Member Call for Papers: Navigating Urban Citizenship. Claiming access to urban space, community and collectivity in a global and long-term perspective (18th to 20th centuries)

Abstract:

For long, research on citizenship has acknowledged the paradox between citizenship as a legal status and citizenship as an active contribution to society. Recent scholarship transcends this state-society ambivalence and its almost exclusive focus on the national level. On the one hand, citizenship has been grounded in the local and dissociated from the exclusive domain of the nation state. On the other hand, research has moved beyond legal prescriptions and social norms of citizenship and looks at the ways in which citizens get access or claim the right to the city by focusing on the practices and the multi-layered institutions and mechanisms they use.

This book builds on these insights and wants to shift the attention to people in urban settings who are not covered by legal frameworks of citizenship, and need to claim access to the city and negotiate their citizenship. We will do so by exploring the boundaries of citizenship, by looking at the informal and formal ways by which groups, individuals or their intermediaries claim their right to urban territory, urban institutions and urban life; and by localizing the sites and spaces of aspiring, claiming and practicing citizenship. We assume that local practices of navigating urban citizenship combine attempts to get access to the urban community (citizenship as legal token), attempts to get access to the urban collectivity (citizenship as social agency), and practices of getting access to urban space (spatial practices of aspiring and obtaining citizenship).

The first focus is on obtaining access to the urban community. Different forms of registration and identification, specific rights and privileges, and instruments of policing and control define the boundaries between legality/illegality or acceptable/inacceptable and set the scene for unequal treatment of particular groups and individuals, who encounter more or less obstacles to obtain citizenship or access to the city.

Parallel to that, practices and mechanisms of belonging through the establishment and membership of associations and other kinds of gatherings can facilitate access to the urban collectivity. Social participation in city life can be stimulated by informal (or incidentally formal) networks of mutual support and solidarity. The focus on the social component of citizenship reveals how people are treated and tolerated and under which circumstances their status as a newcomer or outsider is used by themselves and/or others to facilitate and/or prevent their access to the urban collectivity.

We also draw attention to the spatial dimension of navigating urban citizenship or getting access to urban space. The city dwellers under scrutiny are confronted with spaces of threat and of denied access on the one hand; and with spaces of shelter, support and protection on the other hand. They can settle in spaces of hiding or illicit settlement, or in spaces of accredited settlement. Likewise, the spatial layout of the urban environment is both reflected in and a reflection of the spatial practices of city dwellers. Disputes over property, ownership and right of shelter mark the division between formal and informal, between scales of agency and levels of governance, between social networks and spatial strategies, and thus become an arena for negotiating the boundaries of urban citizenship.

Particular attention should go to people and groups who claim a degree of freedom and use or shape loopholes in the system in order to navigate between regulations and arrangements on different scales and levels of government, thereby manipulating levels of control. Navigating citizenship thus combines the three angles of the book, referring to this degree of freedom or agency to obtain, aspire or claim urban citizenship or to get access to papers, space and the urban collectivity.