Seminar (TURBA Lab): "The organizational structure of municipalism"

The organizational structure of municipalism. Barcelona en Comú’s movement-party and the challenges towards an alternative urban agenda.

 

by Viviana Asara, University of Ferrara

 

In recent years, municipalist practice has proliferated, and correspondingly research on “radical” or “new” municipalism (Roth et al 2023; Veal et al 2023; Thompson 2021) has blossomed. Studies on municipalism have focused on factors accounting for the choice of urban movements to embrace municipalism as a strategic and political positioning of their electoral platforms (Milan 2023; Dolenec et al 2017; Milan & Dolenec 2023; Blanco et al 2020), on commonification of the public (Bianchi, 2023; Bianchi et al 2022; Russell et al 2023; Asara, 2019) and on the processes and limits of state transformation (Joubert 2022; Bua & Davis 2023), on care and feminisation of politics (Kussy et al 2023; Dean & Maiguashca, 2018), on municipalism’s potential for urban sustainability transitions (Sareen & Lund Waagsaether 2023) and on their limits and weaknesses in consolidating an alternative urban regime (Béal et al 2023; Bua and Davies, 2023; Blanco et al 2020). Combining municipalism literature with political party studies, I aim to contribute to this literature through the lens of political organisation, a topic that has been marginalised in these discussions. Following literature on movement-parties since Herbert Kitschelt´s seminal work, this type of party is held to be characterised by a grassroots but stratarchical and thin organizational structure which, once the party enters the governmental level and undergoes the process of institutionalization, will surrender itself to the electoral-professional model of party, and lose its original participatory characteristics. This presentation aims to provide a preliminary overview of my ongoing research on the case study of Barcelona en Comú’s (BeC). Building on preliminary findings collected through fieldwork undertaken during the first legislature in 2016 and 2019, when 60 in-depth interviews were conducted with party members, social movement activists and representatives of civil society organisations, I now aim to conduct the last piece of fieldwork focusing on its second legislature. My original research questions involved what the hybrid identity of movement-party involves and how it is negotiated, how the process of institutionalization unfolds, and how BeC manages its participatory-democratic structure in governing the city.  In a more general, wider perspective, my research also aims to reflect on what are some of the main obstacles and challenges that hinder the implementation of an alternative social-ecological urban agenda and transformation of the economy and the state.

 

Time and place: Room C0.6, Building C (Hub R&I), UOC. From 11:00 AM to 12:30 PM

To register: Confirm attendance to hmarch@uoc.edu.