Over the past few years, New Municipalism has emerged as an urban-rooted leftist political strategy, aiming to challenge neoliberal austerity politics and breathe new life into progressive politics. Although the literature on New Municipalism is still incipient, some features of this political strategy have already been outlined, such as its new politics of proximity (Russell, 2019); its new urban agenda (Blanco and Gomà, 2020); its transformative response to urban-capitalist crises (Thompson, 2020); and its new state institutions transformed through the logic of the “Common” (Subirats, 2016). This paper aims to delve into this last feature, showing how it can be considered distinctive to New Municipalism, with respect to traditional progressive municipalism.

For many traditional progressive governments of the last century, the “Public” was embodied by the state. The state was the institution that centralised resources and capabilities to protect society from the commodifying pressure of the market (Polanyi, 1944) through public ownership and state-provided public services (public water, education, etc.). The full “publicness of the state” represented an inherent characteristic of the state, shared by many progressive governments, both national and local, one that was not questioned until the onset of the neoliberal wave of privatisation and outsourcing in the 1980s (Harvey, 2007). The logic of the “Common” also questions the publicness of the state but from a radically different perspective with respect to the neoliberal one (Mattei, 2011). Common’s scholars uphold that the institution of the local state can be transformed through two principles: the principle of self-government and the principle of non-appropriability (Dardot and Laval, 2015). The application of these principles is often concomitant and overlapping: it means giving space to self-governing civil society to manage the “Public” within state institutions; and it also means preventing the “Public” being fully appropriated by any institutions, even the state itself, thus avoiding decisions about it being taken exclusively by the institutions that manage it. The paper shows the application of the logic of the “Common” in two New Municipalism city contexts, Barcelona and Naples, through the analysis of their respective common-logic transformed public services: local cultural facilities and water services. The first case shows how, during the “Barcelona en Comú” government, local cultural facilities that had previously been provided by the local authority began to be managed by community organisations, through a new regulatory framework -“Patrimoni Ciutadà”-. The second case shows how, during the “Democracy and Autonomy” government, the privatised water services in Naples were re-municipalised, but with the establishment of a governance structure where a “water parliament” now prevents the services from falling into speculative dynamic. The two cases offer insights into how the logic of the “Common” can be applied not only to different public services but also on different urban scales. In this way, the article aims at bridging Common theory with empirical evidence, in order to contribute to defining strategies to reimagine and transform the local state and its institutions in different New Municipalist city contexts.