The Politics of Urban Regime Construction in Spain: 2015-2019

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The Politics of Urban Regime Contestation provides the first systematic assessment of attempts by Spanish New Municipalist movement-parties to consolidate progressive urban regime change between 2015 and 2019. New Municipalism represented a political wave of astonishing proportions, unseating neoliberal regimes led by traditional political parties in eighteen cities with more than 20,000 inhabitants, including key urban centres such as Barcelona and Madrid. Municipalist administrations experimented with the co-operative economy, sustainability initiatives, feminism and democratic revitalization. They produced multiple cases of attempted urban regime change: understood as the process of creating resource coalitions capable of transforming urban governance and political economy. This study provides novel and timely data and theory to understand the politics of urban regime contestation. The success of municipalist platforms in 2015 provided inspiration for an international movement, but is marked nationally by widespread electoral defeat in 2019. Municipalist administrations achieved electoral continuity in just two cases: Barcelona and Cadiz. Outcome variation provides opportunities for comparative analysis into the dynamics of urban governance continuity and change. Theoretically, urban regime theory is used in-order-to understand how New Municipalist coalitions and agendas interacted with urban governance relationships and institutions. The project builds on empirical pilot research into two cases, using a tried and tested methodology, recently published in Urban Studies, adding Qualitative Comparative Analysis to explain varying degrees of success across the entire population of cases. In using this theory and method the project promises to provide an over-arching yet detailed assessment of the topic. It will develop knowledge critical for deepened urban democracy, sustainability and social justice: a valuable contribution to Horizon Europes' strategic ambitions.