This article considers the potential of public–common partnerships (PCPs) to act as a new municipalist intervention against the privatisation and financialisation of land in the UK. In previous publications, we have presented PCPs in abstract terms as a municipalist organisational form that could help communities eschew the disciplinary effects of finance capital to pursue alternative democratic forms of urban development. Here, we start to examine what this process looks like in practice. The article draws from ongoing participatory action research in two contrasting case studies, Wards Corner in Haringey and Union Street in Plymouth. We find that by establishing enduring organisational structures where collective decisions can be made about who owns and manages land and assets, PCPs could bolster already existing efforts to democratise urban development in both cities. As an organisational form, PCPs reframe the ‘local’ as a politics of proximity, decentre and reimagine the role of municipal institutions and foreground a politics of the common. This makes them an archetypal new municipalist strategy, well-suited to contesting the enclosure of urban landscapes. The article concludes by considering the development of PCPs within the broader new municipalist tendency.

In this essay, we argue that the recent financial collapse, the ensuing recession and the work of key social movements have created conditions for a reengagement of critically-inclined organizational theorists with various forms of value analysis. We then introduce the seven articles in this special issue and highlight how each makes a contribution to this reengagement.

Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party has allowed age to emerge as a dramatic new axis of political division. This article treats the political generation gap as, in part, a transformation in class composition. Most notably, starting with the political age divide makes recognition of a shift toward an asset-based economy hard to avoid. The economic crisis of 2008, and the British government responses to it, have provoked a contradiction between the two main avenues through which neoliberal subjectivities are trained. While neoliberal institutional reform and the styles of management that accompany it continue to train the young in line with theories of human capital, the specific nature of their entrainment in bonds of debt increasingly undermine the notions of meritocracy on which the human capital metaphor implicitly depends. This contradiction opens up possibilities for constructing more open conceptions of the future which can, in turn, be embedded within institutions yet to be created.

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In October 2013 during a fractious interview with Jeremy Paxman for the Newsnight TV programme, the comedian Russell Brand called for a revolution against a self-serving political and economic elite. Over the following 18 months Brand became a prominent Left-wing political figure in the UK This paper suggests that Brand's experience was not isolated but forms part of a wider contemporary trend of comedians becoming populist political leaders. Other examples include the French comedian Dieudonné and the Italian comedian Beppe Grillo, whose political party Movimento 5 Stelle is currently the largest in the Italian Parliament and part of the governing coalition. Using Brand as a case study the paper examines his political storytelling for its structure and mode of deployment. Whenever Brand ventures forward a sincere statement he always stands ready to ironize it in order to avoid the perception of piety. Using Peter Sloterdijk's discussion of cynical reason and Slajov Zizek's concept of cynical irony I suggest that a post-political ironic detachment has become the dominant mode of ideology. I then argue that this ironic detachment has come under increasing pressure since the economic crisis of 2008 and the increased political engagement it has provoked. It is within this aspect of the conjuncture that we can position the discourse about a Post-Truth era and Post-Truth leaders. The comedian as political leader, I argue, shows a particular route through this problem. They represent transitional figures pioneering the shift from ironic detachment to postironic statements and narratives of political sincerity of the kind that sustained political engagement requires.