supposed to be maintained without appropriate means to carry out such tasks. Whereas federal states or the central state can cut expenditures without immediate effects, this does not work at the local level, where the reduction of collective social infrastructures is felt by broad sections of society. The growing contradiction between entrepreneurial city management on the one hand and austerity urbanism on the other emphasizes the spatially uneven development of capitalism. In local spaces, growing inequality is apparent. The gap between rich and poor does not have to be illustrated via the detour of statistics and numbers, but manifests in the built and daily experienced environment – feelings of dispossession and exclusion emerge more directly. But grievance alone cannot mobilize bodies and minds on a long-term basis. Every political and social movement has to spur people’s imagination of a better future. Therefore, it is a question of what kind of (plausible) imaginary can be put forward – whether it grasps the fears and desires of people.
in the de-construction of centralized, authoritarian nation states, opening up room for maneuver. The city and local space overflow and subvert the undercomplex and overdetermined concept of nation states in everyday informal practices. This might find institutional expression in municipalist projects. The feminization of politics, urban citizenship, neighborhood-based organizing, squats and social centers stretch and redefine the boundaries of the political. However, the local state is still a constitutive element of the capitalist state and with more resistant self-organizing in and around institutions, opposing forces at other scales with considerable legal and financial resources grow as well. Instead of euphorical outbursts, we should thus analyze what is happening in, among and in-between the municipalist projects of today, supporting the emancipatory potentials, but not fool ourselves about the current relationship of forces to be confronted on national, European and global scales.
A narration that works In the multiple crisis of neoliberalism and its political forms, making the city a nodal point of mobilization and hope is exercised as a strategy of many different actors all over the globe. The new municipalisms function as a narration that binds together different disruptive bits. And the fact that this works is not arbitrary. Forms and contents of struggles are linked to rifts in political, economic and social constellations. The kinds of outcome the crisis of neoliberalism and its ‘management’ were producing are reflected in the practices of resistance. An aggravating crisis of social reproduction, of representative democracy and a crisis of border regimes figured as central issues around which movements of the past years rallied – housing, borders, systematic and enlarging exclusion, social rights etc. The immediacy of the everyday, the concrete local space and local state apparatuses became central points of reference, and a locus of contestation. This local “instituting on the threshold” (Salvini 2016) or its strategic targeting are frequently overlooked or too quickly subsumed under the path of institutionalization as taken by e.g. Syriza and Podemos – its specificity and translocal character is then however not accounted for. The potential, which might prevent the melancholic perception that nothing can be changed anyways, lies
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