About the Project

Municipalist Neighbourhood Experiements (MUNEX) is a JPI Urban-Europe research project coordinated by the University of Amsterdam to study bottom-up capacity building across different municipalist contexts in Europe. The project involves the University of Vienna and the Institut de Recerca Urbana de Barcelona as research institutes and some more 7 project partners outside academia.

How to address growing inequality, cynicism, distrust, and alienation? A growing municipalist movement argues that we should look for answers at the local level. Municipalism seeks to reinvent and reinvigorate local urban democracy by pushing back against overbearing bureaucracies and overpowering market forces. While the commitment to municipalism is strong and the momentum palpable, a key question is whether and how municipalist initiatives – from digital democracy platforms to public-communitarian partnerships – work in practice. To answer this question, the MUNEX project examines municipalist policy experiments in neighborhoods in three cities: Amsterdam, Barcelona, and Vienna.