I am not clear on how to conclude this memoir. My method has been a sort of scattergun, to let fire at one target with several different paradigms, conceptual ratiocinations and empirical accounts of how I have imagined my encounter of anarchism with municipality to occur in theory and in fact. I have assumed that these perspectives are sufficiently parallel and compatible that each one separately may be valid enough to ground my justification and that together they can make it yet more convincing. But I have not addressed how they might affirm or negate one another, or how their consequences, both real and theoretical, may or may not coalesce into a more substantial argument than each discretely can do. I have intended coherence, but praxis is rarely so tidy, and my career is no exception. I have stressed causality, yet my argument has little purchase on its actual processes. Perhaps I have been too enthralled by imaginative speculation and succumbed to fantasy. In any case, I have raised problems which a municipality cannot resolve. I have taken this to be another reason to appeal to anarchism.

Contemplating my political career as a project of adherence to some manner of anarchism, I am beset with retrospective unease. My qualms are not primarily about the assessment of my history as a municipal councillor and citizen activist. That would be another narrative. While I would have to admit to numerous misjudgements, failures of imagination and comprehension, lost opportunities and some unprincipled expediency, on the whole I could assert that I have kept faith with my voters and colleagues. My faults have not been egregious. My actual achievements have been few, but I have been noteworthy, in some quarters notorious, for public adherence to some fundamental principles of empowering participation, sustainability and accountability, which otherwise might have remained more muted.

But I am not now trying to justify myself on these terms. I have assumed a more daunting task, to examine whether in my public career I have kept faith also with my anarchist convictions and whether I have demonstrated that anarchism is relevant to the municipality, both directly in its policy formation and implementation, and indirectly in its cooperation with and increasing reliance on citizen associations, in such a way that anarchism itself emerges enriched and substantiated. I may encounter three sceptical audiences.