Make the City Ours

What would it take to decommodify New York City under a Zohran Mamdani mayoralty? This book connects policy, organizing, and collective power to show how cities can be reclaimed from the market.

What would it take to build a decommodified city—not only in policy, but in practice, power, and everyday life? Written in the context of a new political moment in New York City, this book argues that transforming the city requires the growth of movement spaces rooted in connection, reciprocity, and collective action—spaces that decommodify not only housing, transit, care, and safety, but our relationships to one another.

Balancing bold vision with grounded strategy, the authors move beyond issue-by-issue diagnosis to advance a full-fledged alternative for urban governance. They imagine how a municipal government could actively build a non-market city, while also cultivating the social solidarities and mass participation needed to sustain it over time. The focus is not only on affordability or service delivery, but on power: who governs the city, how decisions are made, and how residents participate as collective agents rather than passive consumers.

Focusing on core areas of everyday life—housing, transportation, care work, schooling, and public safety—the book explores how decommodification can be achieved through mass governance strategies. Policy levers and institutional ingenuity can stabilize communities and reduce costs, but municipalist approaches are also designed to deepen democratic participation. They enable people to make greater demands on the city and to take part in running and governing shared systems, rather than simply receiving them.

Heavy on vignettes from organizing and campaigns, the book bridges vision, policy, and critique to offer hopeful, movement-centered accounts of urban solidarity. It is attentive to the energy and joy of political campaigns, while insisting that lasting transformation requires forms of organization and governance that can outlast electoral cycles and scale beyond them.

Distinctively, the authors show how the intellectual and ethical foundations of the commons can be institutionalized at the scale of a major city—through public ownership, participatory planning, and the democratic administration of housing, education, care, and infrastructure. The result is a movement-grounded blueprint for reclaiming the city as a shared political project.