecological renewal. Never has that case been more powerfully argued, or more pertinent to the challenges of our time." —David Wengrow, co-author, with David Graeber, of The Dawn of Everything
This information about From Urbanization to Cities was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Murray Bookchin (1929–2006) was an active voice in ecology, anarchist, and communalist movements for more than fifty years. His groundbreaking essay, "Ecology and Revolutionary Thought" (1964), was one of the first to assert that capitalism's grow-or-die ethos was on a dangerous collision course with the natural world that would include the devastation of the planet by global warming. Bookchin is the author of The Ecology of Freedom, among two dozen other books.
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