Issue 60: Dossier
Everything you need to take over your city.
20510 Article(s) by: Yi San
Yi San is a freelance writer based in New York.
Issue 60: Letters + Internet Speaks
Keeping up with our constituents.
Ezra Klein on Abundance and the Left
“When the state can’t deliver, people stop believing in collective solutions altogether.”
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.
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.
The Pharaoh’s Curse
Egypt’s authoritarian president has recreated Cairo in his image, bulldozing ancient tombs, working-class neighborhoods, and the city’s already scarce green space.
The System That Survived Apartheid
South Africa’s townships were built to enforce white supremacy. Three decades into democracy, they remain the foundation of a racialized capitalism that governs through scarcity and patronage.
Modi’s Hindutva Theme Parks
India has launched major schemes of urban transformation in cities like Ayodhya. Behind the rhetoric of modernity lurks a crude religious chauvinism.
No War but Artisanal Doughnut War
Boutique storefronts, gourmet shops, and bike lanes are not the reason urban housing is unaffordable.