City as a Political Idea

Urban citizenship is a frequent topic in studies in social sciences and it carries many different and ambiguous meanings. This paper is focused on the studies of urban citizenship as a type of the new concepts of citizenship, which is based on the idea that the city is a primary social and political community within which individuals and groups should exercise their rights. Contemporary demands for urban citizenship are mostly seen as a corrective of the neoliberal policy and unequal social power reflected on the use of space, and they are based on the viewpoint that a more inclusive policy is needed, which would include more citizens in decision making with regard to the (city) space. In this way, its pronounced commercial and consumer function would be reduced, and its use value would increase. In addition to urban citizenship being related to the idea of the right to the city at the theoretical and practical level, it is also based on the concept of citizenship (as a broader term under which it falls) and this paper also points to its variations.

This essay examines how excluded categories of citizens enact, negotiate and bargain rights in the city through their everyday experiences. The different 'regimes of citizenship' in the city are theoretically characterized as the product of interaction between divisive governmentality of the state and active agency from the citizens. The study uses three cases of regimes of citizenship to bring out these interactions in which spatially and politically, the inhabitants are separated and categorized differently by state-led processes. The cases are infrastructural citizenship, immigrant citizenship and religious citizenship, which are peculiar products of neo liberal modes of growth and governance of urban spaces.

This volume is concerned to return politics to its roots by defining an urban public sphere in contradistinction to the centralised, abstracted form of politics practised within the nation state. The book makes the case for expanding 'the political' as a public life at the expense of centralised abstract state politics through making available extensive public spaces for the exercise of local citizen power at the level of the neighbourhood, town, and city confederation. The key principle here is federation so as to achieve a genuine universalism through the inter-linking of ascending purposes. The perspective is developed against the narrowness of localism. Self-sufficiency or autarchy is a key principle but not in the sense of communities that remain independent of each other. Universalism through interconnection and mutuality as opposed to parochialism is crucial. Indeed, self-sufficiency in a parochial separates communities from each other and cannot fail to re-create the anarchical war of all communities against all over scarce resources that is precisely the political problem to be resolved. From this perspective, the globalisation of economic relations is valued in creating the supra-national material ties that make communal interdependence ensuring universalism possible.

This Cahier de la Faculté d’Architecture LaCambre-Horta aims to contribute to the scientific debate on the right to the city, exploring the variety of objects, processes, structures, and relations – both at the conceptual, abstract and theoretical level as well as at the practical, experiential, and material one – that this idea has inspired. The publication offers multiple analysis of the relations between this concept and its application in the urban planning domain, providing a number of examples on how the concept of the right to the city can give practical guidance on urban development. The focus is thus on policies, programmes and projects that aim to intervene in the diverse processes of urbanization and different forms of urban structures and urbanity present in the northern and southern countries, addressing issues of equity, rights, democracy, differences (socio-economic, cultural, etc.) and ecology. The publication aims to explore the socio-spatial relations embedded in alternative approaches – at policy, planning and design level – and emergent practices of urban regeneration, upgrading, development, and management activated by grassroots movements, government agencies or different actors/institutions. This is the reason why we decided to explore the idea of the right to the city within the dialectical confrontation of “social politics” and “urban planning”. The rationale of this Cahier rests on two main principles. First of all, cities are built on the basis of both semiotic and the material contributions, which means that both imaginaries and practices are fundamental in shaping the urban space, its physical form and technology, its socio-economic structure, the social and spatial relations, the subjectivities, the relations with nature, and the daily life reproduction. Second, as the neo-liberal hegemonic culture has emphasized the urban horizon and the city-level in all its physical, social and cultural aspects, the city is the place where oppositional discourses and practices take place. Alternative imaginaries can challenge prevailing worldviews, show the contradictions of the neo-liberal hegemonic project and propose various forms of alternative sets of norms, beliefs, ideals; while alternative practices emerge at various scales of contestation, springing from deprived and often marginalised local groups and places, but also as national projects: there is a need to analyse the variety of imaginaries and practices that in spite of, and because of, the hegemony of the neoliberal culture, are resilient or are emerging (see Boniburini infra).

Chapter 1 from The City of Reason vol 1 Cities and Citizenship by Dr Peter Critchley This study is concerned to return politics to its roots by defining an urban public sphere in contradistinction to the centralised, abstracted form of politics practised within the nation state. The book makes the case for expanding politics at the expense of centralised abstract state politics through making available extensive public spaces for the exercise of local citizen power at the level of the neighbourhood, town, and city confederation. The key principle here is federation so as to achieve a genuine universalism through the inter-linking of ascending purposes. The perspective is quite opposed to the narrowness of localism. Self-sufficiency or autarchy is a key principle but not in the sense of communities that remain independent of each other. Universalism through interconnection and mutuality as opposed to parochialism is crucial. Indeed, self-sufficiency in a parochial separates communities from each other and cannot fail to re-create the anarchical war of all communities against all over scarce resources that is precisely the political problem to be resolved. From this perspective, the globalisation of economic relations is valued in creating the supra-national material ties that make communal interdependence ensuring universalism possible. The principle of self-sufficiency or autarchy derives from ancient Athens. Yet Athens was not a closed city-state but engaged in a Mediterranean-wide trade in order to secure the resources it needed to satisfy its everyday needs.

Elites are cosmopolitan, people are local. The space of power and wealth is projected throughout the world, while people's life and experiences is rooted in places, in their culture, in their history." According to Manuel Castells, the elites of wealth and power of the new global economy-who probably amount to less than 10 percent of the population even in industrial countries and to less than 1 percent in the predominantly rural societies of the poorest countries-hold no special allegiance to local culture and history. Their primary interest is in the unlimited accumulation of profit and influence. The disempowered great majority of the world's population value local traditions and inhabit specific places, but their voices have been rendered silent. The Castellsian human landscape is thus occupied by a pacified proletariat of consumers and semi-consumers of what the global shopping basket holds. This proletariat is subordinated to the global culture of capital and to structures of elite power that control and commodify its penetration into local spaces. In this representation of the elitist world, politics are a matter of arrangements between states and corporations; popular resistance is meek; and emergent counter-movements are easily finessed before they gain substance. Such is the imaginary of the boardrooms of capital. By contrast, the chapters of this book are focused on the local arena of region, city and neighborhood-local not in the sense of being closed off from global influences, but as the effective terrain for engagement in civic life beyond the household and in relation to the state and the corporate economy. Substitute "citizen" for "people" in the citation above, and a very different imaginary from the one painted by Castells emerges. Whereas people is a generic term that conveys little of substance, citizen is a political term that acknowledges (a) a territorial unit organized for a life in common-a political community; (b) the rights and obligations of members of this polity-the citizens-and their claim, legitimated by democratic theory, to be the sovereign of this polity to which the state must be accountable; and (c) the right of citizens to claim new rights for themselves. Citizenship in this view implies a theory-a normative theory-of political organization. This political imaginary is of an inclusive democracy whose primary practice is specifically at the local level. Though not necessarily in opposition to the extra-political rule of global elites, it asserts a fundamental right to human flourishing.

Society Register

The introduction to this volume pursues two aims. On the one hand, it refers to the problem of distinguishing between ‘right to the city’ initiatives and ‘urban city movements’ as phenomena embedded in different structural moments of society. On the other hand, it attempts to propose a supplement to the discussion about the aforementioned phenomena. This supplement addresses the need to take into account different scales by which the phenomena of self-organisation in the city are analysed. The article offers an example of such analysis referring to the Central European and the Polish perspectives, treating the two stories as separate to a certain extent. As it turns out, each of them offers a slightly different reasoning and different contexts for understanding the evolution of phenomena as well as separate decisive factors shaping the empowerment processes. The reader finds here references to research analysis in sociology, urban and economic history, supplementing the existing kno...

ABSTRACT Human being makes an effort to reach an absolute judgement inherently. Just like “cities”. They want life to proceed under control, its' own rationality and in the direction of cognition. At this point a major conflict begins. Today's modernity - rationality and history - tradition with a long past are waiting to collide for each other. It's almost impossible to creat universal and total structures in the light of all the modern discourses. Every settlement, every street, every building have certain characteristics in terms of that culture, perception and inhabitants. To understand and recognize the city, senses should belong to “it” before brains in contrary to the rationalist approach. Wars, especially the World Wars, throw up modernity to the transience of life. First I.World War, then II. World War caused a major trauma as the destruction of people, cities and countries. Big traumas were began to live in their own environment by individuals that are progressive in modernity. Life almost began to stop in cities that were destructed with their structure, vision, past and future. Immediately afterwards, this concerns and efforts to holding on life began to cover pain. At this point, architectural improvements have been effective for the cities that were demolished and struggled to re-stand up. Many items such as modernization, industrialization, urbanization begin to create traces through the texture and posture of the city. Should ‘connection with the past’ or ‘directly future orientation’ be effective for the settlement that wants to stand up to move on the road? Initially everything should be open, then all administrative and architectural decisions should be taken. First option for the city should restore a living organism with its' own dynamics. A place, in which its' people live their lives with the consciousness of their past, can entirely be "CITY". Necessary decisions about cities' own dynamics should be taken and make arrangements before important connections between regions, intersections, meeting points and transport networks. In order to reach right solutions, planning should be based on the transition from human& building scale to architectural scale. All the vital criterias should be determined carefully by emphasizing on the concepts as transformation, transition, interaction and ergonomics. From now on studies should be made for the creation of a real city. KEY WORDS: modernization, organism, inhabitants, settlement, building scale, architectural scale.

Journal of Contemporary Urban Affairs, 2020

This article investigates the relationship between the transformation of cities and the right to the city. To be able to do this, the problems that are created by contemporary urbanization such as social exclusion, poverty and environmental degradation are discussed in the first part. After that, with a special focus on the period starting with the industrial revolution up until today, the article explains economic and political motivations behind the urban transformation. This part emphasizes how urban change under different forms of capitalism creates and deepens social inequalities in cities. The final part of this article will be a discussion on the right to the city, and its relation to these urban issues.

Cities vs States: Should Urban Citizenship be Emancipated from Nationality?, edited by Rainer Bauböck and Liav Orgad, 2020