When the Leaning Tower Leaned Left

In the 1970s, the Italian Communist Party was again on the rise in Tuscany. Then it all toppled over.

Politics Is Something We Do

The hard part is over. The harder part is about to start.

Issue 60: Dossier

Everything you need to take over your city.

Issue 60: Letters + Internet Speaks

Keeping up with our constituents.

Remembering Red Ken

Ken Livingstone’s legacy in London reminds us just how much democratic socialist leadership can do for a single city.

Ezra Klein on Abundance and the Left

“When the state can’t deliver, people stop believing in collective solutions altogether.”

The City the Rich Built — and Broke

A new history traces how elite-driven development made New York richer on paper and poorer in practice.

Paint the Town Red

Jacobin contributor Paul Heideman’s reading list on municipal socialism explores how workers’ movements, from Milwaukee to Liverpool, built power at the local level — and how they were defeated.

A Poet in Practice

Aimé Césaire’s time as the mayor of Martinique’s capital city was characterized by his practical, progressive politics — but also by his poet’s eye for beauty.

The German Take on Gotham

Fritz Lang’s masterful visual depiction of class stratification in Metropolis remains unrivaled by its would-be inheritors.

Stand-In Cities

New York isn’t what it used to be.

Bernie’s Fireside Chats

Before there was a YouTube, and even before there was an internet, there was public-access television. Low-budget, talky, unglamorous, and unfiltered, it was the perfect venue for the political rise of none other than Bernie Sanders.

The Life and Death of Paris’s Red Belt

How discontent over housing, and not workplace struggle, made Paris’s suburbs hotbeds of communism.

The Grass Is Greener

Every game of golf in New York City comes at a cost.

Lost Art

The Geneva Freeport is home to millions of masterpieces you and I will never see. lost-art

A Planet of Slums?

Mike Davis may still be right that slums will dominate the cities of the future — but his prediction was at least a decade premature.

The Mayor of Mexico

Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s amazing success as president had a lot to do with his time as mayor.

Fascism Destroyed Italy’s Socialist City Halls

After World War I, Italian Socialists built an impressive array of welfare programs, schools, and libraries in cities. Fascist backlash soon revealed the limits of their strength.

Sketches of Spain

Tawfiq Zayyad: Poet, Communist, Mayor

Under the leadership of poet and activist Tawfiq Zayyad, Nazareth emerged in the 1970s as a hub of anti-Zionist resistance.