Dimitrios Roussopoulos

Dimitrios I. Roussopoulos (born 1936) is a Canadian political activist and publisher.

Early life Roussopoulos studied philosophy, politics, and economics at several Montreal and London universities, including McGill University and the London School of Economics. He turned down a $10,000 scholarship offer to pursue a PhD from the University of Chicago to instead pursue his political activism. He has remained institutionally independent apart from teaching two years in the late 1960s at a progressive college.

Career Roussopoulos’s political and peace activism began in London, England. He founded in 1959 the Combined Universities Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and organized the first post-war student demonstration in Ottawa. He founded and edited Canada's first quarterly peace research journal, Our Generation, in 1961. Its first issue gained a circulation of three thousand and carried a preface by Bertrand Russell.

In 1969, Roussopoulos founded Black Rose Books, an international publishing house known for publishing works of left-wing politics by Noam Chomsky and Murray Bookchin, among others.

The first book he published was The New Left in Canada, 1969, which chronicled his experience as a major activist of the New Left in Canada in the 1960's.

In a 2021 interview, Roussopoulos stated that the mission of the publishing house was threefold: to disseminate ideas of participatory democracy and community organizing, to publish the best radical analysis of Canadian society, to revive libertarian socialist literature long suppressed on the left.

Since the 1970s, Roussopoulos has been active in radical municipalist community organizing in Montreal. He helped found the Milton-Park Citizens' Committee and contributed to a decade-long effort to prevent the destruction of a heritage six-city-block neighbourhood.

To advance libertarian municipalist ideas of social ecology, Roussopoulos founded Montréal Écologique (Ecology Montreal) in 1989, the first municipal green party in North America. With Serge Mongeau and Jacques Gelinas, Roussopoulos co-founded Les Editions Eco-Société in 1992. Roussopoulos additionally organized five citizen summits (2001–2010) for bottom-up democracy, drawing together one thousand citizens and non-governmental organizations to advance a citizens' agenda for change.

In 2009, alongside Phyllis Lambert and Dinu Bumbaru, Roussopoulos founded the Institute of Policy Alternatives of Montreal, a think tank aiming to shed light on urban planning and development policy.

In 2012, he founded the Transnational Institute of Social Ecology, an Athens-based network of intellectuals and activists working in various cities in Europe.

In 2018, he co-curated the exhibition Milton-Parc: How We Did It, presented at the Canadian Centre for Architecture from September 2018 to March 2019. Currently, he serves as president of Communauté Saint-Urbain, a community project aiming to redevelop the heritage site Hôtel-Dieu de Montréal, such that the site preserves its important status in the community, while attending to the needs of local residents.