Neofascism is Destroyed by Confederal Urban Unions
Neofascism is not an anomaly—it is capitalism’s inevitable mutation, an authoritarian adaptation designed to secure power amid escalating crises. As financialized dispossession deepens, cities have become battlegrounds where capital and the state militarize governance, weaponize land, and suppress dissent. Yet, resistance remains fragmented, and without a coordinated anti-capitalist alternative, we risk merely reacting to oppression rather than dismantling it.
In this episode of Cities After, Miguel Robles-Durán introduces Confederal Urban Unions—a material framework that synthesizes municipalist governance, confederal coordination, and Marxist strategies for structural transformation. More than a theory, Confederal Urban Unions offer a practical counterforce to capitalist urbanization, building interconnected, self-governing territories to preempt and dismantle neofascist expansion. If we fail to construct the systems that will replace capitalism, we leave the future to be shaped by the forces that sustain it. The time for resistance alone is over—the time to build has begun.
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Miguel Robles-Durán is an urbanist and Marxist urban theorist working at the intersections of urban political-ecology, unitary urbanism, and the design of social and environmentally just urban processes. He is a tenured Associate Professor of Urbanism at The New School / Parsons School of Design in New York City. Robles-Durán is founding partner and co-director of Urban Front, a transnational consultancy for urban justice. He is also a founding board member of The Shape of Cities to Come Institute, a New York City based co-learning and strategizing platform for urban activism. Robles-Durán's work with the New York City and Rotterdam-based design cooperative Cohabitation Strategies (CohStra) has been influential to the contemporary development of socially-engaged forms of urban practice.
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