Municipal Recipes 2

What

Municipal Recipes 2 is a documentary about care in the cities. Its first part was released weeks before the 2015 local elections and it gathered a group of activists thinking about the possibilities of social transformation that municipalism opened up back then. This second part re-unites some of the participants in the first part and some new others to rethink the status and possibilities of municipalism four years and a local elections later. Gala Pin (former councillor, Barcelona en Comú), Claudia Delso (councillor in A Coruña, Marea Atlántica), Elena Giner ( former councillor, Zaragoza en Común), Ysabel Torralbo (former councillor, Málaga Ahora) and Guillermo Zapata (former councillor, Ahora Madrid) are the participants of this second conversation in which they talk about challenges, successes and failures of the municipal possibilities.

How

A calm conversation around a table to gather some of the main learnings of their years in the local institutions, confronting the political project of municipal platforms in 2015 with the one that we have in 2019, after having lost most of the cities where municipal platforms governed: participation and transparency tools that spread through the different mechanisms of the local political institutions; the court processes they have been through and they were cleared from; the distance between their political beliefs and the political capacity they had when they realised how city councils actually work; or the lack of care and self-care they found in the institutions.

Why

The self-governed political project that municipalism put on the table in 2015 was confronted with realities that most of the activists working on it could not foresee. The political and the media pressure made the continuation really difficult. Now, after a pandemia, the political landscape has deeply changed: state has more power than ever over other forms of more geographically situated forms of political action. Municipal Recipes 2 is a reminder that we need distributed ways of managing power, and that municipal institutions remain to be a place where many of the decisions concerning our lives are decided. This documentary is an invitation to keep thinking about these topics even after last elections’ setback.