What kind of democratic project is the “CITY”? and what does the new municipalism want to do with it?

This chapter delineates democratic projects of the city. These envisage different roles for the state vis-à-vis society, as well as understandings of the potential of the “urban.” Much of the new municipalist movement's potential lies in the productive tensions it generates from interfacing state-centered and societal projects of the “city,” working across binaries like direct and representative democracy, social movements, and political parties. Limits are, however, detected in relation to the extent to which new municipalism might engage with a range of ongoing urban everyday political activisms, where very different means and spaces of acting politically and democratically are apparent.