THE RISE OF THE FEARLESS CITIES NETWORK Using local governance to tackle global issues and the

development of ‘Fearless City’ Amsterdam

fearless city amsterdam

Photo: BNNVARA (2017), edit: Author (2019)

Author: Suzan de Jong Master Thesis Student ID: 10574727 Master: Political Science Supervisor: Dr. A. Afsahi Second Reader: Dr. L. W. Fransen

Date: 21-06-2019 1

2 Table of Contents

1. Introduction 4

2. Theoretical Framework 6

2.1 The Fearless Cities network 6

2.2 Radical Urban Theories 7

2.2.1 Introduction 7

2.2.2 Bookchin’s (1991) ‘Libertarian Municipalism 7

2.2.3 Lefebvre’s (1968) ‘Right to the City’ 8

2.2.4 Harvey’s (2012) ‘Rebel Cities’ 10

2.2.5 Barber’s (2013) ‘If Mayors Ruled the World’ 11

2.3 Beyond theories: going into existing city networks 12

2.3.1 Studies of city governance and networks 12

2.3.2 The C40 network 13

2.3.3 The Sanctuary Cities network 14

3. Methodology 16

3.1 Research strategy 16

3.2 Research methods and data collection 16

3.3 Limitations 17

4. Analyzing the Fearless Cities Movement 18

4.1 The Fearless Cities Network: A network of cities or of organizations 18

4.2 Unraveling the Fearless Cities ideology 20

4.2.1 A ‘new’ municipalist ideology 20

4.2.2 Altering the way we do and think of politics 20

4.3: So: how new is the ‘new’ municipalist movement? 23

5. Amsterdam, a Fearless City? 25

5.1 Introduction 25

5.2 Contextual challenges 25

5.3 Application of the Fearless Cities ideology in Amsterdam 26

5.4 What does this entail for the meaning of Fearless Cities? 29

6. Discussion and conclusions 30

6.1 Discussion 30

6.2 Conclusions 33

7. Literature 34

3 Chapter 1: Introduction

City governance is all the rage right now. The idea that national and supranational governments have failed us and that our democracy is in jeopardy is gaining ground both in the media and in public discourse.

The answer to this is increasingly searched and found in our municipalities, our local councils, and our neighborhoods. Bringing politics back to the local level is beginning to be viewed as the secret formula against all of the challenges we currently face. Just take these news articles’ headings as an example: ‘Don’t look to national politics for hope: you’ll find it thriving in local councils’ (Harris, 2019), ‘Why cities are on the front lines of the climate change fight’ (Roberts et al., 2018), ‘Tackling global problems? Look to cities, not countries’ (Muggah, 2017), and the list goes on. So what is it about cities that people now look at them to tackle global issues? Why do they sprout so much hope?

While the world is struggling to cope with challenges such as climate change, inequality, the rise of populism, and migration, cities are increasingly taking matters into their own hands. They do so by connecting and creating networks, thereby increasing their relative power vis-a-vis other levels of governance (Muggah, 2017). Think of examples such as the famous C40 network that consists out of cities battling climate change (C40, 2019), the U20 network that enhances the role of cities in the G20 agenda

(Urban20, 2019), and the sanctuary city network that is composed of cities that welcome refugees and thereby disobey national policies (Kopan, 2018). Although these networks all focus on specific issues, there is another network of which its main purpose seems to be the reconfiguration of the democratic system as a whole by further empowering cities to take on such issues: the Fearless Cities network.

The Fearless Cities network was born during its first summit in June 2017, when more than 700 participants from all over the world came together in Barcelona to discuss bottom-up city politics. This event had a broad resonance and the Fearless City network quickly grew in scope and popularity after (Russell,

2019a). The network beliefs that the municipality is the most suitable level to improve democracy since it’s closest to the people and thereby more easily facilitates aspects such as political participation, transparency, and accountability. It allows a quicker and more active way of doing politics than the national level and can therefore provide an escape from the political deadlock that national governments too often find themselves in (Bookchin & Colau, 2019). While Barcelona is the absolute frontrunner, many other cities have followed its example, such as Naples, Bologna, Grenoble, and New York (Russell, 2019a; Ultratel, 2017).

Although the network is growing rapidly and being ‘fearless’ is becoming a popular buzzword in the

4 world of urban movements and politics, a clear understanding of the Fearless Cities network is still up for grabs (Russell, 2019b; Balkind, 2016). There is only little understanding about the drivers of cities to join the

Fearless Cities network. This also counts for Amsterdam. In its new coalition agreement, Amsterdam states that it will join the Fearless Cities network and organize a Fearless Cities summit in 2020. It even aims to become the frontrunner in the terrain of Fearless Cities (Coalitieakkoord Amsterdam, 2018; Gemeente

Amsterdam, 2019a). This coalition agreement has sparked many critical reactions from more right-wing politicians. Also the Dutch prime minister Rutte has acclaimed to be unhappy with this leftist direction

(Milikowski, 2018). Although the execution of these plans will result in profound changes to Amsterdam’s socio-political system, no academic research has been carried out to understand how the ideology of Fearless

Cities could be positioned in Amsterdam and what its effects would be.

This research aims to create a better understanding of the ideology of the Fearless Cities network and of how the Fearless Cities network can be related to or distinguished from other series of local governance pushes and existing theories about urban politics. Moreover, this research will explore how the concept of

Fearless Cities is applied in Amsterdam. Amsterdam serves as an interesting case to study this, since it has different socio-economic characteristics than the movements ‘mothership’ Barcelona, which makes it interesting to discover whether the Fearless Cities ideology is context specific or if it has the potential to be applied to a diverse array of contexts worldwide. The research will be centered around the following research question:

“What is new about the Fearless Cities network and to what extent is it’s ideology applicable to the

socio-economic context of Amsterdam?”

This thesis will begin with providing theoretical background and discussing urban theories and city networks that are closely aligned to the Fearless Cities network. This will be followed by the methodological section, where the research strategy and the research methods will be explained. The following chapter will go into an analysis of the ideology and structure of the Fearless Cities network, in order to understand how it can be differentiated from previous networks. Subsequently, the way in which the ideology is applied in Amsterdam will be analyzed, which serves to explore whether Amsterdam can become a Fearless City. The thesis will be finished with a discussion and conclusion.

5 Chapter 2: Theoretical Framework

2.1 The Fearless Cities network

The Fearless Cities network was born in Barcelona. The pushing force behind the creation of the network was the political party ‘Barcelona en Comú’ (BComú), which is a social movement and citizen platform that came to office in 2015 and catapulted Barcelona’s current mayor: Ada Colau (Russell, 2019;

Burgen, 2016). With BComú as its flagship, the network embraces the political structure that the platform has developed in Barcelona and aims to draw parallels in cities elsewhere. In order to understand the Fearless

Cities network, it is therefore crucial to understand the origins and ideology of BComú as well (Russell,

2019).

BComú was born out of a coalition of already established local leftist parties and the 15-M movement. It was created in 2014, and already won the 2015 municipal elections as the biggest political party. The party is constructed as a citizen platform, which entails that they avoid the traditional political party structure and allow every individual to participate in politics. It’s a philosophy of cooperation based on shared priorities and concrete goals, instead of getting trapped in the endless discussions between different political parties. BComú beliefs that a citizen platform should not be led by a political party, but instead should be developed from the social reality of the city and be led by its citizens. It argues that there can only be one citizen platform within a city and stresses the importance of an equal gender balance (Bieckmann,

2017). From the moment that BComú took office, it has sought connections with municipalist organizations from all over the world in order to exchange experiences and best practices. These organizations increasingly started to work together, which resulted in the creation of the Fearless Cities network (Bookchin & Colau,

2019).

Being born from the political force BComú, the Fearless Cities network could be understood as a movement that aims to radically transform the way we do politics and perceive democracy by decentralizing power, stimulating citizens’ participation, and making politics more pragmatic and action-based. The movement uses three concepts to define itself: decentralized, diverse, and pragmatic. Although it is often referred to with terms such as Rebel Cities, Cities of Change, democratic confederalism, and communalism, it self-identifies as a municipalist movement (Bookchin & Colau, 2019). Municipalism can therefore be understood as the most important theoretical building block of the movement’s ideology and is one of the ideologies that will be further elaborated upon in the next chapter.

6 2.2 Radical urban theories

2.2.1 Introduction

The Fearless Cities network promotes itself as the ‘new’ municipalist movement. This indicates that the idea of municipalism is nothing new. Almost three decades ago, Bookchin (1991) already wrote about

‘libertarian municipalism’ and laid the foundations for municipal thinking. However, the current municipalist movement cannot be referred to as a ‘Bookchin-ist’ movement (Russell, 2019). Neither can it be referred to as a ‘Harvey-ist’ movement, whose theory about ‘rebel cities’ placed cities at the center of capital and class struggles (Harvey, 2012; Russell, 2019). While the movement is clearly inspired by these and other urban politics theories, their initiatives cannot be fully explained by existing political theories. Their practice seems to be running ahead of theory (Russell, 2019). In order to create the best possible understanding of this movement, this section discusses the more radical urban political theories in order to position it within existing theories. The following theories are therefore discussed: Bookchin’s (1991) ‘Libertarian

Municipalism, Lefebvre’s (1968) ‘Right to the City’, Harvey’s (2012) ‘Rebel Cities’, and Barber’s (2013) ‘If

Mayors Ruled the World’. These four theories have been chosen because they have been directly linked to the ideology of the Fearless City Network and the scope of the research doesn’t allow a discussion of all available theories (Russell, 2019; Fearless Cities 2018; Caccia, 2019).

2.2.2 Bookchin’s (1991) ‘Libertarian Municipalism’

In his theory of ‘Libertarian Municipalism’, Bookchin (1991) argues in favor of the municipality as the basic unit of political life and the gateway to maximize democracy. He believes that a radical change in our political system is necessary, as he claims that the current affairs of state politics and party mechanisms are antithetical to participatory democracy. He argues that today, politics is mostly about the battle between top-down bureaucratic parties for electoral office. Once these parties are in office, their programs and promises often change into ‘compromises’. This has created a certain indifference towards politics amongst the Euro-American public, because their votes usually turn into disappointments. Therefore, Bookchin argues that politics has become a structure of techniques for holding power in office, not a ‘moral calling based on rationality, community, and freedom’ (Bookchin, 1991: 3).

Bookchin’s theory aims to bring politics back to the public sphere and thereby goes against the power of the state. He distinguishes between statecraft and politics as it once was in pre-capitalist democratic societies and now. He believes that without communities there can be no politics, and that to include communities in politics we have to begin at smallest level of politics, namely the neighborhoods, villages,

7 and cities. In order to bring politics back to the public realm he proposes neighborhood assemblies.

Assemblies can decentralize politics into humanly scaled communities. This can create a form of popular power which can can expand locally and develop over wider regions. Through the assembly system, political decision making can be shared with the population at large and depend on the rule of majority. In his ideal political system, policy-making would happen within these assemblies and there would be a confederal network of delegates with strict administrative functions. These delegates would be elected from the assemblies. Together, the delegates would interlink the different neighborhoods and cities into networks. In this way, power would flow from the bottom up. The delegates would always be mandated and recallable by the assemblies. Besides decentralizing the political system, these assemblies would also strengthen the social relationships within communities, create dialogue and solidarity. Instead of solely voting, it will enable citizens to be politically meaningful and to carry a sense of public responsibility.

Bookchin also elaborated upon a municipalist approach towards economics. He proposed a municipalization of property, which would place land and enterprises in the custody of the community. This would ensure that the economy is guided by the needs of the community rather than by personal interests.

This would result in communal and therefore fairer forms of distribution. Moreover, he stressed the idea of the ecological society, which would take better care of the ecological stability of the planet. He believed that environmental problems find their roots in social problems and in the capitalist system, which he referred to as social ecology. Alternative institutions of political power could alter these social problems and thereby improve our ecological stability (Bookchin, 1991; Bookchin, 2015).

Libertarian municipalism could be viewed as the first municipalist proposal to democratize city governments, to root politics into popular neighborhood assemblies, and to provide an alternative to the centralized nation-state and to an economy based on profit. As has already been discussed, the Fearless Cities network considers themselves as a municipalist movement. Murray Bookchin’s daughter, Debbie Bookchin, is involved in the movement and hereby aims to further the political trajectory that her father created. She believes that municipalism is not just one way, but the only way to bring about social change and to successfully transform society (Bookchin, 2019).

2.2.3 Lefebvre’s (1968) ‘Right to the City’

The Fearless Cities network also finds theoretical grounding in Lefebvre’s (1968) ’The Right to the

City’ manifesto (Fearless Cities, 2018). With this manifesto, Lefebvre presented a radical vision of the city in which the management of urban spaces is controlled by its users, instead of by capitalism and the state. He

8 calls for a restructuring of the social, political, and economic relations in the city. He perceives the right to the city as the right to reinvent cities by those who live in it. This right thus belongs to all city inhabitants and therefore also incorporates those who are usually excluded from more formal forms of membership, such as undocumented migrants. The municipalist platforms that are creating Fearless Cities are reclaiming this right to the city, as they aim to increase the power of city inhabitants over cities’ physical and political spaces

(Turhan & Armiero, 2019).

In Lefebvre’s understanding of the right to the city, two principal rights can be distinguished: the right to appropriation and the right to participation. Since city inhabitants have the normative right to use urban spaces, they also have the right to appropriate urban spaces, which means they should be entitled to physically access, occupy, and use urban spaces. This idea directly challenges capitalist notions of property rights and goes against the idea that urban space is a commodity that can be valorized by capitalism. It prioritizes the use value of space for urban residents over the exchange value of space for capitalist firms and thereby alters conceptions over who owns the city. The right to participation entails that city inhabitants should play a central and direct role in the decision making processes about the production of space in the city. This right opens up participation in decision-making beyond the state and makes city inhabitants more important advocates in urban politics. Thereby, they can become mobilized and empowered to increasingly manage their urban spaces (Lefebvre, 1996; Purcell, 2013).

Lefebvre’s right to the city can be viewed as a resistance against the capitalist structure. However,

Purcell (2002) argues that it remains questionable whether the right to the city will challenge capitalism.

Since city inhabitants have different identities and interests and they all have a right to the city, they can use this right to challenge structures other than capitalism, such as heteronormativity or racism. He therefore argues that we should remain skeptical of what the outcome of claiming the right to the city would be, as it remains unclear how inhabitants will use this right, a problem also recognized by Harvey (2012). It could possibly provide us with a more inclusive democracy, but it might also result in new types of political domination by certain groups (Purcell, 2002). Yet, as the case of the Fearless Cities shows, the reclamation of the right to the city can result in the political domination of a citizen platform, which is open to the participation of all citizens. It could be argued that the Fearless Cities network reclaims the right to the city in the way that Lefebvre had envisioned it. They challenge the power of capitalist structures to shape the city and mostly reclaim the right to participation, by opening up local politics to all city inhabitants and empowering them to manage urban spaces. The Fearless City network operates through the reclamation of the right to the city and through the pursuance of the re-establishment of this right for all city inhabitants.

9 2.2.4 Harvey’s (2012) ‘Rebel Cities’

The Fearless Cities movement is known by many names and ‘Rebel Cities’ is one of them (Bookchin

& Colau, 2019). Although it seems like these names are used interchangeably, the concept of Rebel Cities is rooted in a radical urban theory written by Harvey (2012). Whilst the ideology of the Fearless Cities movement seems similar to that of the Rebel Cities, they should not be considered as one and the same. In

Rebel Cities, Harvey mostly focuses on the intersections between the city and capitalism. He provides a rework of Lefebvre’s right to the city and argues that this theory has revived in the last decade. This is visible in the ongoing struggles driven by social movements over who has the power to shape the urban spaces. It is also visible in the increasing popularity of innovative democratic systems such as ‘participatory budgeting’.

These tendencies make evident that in diverse ways, people are seeking a response to the power of the capitalist system to shape their cities.

To claim the right to the city means that the city should be reclaimed from the power of capitalism.

Harvey elaborates on the ways in which capital accumulation shapes urbanization processes and discusses the therefore ‘inherent’ potential of the city to challenge the dominant political and economic model. His conception of a ‘Rebel City’ is a city that has been reclaimed for anti-capitalist struggles. However, he acknowledges that he thus far fails to provide a clear understanding of how a city might be organized as such. He states: ‘How, then, does one organize a city? The honest answer is … we simply do not know’ (Harvey, 2012: p140). The lack of real life examples of rebel cities makes it impossible to study any existing political practice. In order to tackle this issue, he uses different examples of urban political practices in revolutionary situations, such as that of El Alto in Bolivia and of the Soviet Union in the 1920s. From these examples of emerging radicalism, he shows how alternative visions of democracy have been produced and argues that it is possible to organize a political city out of the disabling processes of capitalist urbanization. However, it remains ambiguous how this should be established (Poulton, 2012).

In his book, Harvey also discusses the municipalist proposal of Bookchin (1991). He is skeptical about the maximization of localism and argues that decentralization and local autonomy are a vehicle for furthering inequality through neoliberalization. As municipalism will increase local autonomy, the quality of services will be highly dependent on the available financial resources in the local administrative districts.

Without a centralized, national body to equally distribute these financial resources, there is a strong likelihood that differences in the quality of service provision between districts will increase. He does acknowledge that Bookchin is aware of this problem and that he provided an answer to it in the form of a confederal network (Harvey, 2012: p84). However, Harvey upholds a critical perspective, because the

10 confederal delegates will not have any policy-making power and therefore will not be able to guarantee a fair redistribution of wealth between municipalities. To Harvey, cities are the suitable level to begin the anti- capitalist struggle, but not the suitable level to eventually organize and structure society (Harvey, 2012).

Although there are many similarities between the Fearless Cities and the idea of Rebel Cities and both view cities as the best scale level to challenge the current political and economic systems, there are thus also stark differences.

2.2.5 Barber’s (2013) ’If Mayors Ruled the World’

Through the creation of strong local networks and local forms of power, the Fearless Cities movement is challenging the current sovereignty of nation-states and the dominant system of national politics. The movement believes the city to be more democratic than the national scale level (Bookchin &

Colau, 2019). Another academic that celebrated the city as more democratic than other scales is Barber

(2013) in his book ‘If Mayors Ruled the World’. Many of Barber’s perspectives align with the Fearless Cities movement. Barber also states that our democracy is in a deep crisis and that it is threatened by the rise of the far right. He proposes cities as the only solution to save democracy. Cities were the breeding place for democracy and define both our history and current lives. More than half of the world population is living in cities. Although the past millennia politics was shifted to the invented nation-states, these are now failing us on the global scale. The resistance of states to cooperate across borders and the difficulties that are met when addressing problems of an interdependent world by independent nation-states provides the biggest political challenge of today. He argues that we are in need of more global democratic bodies that can uptake this challenge of global governance and believes that cities should do so and are already doing so. Cities are networked in a diverse array of global webs such as of culture, economics, and communication. They are proving that they can successfully cooperate and together combat global issues such as global warming. In many aspects, they are already governing informally based on voluntary cooperation. In Barber’s (2013) eyes, we should increasingly allow these city networks to also govern more formally.

Barber (2013) argues that the challenge of contemporary democracy is to unite local forms of participation with central forms of power. Allowing cities to govern globally would create a certain

‘glocality’: a combination of local participation and global cooperation. This could increase the potential of global politics to be pragmatic, innovative, and solution-based and provide liberation from the political deadlock of nation-states. If power would be redirected from the nation-states towards cities, political dimensions such as bottom-up citizenship and civil society would receive emphasis. On the more global

11 level, cities could share best practices together. He proposed the creation of a global parliament of mayors, which is currently in existence (Global Parliament of Mayors, 2019). This parliament should discover solutions to common problems together without the interference of nation-states (Barber, 2013).

Although Barber’s (2013) greater idea of letting mayors run the world seems utopian, his proposal to create a global parliament of mayors is not a grandiose scheme. Rather, it is an institutional expression of all the informal global city networks that are already in place intensifies their collective voice. Barber’s (2013) work could be criticized for overstating and simplifying the failure of nation states. Moreover, his view on the potential of cities has been criticized for being too idealistic (Aust, 2015). Others have engaged in more pessimistic views on global city cooperation such as that of the C40, by arguing that these activities are a matter of city marketing and are less altruistic then they appear to be (Trisolini & Zasloff, 2008). In order to provide more nuance, the next section will elaborate on studies of more concrete examples of local governance and urban politics.

2.3 Beyond theories: going into existing city networks

2.3.1 Studies of city governance and networks

The Fearless Cities movement is only one of many existing city networks and experiments of local governance. Many scholars have researched the possibilities of city governance and have questioned the legitimacy of the nation state as the ultimate site for political power and decision making in relation to the city (Mugah & Foster, 2018; Oomen & Baumgärtel, 2018; Acuto, 2013; Sassen, 2001 etc.). Mugah and

Foster (2018) argue that although urbanization has shifted the social and economic power from nation-states to cities, cities still lack real political power. We are living in the ‘century of the city’ (Pierce et al, 2009) and cities have become the most important sites of innovation, population clustering, and economic productivity, but not of politics. However, cities are successfully challenging some of today’s global threats. Numerous examples display how cities are bypassing national policies and are finding local solutions for national or global problems, such as by responding to climate change and improving environmental sustainability (Leck

& Simon, 2018; Schwartz, 2016; Leck & Roberts, 2015; Bulkeley & Betsill, 2003 etc.), by providing sanctuary to undocumented migrants (Bauder & Gonzalez, 2018; Bauder, 2017; Daamen & Doomernik,

2015; Van der Leun, 2004 etc.), and by ensuring affordable and inclusive housing (Droste, 2015; Paten,

2015; Nanda & Parker, 2015 etc.).

Cities often do so by working within the structure of a city network, such as the Fearless Cities network (Mugah & Foster, 2018). Similar to the Barber’s (2013) perspective on the strength of city networks,

12 many other scholars have also investigated the different forms of city networks and their effects on political affairs (Gordon, 2013; Caponio, 2018; Acuto & Raynor, 2016; Taylor, 2005 etc.). City networks further institution-building processes on a global level and create new forms of city diplomacy. Although city networks are usually assumed to be global, fifty per cent of the networks solely operate on a national or a subnational level (Acuto & Raynor, 2016). This illuminates how much cities continue to be embedded within the sovereignty of their nation-states. It also has to be acknowledged that the existence of city networks is not a new phenomenon per se. About 17% per cent of all city networks were founded more than 60 years ago.

However, the current pace of the expansion of networks is unprecedented (Acuto & Raynor, 2016). What conditions have enabled this spectacular growth of city networks? Gordon (2013) has distinguished three conditions that have stimulated this expansion. He suggests that first, cities are more and more exposed to globalization forces. This increasingly places emphasis on their position within global networks and on the importance to remain competitive (Sassen, 2001). The creation of city networks can provide cities with a form of agency to cope with this increased interconnectedness and with the competitive forces of globalization. Second, he argues that the weak political position of cities within the jurisdiction of their nation-states functions as another driver for the creation of city networks. This creates incentives for cities to cooperate, both to increase their collective strength vis-à-vis national governments and to enhance their municipal governance efficiency. Third, the advances in communications and mobility technology has facilitated the ability of cities to communicate and to meet up and has thereby enabled the creation of tight global city networks (Gordon, 2013).

In order to increase the understanding of how city networks function and how they are finding local solutions to global problems, the remainder of this section will elaborate upon two examples of city networks with which cities are collectively addressing global issues. These are the C40 network and the Sanctuary City network. These networks have been chosen because their purposes and goals are akin to that of the Fearless

Cities network, and because they are both well-established and impactful.

2.3.2 The C40 network

When speaking of global issues, climate change is with no doubt one of the most pressing issues on the global governance agenda. Global climate governance has taken the form of international conventions, such as the World Climate Conference, which allow representatives of nation-states to come together and discuss future climate agreements. Although these agreements seem aspirational, they have been largely disregarded by the nation-states (Gordon, 2013; Black & Donaghy, 2010). It could therefore be claimed that

13 the international regime is failing in its efforts to combat climate change. This failure creates space for the emergence of new governance experiments, such as that of city networks (Gordon, 2013; Schwartz, 2016).

Cities have taken an increasingly important role in climate change governance. The ongoing urbanization makes cities both an important generator of climate change as well as a vulnerable victim to its effects

(Gordon, 2013; Lee & Jung, 2018). Driven by the need to find solutions, cities have increasingly scaled up their localized actions and cooperated as central agents in global climate governance (Bulkeley, 2010). They have done this through the creation of climate governance city-networks, like the C40.

The C40 network is composed out of 63 cities. It establishes interaction between cities to address climate change issues and to share best practices through biannual mayors’ summits (Gordon, 2013; Lee &

Koski, 2014). This creates homogenous coordination in terms of problem definition, agenda setting, and established environmental actions. This has resulted in a stronger commitment to environmental actions by cities (Lee & Koski, 2014). The actions cities have consequently taken resulted in what could be called their mantra: ‘countries talk while cities act’ (Gordon, 2013). The success of the actions undertaken by the C40 network is challenging the foundational norms of global governance, changing the notions of both who governs, and how to coordinate governance actions towards collective goals instead of running into the collective action problem that stalls inter-state efforts (Gordon, 2013).

Although many scholars on global climate city governance believe strongly in the potential of city networks to more effectively address the global climate change challenge (Gordon, 2013; Lee & Koski,

2014; Bulkeley 2010; etc.), Schwartz (2016) provides a more nuanced view. She challenges what she refers to as the ‘overly celebratory’ tone in local climate governance literature and argues that cities are not able to address global climate change by themselves (Schwartz, 2016: p. 2;3). Her study into the variation of municipal climate policy adoption in Canada demonstrated that there is much variation in climate change policy adopted by different cities, which she explains by differences in political economy considerations.

However, she argues that further studying of the limitations set by the political economy considerations could increase the effectiveness of city governments’ climate change policies (Schwartz, 2016).

2.3.3 The Sanctuary Cities network

Another global issue with local impacts that cities aim to combat is migration. National policies oftentimes produce unfair outcomes when it comes to migration. By denying documents to migrants they are creating ‘undocumented’ and thus ‘illegal’ migrants. Sometimes, these migrants are already living in cities for years and therefore governments are illegalizing people who are de-facto city-residents. Cities are

14 confronted with the harsh outcomes of such exclusionary policies on the local level and increasingly challenge these national policies. These cities are now working together in a network called ‘Sanctuary

Cities’ (Bauder, 2016; Lippert & Rehaag, 2013). They challenge the exclusionary national migration policies with inclusive local measures. Hereby, they are changing the common discourse of migration and are reconfiguring the city space as one that is inclusive and open (Bauder & Gonzalez, 2018). Sanctuary practices are highly diverse and context specific, but are mostly focused on the protection of undocumented migrants. The issuing of municipal identification cards in order to be able to document the undocumented migrants within the municipal boundaries is one of the concrete policy measures that derived from the movement (Bauder & Gonzalez, 2018; De Graauw, 2014).

It has been argued that Sanctuary Cities are part of the new municipalism, as they challenge the control of the national state over city affairs and enforce their own control and power over city policies

(Bauder & Gonzalez, 2018). Hereby, they challenge the federal monopoly over citizenship regulation and soften the effects of national policy. This points to a discrepancy between national and local policies (De

Graauw, 2014). Although cities are in a hierarchic relationship with the nation-state, they sometimes use the independence that decentralization gives them to interpret and disobey national policies and to set their own priorities (Gebhardt, 2016). Multiple studies have shown the diverse ways in which municipalities create their own local policies to incorporate undocumented migrants into their communities (Daamen &

Doomernik, 2014; Cantor, 2010; Singer et al., 2009). This points to a gap between national immigration policies and local implementation (Kos et al., 2016).

The Fearless Cities movement dedicates a chapter to the Sanctuary City network in their book and proposes that Fearless Cities should also be cities of sanctuary. According to Hansen et al. (2019), sanctuary cities provide another example of how municipalism can be used as a tool to challenge the rise of the far right and xenophobia. Municipalism allows the creation of a broader perspective on citizenship and perceives everyone residing inside a city’s boundaries as citizens. This suggests that the Fearless City network and its municipalist ideology can function as an overarching system under which different other movements and city networks, such as Sanctuary Cities, can be placed.

15 Chapter 3: Methodology

3.1 Research strategy

This research is a case study into the Fearless Cities network. In a case study, one object of interest is intensively examined with the purpose of providing rich and detailed data about it (Bryman, 2012). In this study, the Fearless Cities network functions as the object of interest. The unit of analysis within this case is

Amsterdam. This is the major entity within the Fearless City network that has been analyzed for this study.

In order to answer the research question, “What is new about the Fearless Cities network and to what extent is it’s ideology applicable to the socio-economic context of Amsterdam?” in-depth information is needed about the ideology and functioning of the Fearless Cities network and the way in which it is adopted in Amsterdam. In order to gather this information, qualitative methods have been utilized. Qualitative methods are able to provide in-depth information and to create a thorough understanding of a social setting

(Bryman, 2012). The methods that have been used for this study are the analysis of external data and semi- structured interviews. By combining different methods, the same issue is viewed from different angles. This is helpful to validate conclusions.

3.2 Research methods and data collection

The first research method that is utilized in this research is the analysis of external data. First, the book ‘Fearless Cities’ that was published by the Fearless City network itself is analyzed. This book is a guide to the global municipalist movement and describes their interpretation of municipalism (Bookchin & Colau,

2019). Second, recordings of the plenary sessions of the Barcelona Summit in 2017 are analyzed. In these sessions, activists speak about initiatives they undertook to stimulate municipalism in their cities. Hereby, more data about local initiatives can be gathered instead of by solely using the Fearless Cities book. Third, an open-access database that is created by the Fearless Cities network which includes all the members of the network is analyzed and used to create a map. Fourth, documents and articles published by the municipality of Amsterdam and the political party GroenLinks are analyzed in order to understand the application of the ideology in Amsterdam. These include the coalition agreement (Coalitieakkoord Amsterdam, 2018), the yearly report (Gemeente Amsterdam, 2019), and an essay on Amsterdam Fearless City (Groenlinks, 2018).

Fifth, two internally circulated documents are analyzed. These consist out of a letter written by Groot

Wassink to the city council in which he explains his vision on democratization and Fearless Cities (Groot

16 Wassink, 2019), and a document written by Bieckmann with a working plan describing his vision on steps that should be taken to make Amsterdam Fearless (Bieckmann, 2019).

The second research method of this research consists of semi-structured interviews. The interview questions vary per interviewee, since the different respondents covered different positions. The interviews are semi-structured, which entails that they provide a question guideline, but that the interviewer can respond to themes the interviewee brings up. This ensures that there is also room to discuss relevant issues that have not been foreseen whilst preparing the interview questions. The first interviewee was Bart Klaar, who runs the bottom-up organization ‘Faircity’ in Amsterdam. This interview focused mostly on his view on the approach of the municipality to make Amsterdam Fearless. The interview took one hour and was recorded and transcribed. The second interviewee was Femke Roosma, GroenLinks chairwoman in the municipal council, who provided insight into how the municipality is exactly executing this project. The interview lasted 45 minutes and was recorded and transcribed. Third, insights from a group discussion with the working group Democratization GroenLinks have been analyzed. Since I took part in this discussion I was not in the position to conduct an interview, however many interesting opinions on the topic of Fearless Cities were shared by the members of this working group. This gave insight into what members of GroenLinks who critically follow how the party is pursuing the Fearless Cities ideal think about this. The discussion took one hour. Notes were made directly after the discussion to ensure that no important information was lost. Fourth,

Savannah Koolen, chairwoman of GroenLinks Amsterdam, did not have time for an interview but granted me permission to use the insights she shared with me during an earlier two-hour conversation we had about

Fearless Cities in march 2019. During the interviews, the main ethical principles distinguished by Bryman

(2012) have been respected. Respondents have been informed about the purpose of the research, have been asked for permission to record and have been given the choice to remain private.

3.3 Limitations

The most important limitation for this research is the dependence on the willingness of people to respond and to be interviewed in order to gather data. There is only a small group of people available in

Amsterdam that are working with the concept of Fearless Cities. These are unfortunately mostly people with a busy schedule, such as aldermen. Despite multiple attempts to get in contact with all these people, only a few responded to my requests. Most of these responses were negative, because people did not have time for the interview. This has resulted in a smaller amount of interviews than what I had hoped for and therefore a less comprehensive dataset.

17 Chapter 4: Analyzing the Fearless Cities Movement

4.1 The Fearless Cities Network: A network of cities or of organizations?

Since its first summit in 2017, the Fearless Cities network has quickly spread worldwide. BComú has created an open-access database including information about all the members of the network (Fearless

Cities, 2019a). From this database it becomes apparent that, although the network portrays itself to be a network of municipalist city governments (Fearless Cities, 2019b), this is not the case. The network actually includes all forms of municipalist organizations. Involved organizations are therefore in government, in opposition, standing for election, or working fully outside of the formal political institutions. There are currently 88 organizations listed in the database, ranging from very small organizations with only a handful of members to installed city governments. Figure 1 shows all these organizations located on a map. The red markers indicate cities that have a municipalist government. These are thus cities where the municipalist ideology has established itself institutionally and that can be referred to as ‘Fearless Cities’. The blue markers indicate all the remaining organizations. The map shows that there is a relatively small share of cities that have a municipalist government, namely 26 percent. The map also portrays the uneven distribution of municipalist organizations across the globe. There is a high representation in Europe. Outside of Europe, the network is mostly growing in North and South America. In three cities in North America there are municipalist organizations in government: in Montreal, Vancouver, and Richmond. Also in the Middle East region municipalism is gaining ground and there is one city with a municipalist government, namely the city

Qamishli in Syria. In Europe, the concentration of municipalist organizations is relatively well spread across the continent, but clearly mostly concentrated in Spain and Italy.

These findings make it questionable whether it should be considered a city network. Structurally it is a different network than for example the C40 and the Sanctuary City network, which are both composed out of formal governmental representatives of cities. These are undoubtably city networks, in which each member of the network represents a city. In the case of the Fearless Cities network, it cannot be argued that small organizations working outside of formal institutions are able to represent a city as a whole. I would argue that the Fearless Cities network is a network of organizations with an overarching ideology of municipalism. The end goal might be to become a city network, when more and more city governments have installed municipalist organizations. However, as of now, the network is mostly about strengthening the support for the municipalist ideology by connecting organizations worldwide.

18 Source: Author (2019) Source:

Figure 1: Mapping the Fearless Cities network (Fearless Cities, 2019a) Cities, network Cities (Fearless 1: Mapping the Fearless Figure 19 4.2 Unraveling the Fearless Cities ideology

4.2.1 A ‘new’ municipalist ideology

There is no doubt that the Fearless Cities movement is on the rise. However, it remains rather vague what cities are adopting when they install a municipalist government. As Russell (2019) argues, the movement is still in the phase of theory building and develops mostly by learning from practice. This suggests that the movement is working with a trial-and-error method and that the practical implications of having a municipalist local council differ from case to case.

The Fearless Cities movement is first and foremost based on Bookchin’s (1991) municipalist ideology. However, his view is adjusted to the current time spirit which results in an interpretation that can be considered as ‘new’ municipalism (Russell, 2019). Three dimensions can be distinguished that are fundamental to this interpretation. The first is the focus on the local level and on concrete and immediate action. The importance of the local scale as the primary level of organization is inherent to the beliefs of municipalism. However, only focussing on the local level would result in the movement getting ‘trapped’ within this local perspective, as happened to most of the former municipalist movements (Russell, 2019;

Leopold & Mcdonald, 2012; Quilley, 2000). This could explain why the idea of municipalism has not taken off before, although it has been around for a long time. So how does the Fearless Cities movement escape from this trap? They use the local level as their entry point for organization, but further mobilize internationally. This comes forward in the second dimension: the internationalist commitment (Bookchin &

Colau, 2019). The Fearless Cities network strives for international cooperation of local municipalities.

Localities are stimulated to find solutions to global challenges together, which is realized with the creation of the global network. The third dimension is an alteration of the way we do and think of politics. Since this dimension is more extensive the next section will be dedicated to this.

4.2.2 Altering the way we do and think of politics

The Fearless Cities network uses many principles and theories to alter the dominant political system.

In this section only the principles that appeared to be most important to its ideology are discussed. This selection is based on the articles by Russell (2019), Russel & Reyes (2017), the Fearless Cities book

(Bookchin & Colau, 2019), and the first Fearless Cities summit (Fearless Cities, 2019b) and includes the four principles that were most extensively discussed in these sources.

The first principle is the feminization of politics. The movement questions the dominant patriarchal models of power and aims to put care work at the centre of organization and the political agenda (Bookchin

20 & Colau, 2019). Feminization of politics has traditionally not been a part of municipalism and this is therefore one of the ways in which the ideology of the Fearless Cities network differs from waves of municipalism. With the feminization of politics, the movement aims to achieve more equal gender representation in political positions. After looking at a random sample of 10 organizations that are linked to the network, I found that they all succeeded in having a female presence of 50% or higher. Besides this, feminization of politics also means fundamentally changing the character of politics itself and change notions about what counts as ‘political’ (Russell & Reyes, 2017). This includes a recognition of the importance of interpersonal and community needs and of caring and an equal division of responsibilities amongst men and women. Tools that the Fearless Cities network suggests to achieve this are for example equal speaking times during meetings and the creation of working places where children can also be present

(Pérez, 2019). It remains unclear how such tools can result in a fundamentally different political character.

Unfortunately there is also no evaluation available of how this feminization of politics is developing.

Furthermore, it could be argued that connecting the feminization of politics to a further emphasis on the importance of ‘caring’ and on interpersonal relationships in society is controversial. It reinforces the idea that certain traits are ‘feminine’, which itself a product of patriarchy (Roth & Shea Baird, 2017). However, it could also be argued that since traditional politics currently still prizes masculine traits, promoting traditional feminine traits is a necessary step that should be taken in order to ensure that women do no have to uptake a subordinate role within decision-making processes.

The second principle is the expansion of the commons. Commons could be described as local resources in which residents all share a common stake (Baley & Mattei, 2013; Ostrom, 1990). They are created as a response to the commodification of cities, whereby the exchange value of public resources in the capitalist market is prioritized over the use value for city residents. This results in a lack of control of city residents over local resources such as water and public space (Forné et al., 2019). By creating commons, these resources become collectively self-managed by residents in a democratic, non-profit way. Fresnillo

(2017) stresses the positive effect commons have on communities:

The Fearless Cities movement stimulates the creation of commons, as it provides an opportunity to play with different forms of governance and of public participation and community management. It also creates new

21 forms of interaction between the municipality and community initiatives (Forné et al., 2019). The creation of commons therefore seems to function as an important tool to activate public participation and to alter the way municipal administrations function alongside urban communities. This adoption of commons is new in the municipalist tradition and is therefore another way in which the movement differs from previous municipalist pushes. The usage of the commons also differs from previous movements that worked on commons, as these have usually been preoccupied either with promoting commons as a better way to manage resources (Ostrom, 1990; Hess, 2008, etc.), or as a way to challenge capitalism (Harvey, 2012). The Fearless

Cities network uses the construct of commons for both of these purposes, but mostly to activate public political participation and cooperation amongst communities and the municipality.

The third principle is remunicipalization, which brings back public services under municipal control.

In the last decades, many public services have fallen into the hands of private actors. Although this was supposed to create more efficiency and innovation, it is now largely argued that privatization has failed to meet its promises (Subirana et al., 2019; Farré, 2017; Becker et al., 2015). Municipalities often remunicipalize services for economic reasons, because it is cheaper to control the services themselves. More often, remunicipalization is considered as a political approach by responding against austerity measures that are imposed on local authorities by higher levels (Petitjean, 2017). More and more cities are now remunicipalizing services and there are currently more than 800 documented cases of remunicipalization worldwide (Subirana et al., 2019). The massive growth of remunicipalization could be considered as a movement in itself that it not necessarily directly linked to the Fearless Cities movement (Kishimoto, 2018).

However, since organized citizenship plays an important role in remunicipalization, it does fit well within the municipalist ideology of the Fearless Cities movement and functions as another tool to stimulate citizens’ participation and to deepen democracy (Subirana et al., 2019; Farré, 2017). On the other hand, the feasibility of this tool should not be overestimated. Remunicipalization is a long and difficult process that can create costly legal battles between local governments and the private corporations managing the public services.

Although remunicipalization is often proposed as a response against austerity, the financial limits caused by austerity also impede the possibilities of local authorities to bring public services back into public hands

(Kishomoto, 2018). These challenges are thus far ignored by the Fearless Cities network. Although the network presents remunicipalization as a financially beneficial practice, this should thus not be automatically assumed.

22 The fourth and last principle is the creation of a radical democracy. Municipalism provides the

Fearless Cities movement with the tools to reconfigure democracy (Roth et al., 2019). During the Fearless

Cities Summit, Roth (2017) argued that:

Local forms of government also make it easier to achieve more participation, transparency, and accountability, compared to higher levels (Roth et al., 2019). How the movement exactly aims to radicalize democracy is still rather vague. They aim to establish a new idea of democracy, but that they don’t know yet what this should entail (Roth, 2017). They mostly have a clear idea of what democracy is not and are experimenting with new ways of doing politics, such as the usage of digital participation platforms. In

Barcelona, for example, the open-source platform ‘Decidim’ is created, which allows citizens to take part in participatory practices (Pin, 2017; Ajuntament de Barcelona, 2019a). Unfortunately, the Fearless Cities network seems to overlook an important side-effect of radical and direct democracy: it doesn’t only give leftist people more right to decision making, this right is given to everyone. I would argue that the movement falsely assumes that this right will be used by people to further certain leftist ideals. Similarly as how Purcell

(2002) argued that Lefebvre’s (1996) right to the city can also be claimed to challenge structures other than capitalism, so can radical democracy be used to challenge structures other than racism and inequality, for example. The idea of municipalism could then turn into what could be called ‘dark municipalism’. Political parties on the far right are also promoting the idea of direct democracy, however with different goals in mind.

Direct democracy could then also be used to argue in favor of facism, for example (Symbiosis Research

Collective, 2018). This implies that there are also dangers in local politics and radical democracy that should not be overlooked. Unfortunately, it seems like the Fearless Cities movement is thus far ignoring this danger.

4.3 So: how new is the ‘new’ municipalist movement?

Now that we have created an understanding of the ideology of the Fearless Cities movement, we can discover how the movement can be distinguished from previous series of local governance pushes. Their perception of municipalism is more inclusive than that of Bookchin (1991). Besides the traditional municipalist principles, such as the decentralization of power and neighborhood assemblies, they incorporate

23 many other principles that have appeared important in previous progressive urban literature and movements.

This is however also what contributes to the ‘vagueness’ of the movement. It seems like almost every idea that is leftist, inclusive, and participatory is embraced. It could therefore be argued that the ideology of the

Fearless Cities movement is in fact nothing new. All of the ideas and principles that characterize the movement’s ideology were founded by previous movements or theorists, such as commons, remunicipalization, providing sanctuary to migrants, and feminization. The movement thus doesn’t have an ideology of its own but seems to be a network of existing ideologies.

On the other hand, this network character is also exactly what constitutes the ‘newness’ of this movement. Without reinventing the wheel, they bring many related ideas and principles together into one overarching network with a new, catchy name. There is no other network of this size that connects this many leftist ideas and organizations. This greatly increases the scope and possibilities of the Fearless Cities network compared to networks such as C40 that are solely focused on one issue. Moreover, their network structure which brings together organizations as opposed to city governments, further enhances the scope and inclusiveness of the network. It facilitates contact and thus knowledge sharing with like-minded organizations from all over the world, also in cities where the municipalist ideology has not rooted yet.

The strong leftist political meaning of the network is also new for a city network of this size. City networks are usually not this politically articulated, because that also destabilizes a network. When a city government’s political colour changes into one that is not progressively leftist, they also automatically stop being fearless. Networks such as C40 don’t carry this risk, since their membership is more formalized and less political. This political character also contributes to the looseness of the network, because as city governments change, they continuously join or quit the network. This might also be the reason why the network is so focused on connecting organizations instead of city governments, because non-governmental organizations do continue to exist as members, also when city governments change.

Thus, although the ideology of the movement itself is not new since it’s a combination of already existing ideas and ideologies, the way it brings togethers all these different leftist ideologies into one single network is new. In this way, a network of leftist urban political ideologies is created with which many cities and organizations can and want to relate itself. The idea of being fearless and of being a part of this network has become trending in a way that is unprecedented by previous local governance pushes. An important factor of this popularity is perhaps its successful marketing strategy, with which it distinguishes itself from previous urban politics movements.

24 Chapter 5: Amsterdam, a Fearless city?

5.1 Introduction

In 2018 a new municipal government was formed in Amsterdam. The new coalition consists of four leftist political parties: GroenLinks, PvdA, D66, and SP. As could be expected, their coalition agreement is exceptionally leftist and one of the objectives is becoming a ‘Fearless City’ (Couzy, 2018; Gemeente

Amsterdam, 2019). Although all parties signed the coalition agreement, the only party that is pushing for the

‘Fearless City’ objective is GroenLinks and mostly their alderman Groot Wassink. The other parties support the idea but don’t perceive as much importance in become ‘fearless’ (Groot Wassink, 2019; Koolen, interview 2019). This section will analyze how the adoption of the Fearless Cities ideology by the municipality of Amsterdam is proceeding.

5.2 Contextual challenges

The Fearless Cities movement was founded in another socio-economic and political context than the

Netherlands. Its birth country Spain has, similar to other Southern European countries where the Fearless

Cities network also flourished well, suffered more severely from the economic recession and has more difficulty in recovering again. Economically this results in lower GDP rates, higher debts and deficits, higher unemployment rates and thus higher risks of poverty, amongst others. Politically this also entails more uncertainty, which was profoundly shown in the Catalan independence referendum (Santander Trade, 2019).

There is an increasing imbalance between southern and northern European countries, as the southern countries continue to carry the burden of the financial crisis, whilst northern countries are economically growing (Landesmann, 2013). This results in important differences in the social context of countries such as

Spain and the Netherlands, which can possibly stimulate or impede the support for the municipalist ideology.

A study in Naples has shown that support for the development of a municipalist trajectory in the city derived from feelings of anger and discontent with the government and their austerity measures. This created incentives for city inhabitants to dedicate time and effort towards becoming more politically committed in a municipalist manner as a way to oppose national government and to do themselves what the government doesn’t do for them (de Jong, 2018). The development of the Fearless Cities ideology there was created from the bottom-up, driven by discontentment, similar to its development in Barcelona (De Jong, 2018; Roosma, interview 2019). It could be argued that in Amsterdam the inhabitants are not as discontent with the political

25 authorities, and that they are therefore not as inclined to dedicate time towards changing the current political structures. This raises the question to what extent it is possible in Amsterdam to create the political participation that is needed for a Fearless City. Klaar (Interview 2019) argued that it is very difficult to activate the citizens of Amsterdam:

This ‘inactiveness’ of Amsterdam’s inhabitants was also recognized by all the other interviewees. Not being politically committed is a luxury that the people from Amsterdam can afford themselves, because of the political and economic stability (Klaar, interview 2019; working group Democratization GroenLinks, interview 2019). This contextual difference between Amsterdam and cities such as Naples and Barcelona makes it questionable to what extent the Fearless Cities ideology is able to thrive in Amsterdam, since a

Fearless City needs an active citizenry that wants to participate in order to get a more participative democracy.

However, besides these differences there are also some important contextual similarities which are underlined by the municipality. These similarities are the challenges that big European cities face: mass tourism, speculation on the housing market, climate change, and increasing socio-economic inequality

(Roosma, interview 2019; Groot Wassink, 2019). Since the Fearless Cities movement was developed in cities with similar challenges, its ideology can provide tools to address these issues that are increasingly shaping urban life in Amsterdam. On the other hand, an active citizenry is still needed for the fulfillment of each element of the Fearless Cities ideology, so it remains unclear how these elements can be employed in

Amsterdam.

5.3 Application of the Fearless Cities ideology in Amsterdam

According to the municipality, Amsterdam is already a Fearless City and a member of the Fearless

Cities network (Gemeente Amsterdam, 2019a). This seems odd, since the municipality is not registered in the

Fearless Cities database as a member. The only organization in Amsterdam that is listed in this database is

‘Faircity’, a bottom-up platform that connects all progressive leftist movements in the city. Although the municipality has established a taskforce to develop the Fearless Cities agenda for Amsterdam and they have

26 been working on this for more than half a year already, they have not yet contacted Faircity. One of the organizers of Faircity, Klaar (Interview 2019), finds this problematic. He argues that this shows that the municipality is trying to make the city fearless by employing expensive officials, without reaching out to the existing social structures that are already in place. A job opening for a position in this Fearless Cities taskforce clarifies its salary: €5520 per month (Gemeente Amsterdam, 2019b). Klaar responds:

In comparison, Barcelona’s mayor Colau has cut her salary down to €2200 per month. The money that is saved with this is given to social projects in the city (Ajuntament Barcelona, 2019b). The mayor before her earned €109.000 per year (Jones, 2015). This approach suits with the Fearless Cities ideology, by going against inequality and by enabling citizens to lead social change, instead of political parties. The budgetary decisions of Amsterdam indicate their different approach, by directing financial possibilities and thus power towards government officials and thereby stimulating change top-down. Using a top-down approach to create a fearless city could be considered as controversial, given the fact that what makes a fearless city is the uprise of city inhabitants who reclaim the city. The idea of a fearless city is thus inherently bottom-up and cannot be led by formal political parties. Roosma (Interview 2019) acknowledges this controversiality and underlines that the BComú is even against political parties. There are therefore people in Barcelona who carry the opinion that political parties cannot ‘create’ fearless cities (Roosma, interview 2019). This points to an interesting question whether formal parties can take on this role.

Although this top-down approach could be criticized, it might be the most suitable approach to further develop the municipalist ideology in Amsterdam. Roosma (Interview 2019) calls it ‘necessary evil’ believes that although this design is not ideal, at least something is being done, an opinion that was shared by the working group Democratization of GroenLinks (Interview 2019). With the current politically inactive socio-political climate in Amsterdam it cannot be expected that the citizens of Amsterdam will uprise soon and take matters into their own hands. The government can therefore help to boost the social initiatives that are in place and support them to become better politically articulated (Roosma, interview 2019). Thus, in a climate where change is not expected to come from dissatisfied citizens, the government might be the most

27 suitable actor to stimulate political participation. The question then arises, if people are not dissatisfied or angry with the current system, then why should we stimulate them to fight for another political system?

According to all the interviewees, Amsterdam is changing in a fast pace as the city becomes increasingly commodified by capitalist powers. The longer the people of Amsterdam will allow this to happen, the further these developments will take over the city. They therefore find it justifiable to stimulate the inhabitants of

Amsterdam to take a stand against this, before it is too late.

So far, it remains unclear how the government wants to stimulate the political participation that is needed for this change. Or what a Fearless Amsterdam looks like. The people in charge of this project don’t have answers to these questions yet. There is no blueprint for a Fearless City and the municipality is still searching for the way to position the Fearless Cities ideology in Amsterdam (Roosma, interview 2019). In order to avoid too much top-down influence, they want to shape the agenda for this together with

Amsterdam’s citizens. To reach these citizens they plan to work together with existing local initiatives and to create spaces in neighborhoods where residents can co-create, organize, and have political discussions based on the ‘commons’ principle. They also aim to create more digital political participation tools, to organize neighborhood assemblies, and experiment with participative budgeting in neighborhoods, amongst others

(Groot Wassink, 2019; Bieckmann, 2019; Roosma, interview 2019). Unfortunately, these are all still only plans so it remains unsure how this wil unfold in practice. There is criticism that the stance of the people pushing the Fearless Cities ideology is too passive. They proposed the Amsterdam Fearless City idea, but are now waiting for social movements and citizens to execute this (Klaar, interview 2019; Working group

Democratization GroenLinks, interview 2019). This illustrates the problematic position Amsterdam finds itself in, torn between leading the Fearless Cities trajectory top-down and making it as bottom-up as possible by waiting for existing social movements to initiate action.

5.4 What does this entail for the meaning of Fearless Cities?

The adoption of the Fearless Cities ideology in Amsterdam could be considered as a project with good intentions, but with a controversial execution. The ease with which Amsterdam is able to refer to itself as a Fearless City further underlines the looseness of the network. Without being an officially listed member of the network, without having effectuated any of their fearless proposals yet, and while using a top-down approach which does not fit within the fearless ideology, Amsterdam ‘is’ a Fearless City. This makes me wonder: do good intentions already make a city fearless? In that case, the Fearless Cities network is in

28 danger of losing its ideological substance and can become just another label that cities can adopt, without letting it severely change urban political systems. Klaar (Interview 2019) argued:

He is thus afraid that the simplicity with which Amsterdam has given itself the Fearless City title might evolve into a way of promoting the city with progressive leftist politics, without thoroughly making the city progressively leftist. The interviews and analyzed documents give the impression that for the government of

Amsterdam being part of the network mostly functions as a way to strengthen their relations with the other member cities. It is a way to share knowledge with cities who struggle with the same challenges and to make a statement towards higher political levels that cities are collectively strengthening their political power.

According to Roosma (Interview 2019) this is the most important reason for Amsterdam to be part of the network. If being a Fearless City is mostly about making a political statement, then there is less need of actually realizing the political changes that are needed to be fearless. This further confirms the argument that the concept of Fearless City might degrade towards a label, as calling yourself a Fearless City and maintaining relations with the other cities already functions as the statement in itself. If the label Fearless

City becomes just another way of city promotion, it becomes a means to an end that is opposite to its real purpose. Since the development of the Fearless Cities ideology in Amsterdam is still in its infancy, time will have to tell how this will unfold. The way Amsterdam thus far is establishing its Fearless Cities agenda does suggests that the Fearless Cities network should be careful with allowing cities to use the Fearless Cities label if it remains unclear how and whether they will actually become fearless.

29 Chapter 6: Discussion and conclusions

6.1 Discussion

This research aimed to gain a better understanding of the rapidly growing Fearless Cities network and its adoption in Amsterdam. It was centered around the following research question: “What is new about the Fearless Cities network and to what extent is it’s ideology applicable to the socio-economic context of

Amsterdam?”

The findings of this study indicate that there is nothing new about the ideology of the Fearless Cities network. All the principles that form the ideological basis of the movement are based on existing theories and practices. However, what is new is the way that the movement connects these pre-existing leftist political ideas into one overarching network. This illustrates that it is not only a network of geographical entities, but also a network of ideologies. Although the movement promotes itself as a municipalist movement based on the theory of Bookchin (1991), they have profoundly renewed his theory by embracing other lines of radical urban political theories into the municipalist thinking. This has allowed classical leftist urban theories such as the commons (Ostrom, 1990) and the right to the city (Lefebvre, 1996), and topics like feminization to alter the traditional conception of municipalism into a ‘new’ municipalism. Whereas previous movements and networks in leftist urban politics usually focused on one specific theme or ideology, the Fearless Cities movement incorporates the existing networks of, amongst others Sanctuary Cities and Remunicipalization, into one powerful force. Thus, although the foundations of the ideology is not new, the fusion of many separate movements and ideologies into one is what makes the network innovative and successful. This is also what made it possible for the movement to escape the local trap of municipalism that was discovered by

Russell (2019), and to be the first municipalist network of this scope.

Furthermore, this study also showed that the Fearless Cities network provides a new perspective on the structure of city networks. City networks are usually understood as formalized city ties between city governments, as described by Acuto and Raynor (2016). Examples of these are abundant and also the city networks discussed in this study are cases of formalized networks, such as C40, U20, and the Global

Parliament of Mayors. Although the Fearless cities network shares many characteristics with these authentic formal city networks, their network structure is informal as opposed to formal. This entails that besides formal governments, the network also connects all types of informal city organizations and could therefore be characterized as open and loose. This changes notions of what constitutes a city network and of ‘who’ can

30 represent a city. An explanation that this study has given for this informality is the strong political opinion of the network and its members. The network cannot solely build on the membership of city governments, because as soon as a new government with another political opinion is elected, a city loses its Fearless membership. Through connecting informal organizations, the network is therefore able to stabilize its inherently unstable character. Additionally, this study can confirm that the conditions Gordon (2013) distinguished to describe the development of formal city networks also count for the informal Fearless Cities network. Especially the second condition, which explains how the weak political position of cities functions as a driver for cities to cooperate and strengthen their political power vis-à-vis other levels of governance, can be affirmed. However, the informal structure of the network even points to a further decentralization of power and shows that also, for example, small-scale neighborhood associations and political parties in opposition are cooperating in order to strengthen their power vis-à-vis established city governments.

The case of Amsterdam has demonstrated that this open character of the Fearless Cities network can also result in the incorporation of cities that do not comply yet with its ideology. Although the government wants to take the necessary steps that are needed to make Amsterdam Fearless, they seem clueless as to how to employ this. This struggle seems similar to Harvey’s (2012) experience, who could not give an answer to how a city could be organized as a ‘rebel city’. This indicates difficulties with applying theoretical concepts into real urban settings. This study argued that this is further complicated by the different socio-economic context of Amsterdam compared to that of the ‘original’ Fearless Cities. The low levels of political involvement of Amsterdam’s citizens make it seem untenable to create a Fearless discourse that is in accordance with the prerequisites of the Fearless Cities movement: namely developed from the social reality of the city and led by its citizens (Bieckmann, 2017). Despite this, the Amsterdam government has a strong urge to make the city Fearless, which results in a controversial top-down approach to stimulate the development of bottom-up change. Since Amsterdam has not yet executed their ideas, it remains unsure how the Fearless Cities narrative will unfold with this approach. However, this study does suggest that the government of Amsterdam is mostly pushing for the development of a Fearless Amsterdam in order to reap the benefits of obtaining the label ‘Fearless City’ and of a position within the network of progressive cities.

This means that the government wants to make a political statement, without necessarily aiming to change current political structures. This suggests that the Fearless Cities network should handle its open character with caution and ensure that the concept of Fearless Cities doesn’t degrade towards a label that can be used for city promotion, without cities actually becoming fearless. A similar argument was made by Trisolini and

Zasloff (2008) who argued how the C40 network is mostly a matter of city marketing. This suggests that in

31 some cases, city networks might be less altruistic then they appear to be.

Lastly, this study elucidated that the Fearless Cities network thus far fails to acknowledge the potential dangers and difficulties of the employment of its ideology. This danger lies most profoundly in the idea of direct democracy, of which its possible negative outcomes have already been recognized by many academics before (Bolton, 2013; Christmann & Danaci, 2012; Kern & Hooghe, 2017; etc.). The movement seems to assume that direct democracy will result in desirable outcomes that cater better to citizens’ interests, such as more equality. However, they thereby seem to neglect that some citizens could also use direct democracy to further opposite outcomes such as discrimination and inequality. The idealistic idea of municipalism could then in the worst scenario pave the way for a more exclusive and unequal society, already referred to as ‘dark municipalism’ (Symbiosis Research Collective, 2018).

It should be recognized that the findings of this study have been limited because of the difficulty that was experienced when finding interviewees. The limited availability of people with knowledge on the topic in Amsterdam and the fact that almost all of these people did not have time for an interview, has possibility resulted in an incomplete dataset. Furthermore, the timing of this research might have been too early, since the development of the Fearless Cities ideology in Amsterdam is still in such an early stage. This made it impossible to gather data about how this ideology exactly develops in Amsterdam and what its results are, because the government is still in the phase of brainstorming about how to position the ideology within

Amsterdam instead of executing their ideas.

This study therefore asks for further research. First, into the way in which the Fearless Cities narrative will further develop in Amsterdam, which will be a fruitful analysis to understand whether and how the approach of Amsterdam is successful in furthering the leftist ideals of the Fearless Cities movement using a top down approach and the extent to which this can be translated to other cities. However, as was shown in this study, it appears difficult for the government of Amsterdam to create such an approach in the first place.

It seems like the endless discussions that national governments get stuck in can also form a trap for city governments, as Amsterdam seems to be continuously discussing how to stimulate more concrete action.

Instead of reinventing the wheel, methods for the stimulation of concrete action and political participation might be already available in other research domains. For example, sustainable innovation research has proposed a new way of governance that seems well applicable to the stimulation of the Fearless Cities ideology. Referred to as the ABDC-roadmap, this method works by connecting the quadruple helix of the government, academia, industry, and civil society to create socially inclusive innovation (The Natural Step,

2019; Borkowska & Osborne, 2018). The process is visualized in figure 2 and following these steps could

32 possibly provide solutions to the top-down/bottom-up controversy and to the dangers of dark municipalism that are found in the Fearless Cities trajectory. Further research could explore whether guidelines such as these could be helpful to facilitate a better practical application of the Fearless Cities ideology, for example by conducting experiments on the neighborhood level.

Figure 2: ABCD-roadmap

Source:`The natural step, 2019

6.2 Conclusions

This study has demonstrated that the rising Fearless Cities network hasn’t provided substantive ideological renewal. However, it has renewed and altered notions of city networks and is therefore successful in exactly what aims to be: a network of municipalist organizations. By functioning as an overarching, informal network that embraces many types of progressive leftist ideologies and many types of formal and informal organizations, the Fearless Cities network has been able to strengthen the position and collective voice of people aiming to improve our cities by democratic renewal in diverse ways. They have used the ideology of municipalism to find common ground and cooperation between already existing organizations, movements, and networks that used to work separately. Thereby, they have also renewed the theory of municipalism into a more inclusive and extensive version: ‘new’ municipalism. This technique has allowed them to create a network of progressive leftist city politics of an unprecedented scope.

Despite these positive notes, the case of Amsterdam has elucidated that the practical implementation of the Fearless Cities ideology in different socio-economic contexts is complicated. The Fearless Cities ideology needs an active, politically involved citizenry to develop. This poses challenges for cities that want

33 to become ‘fearless’ but where citizens are more passive. This creates controversies in the employment of the

Fearless Cities ideology in Amsterdam: the development of a Fearless trajectory is stimulated using a top- down approach, endless discussions stand in the way of the first principle of the network ‘concrete and direct action’, and emphasis seems to be placed on acquiring the label ‘Fearless City’ and the position in the network without bringing profound changes to the local political system. I believe the Amsterdam government has the best intentions, but they have difficulties in finding the tools or guidelines needed to translate the Fearless Cities ideology to their context. It is likely that these same difficulties also hinder the development of the ideology in many other cities. Further research is needed to create more practical guidelines that can help to deal with the potential dangers within the Fearless Cities ideology, and the difficulties with practically applying it. If practical application of the ideology is not made more feasible but cities do continue to embrace the label ‘Fearless City’, the network risks losing its ideological substance. In the worst case scenario this would make figure 1 on the cover of this thesis a reality: the term ‘Fearless City’ would degrade into another way of city promotion.

34 Chapter 7: Literature

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