Metropolitics

An Interview with Marc Serra Solé: Barcelona's Citizens Forge Solidarities Through the State

Celina Su — 2026-04-07T05:00:00Z

How might progressive city administrations build the power they need for real policy wins? Celina Su gives us a preview of her book Budget Justice: On Building Grassroots Politics and Solidarities, where she interviews Marc Serra Solé, of Barcelona en Comú, about their experiment with “new municipalism,” the centrality of participatory democracy in shaping and forwarding their robust affordability agenda, what happened when they shifted from building a social movement to governing inside City

- Interviews

CALL FOR PAPERS | Governing Repair: The Role of Cities and States in Reparations Policy

2026-03-24T06:00:00Z

The Editorial Board is issuing a call for papers for a forthcoming special series in Metropolitics titled “Governing Repair: The Role of Cities and States in Reparations Policy” and edited by Prentiss A. Dantzler, Rashad Williams, and Akira Drake Rodriguez. We welcome abstract submissions through June 1, 2026.
It's been over a decade since Ta‑Nehisi Coates published “The Case for Reparations” in The Atlantic. In his article, Coates (2014) vividly recounts the harsh realities of housing

- Infos/Contact / Focus, call for papers

The Cities We're Losing—The Cities We Need

Ahmed Allahwala — 2026-03-17T06:00:00Z

Although there is no shortage of work on gentrification, it rarely takes as its object of inquiry those “ordinary” places—diners, corner stores—that are lost. Yet, in The Cities We Need, Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani shows the importance of understanding how their loss impacts not only how we understand neighborhoods, but how we understand ourselves.
The Cities We Need explores what we lose when the spaces that anchor life in urban communities disappear. In this beautiful book, visual artist and

- Reviews / gentrification, nostalgia, place, placemaking, displacement, Brooklyn, New York, Oakland, everyday spaces

What Is Worth Asking About Our Cities?

Naomi Adiv & Anant Maringanti & Harikrishnan Sasikumar — 2026-03-03T06:00:00Z

What is the state of urban theory from the Global South and how can local research simultaneously advance scholarly research and be a vehicle for advocacy? Dr. Naomi Adiv and Dr. Hari Sasikumar explore these questions in their conversation with Anant Maringanti.
A central guiding idea of our work at Metropolitics is to share the knowledge, concepts and practices that academic and activist scholars generate in contemporary cities. In addition to making scholarship public, the journal is

- Interviews / Global South, India, urbanism, Southern urbanism, Hyderabad

A Masterpiece in Peril: The Garden Suburb of La Butte-Rouge

Renaud Epstein & translated by Oliver Waine — 2026-02-24T06:00:00Z

La Butte-Rouge, built in the mid-20th century in Paris's southern suburbs, is the archetypal example of a French cité-jardin. In a recent work retracing its history, Élise Guillerm highlights the urban and architectural qualities of this eco-neighborhood before its time, whose very existence is now threatened by an urban renewal project.
Analysis of urban policies, and particularly urban renewal policies, dispels the idea that historical knowledge can prevent the repetition of past mistakes.

- Reviews / urban planning, cité-jardin, HLM, urban heritage, heritage, Châtenay-Malabry, Hauts-de-Seine, Île-de-France, social housing, sustainable development, garden city, garden suburb, France, Paris region, Paris, history, urban history, environment, urban renewal, landscape

Useful Transgressions: Informality, Power, and Urban Life in Ciudad del Este, Paraguay

Ryan Thomas Devlin — 2026-02-17T06:00:00Z

Urban informality has been theorized as a process operating at the edges and margins under capitalist urbanization. Yet Outlaw Capital argues that the gray spaces of informality are essential to the vitality of cities, leveraged for different ends by elites and the poor alike.
On the Paraguay side of the Paraná River in Ciudad del Este, smugglers load up small boats with things like electronics and cigarettes bound for the opposite shore and eventually for consumers in Brazil, bypassing

- Reviews / informality, Latin America, South America, Global South, Paraguay, Ciudad del Este, neoliberalism, capitalism, urbanism, urbanization, gray spaces, informal urbanism, urban governance

The Making of City Digital Twins: The Case of Dassault Systèmes

Oskar Steiner — 2026-02-03T06:00:00Z

With their origins in manufacturing and heavy industry, “digital twins” are increasingly being applied to urban planning and governance. As Oskar Steiner demonstrates, while the private firms that develop these tools often market them as a way to “let the city speak,” in practice they mostly serve as a vehicle to amplify and legitimize those companies' own voices.
As cities rush to brand themselves as “smart,” city digital twins have emerged as the latest techno-utopian promise: a live,

- From the Field / technology, smart city, digital city, digital economy, platformization

Agrarian Fantasy, Settler Colonial Property, and the Making of Industrial Johannesburg

Renugan Raidoo — 2026-01-20T06:00:00Z

Some of the gated estates in and around Johannesburg and Pretoria sell residents a settler colonial fantasy of a bucolic idyll away from the urban condition. But Renugan Raidoo examines the important role agricultural surplus played in mining industrialization, which tells a much more complex story of urban–rural relations.
---- Series: Provincializing the “Real-Estate Turn” “A piece of the past has found its' [sic] way to the future” in all-white majuscule is the first thing one sees on the

- Essays / Africa, South Africa, Global South, Johannesburg, Pretoria, gated communities, rural, colonial urban planning, agriculture, industry, history, apartheid, real-estate turn, real estate

Post-Covid Mobilities: A Greener World for Tomorrow?

2026-01-13T06:00:00Z

Against the backdrop of the growing climate emergency, Covid-19 radically altered the way mobility is organized. But have the adaptations observed during the pandemic proved to be sustainable? In this series of articles, Metropolitics and the Mobile Lives Forum have joined forces to investigate our changing mobility habits.
---- ▼ Jump to the list of articles in this series ▼ Over the past 20 years, public policies have set ambitious targets to reduce carbon emissions related to mobility,

- Series / Covid-19, public policy, mobility, practices, ecological transition, climate change, lifestyles

On the Land Question in India: The Case of Sriperumbudur Industrial Region in Peri-Urban Chennai

V. Gajendran — 2025-12-23T06:00:00Z

Amidst intense demand for land, farmers near Chennai, India face dispossession by neglect.
---- Series: Provincializing the “Real-Estate Turn” My essay begins with a puzzle. The past two decades have been called the decades of intense land conflicts in India. There has been an outpouring of media and academic scholarship on agrarian landowners resisting and protesting the acquisition of their land for urban and infrastructure projects. In this context of land dispossession and opposition to

- Essays / India, Global South, land, land use, agriculture, farming, real estate, real-estate turn, periurban, Chennai