Abstract
The right to the city is like a cry and a demand. . . . [It] cannot be conceived of as a simple utility right or as a return to traditional cities. It can only be formulated as a transformed and renewed right to urban life.
The hype that dominates so much of urban governance today has made it impossible to miss the claim that the 21st century is the century of the city. The statistics routinely cited by bureaucrats, politicians and planners confirm that more than half the world’s population now lives in cities. With the number of city dwellers swelling, the urbanization of more and more of the world will only develop in significance in all kinds of ways. The combination of population growth and increasingly complex urban environments has profound implications for city life. Forecasts of a new, utopian era of opportunity appear as often as warnings of dire environmental catastrophe: unparalleled economic innovation driven by the finely tuned engines of “creative” and “postindustrial” cities on the one hand (Florida, 2002; Landry, 2000) and an imminent “planet of slums” on the other (Davis, 2006). But what exactly does it mean to claim that this is the age of the city, an “urban age”? Beyond the facts and figures that appear repetitively in urban development and renewal strategies, what are the consequences for the relationships between citizens, immigrants, tourists, and outsiders, as well as the many others who inhabit, and frequently struggle within, the city today?
Regionally and globally cities have emerged as increasingly important players. In the context of globalization, cities create and shape connections on a worldwide scale, taking an active role in the formation and conduct of international affairs and world politics, financial flows and economic networks, as well as new forms of city-based cultural linkages, organization, and political engagement. In this sense, cities are caught in a paradoxical tension as both milieu and actors, and they are increasingly charged with a presence and power on the global stage that can compete with that of the nation-state (Calder & de Freytas, 2009; Sassen, 1991). At the same time, cities are seeking to establish themselves as dynamic and attractive cultural centers with viable local economies. In an era of international competition for people, capital, ideas and investment, cities today are ever more conscious of the importance of establishing a distinctive edge, feel and buzz—an urban “brand” that will beckon business and tourism. Constantly in search of a market niche that will hopefully translate into a competitive advantage over other city rivals, cities have become more and more entrepreneurial, adopting place-marketing and branding strategies.
The so-called new creative industries built on the production and consumption of profit-oriented cultural and symbolic goods are central to these strategies of city branding. Through such industries, cultural production and consumption become imbricated in extensive networks of commerce and economic enterprise that are in turn connected in concrete, material, and sensory ways to consciously constructed spaces (neighborhoods, districts, buildings, sites, and events) within the urban fabric. Leisure, tourism, and consumption practices linked to specific urban “scenes” are actively targeted and promoted. Microcultures like marginal and alternative subcultures and transgressive and/or hedonistic lifestyles are also recognized as valuable markers of difference and authenticity and therefore as sites of potential economic value. In this way, specific urban places, and even entire cities, come to be coded symbolically with an image-index of “cool,” “hipness,” or other unique qualities that, ideally, through successful marketing, will attract interest and lead to commercial success. As Sharon Zukin (2008, p. xii) notes, “Branding is a necessary cultural strategy in our age of image inflation. A city that does not curate its image and manage its story is out of date.”
Service and consumption-based sectors also have the added bonus of being associated with a workforce of predominantly young, nomadic, transiently employed knowledge workers, new media professionals, artists, designers, and so on, who, like the spaces in which they work and play, fuse “creativity” and “flexibility” into a highly desirable and, again, economically useful combination. Consequently, “urban entrepreneurialism” (Harvey, 1989, p. 4) and a creative/cultural industries-based urban economy have become models for development and economic growth worldwide. Cast as “speculative actors” responsible for attracting and securing profitable international interest and investment, cities have become increasingly dedicated to simultaneously (and often continuously) reinventing urban space, culture, and identity to meet those goals. Cities must therefore manage a range of heightened expectations demanding that they perform as catalysts of development across urban economies that are as cultural as much as they are economic, but whose “revitalization” frequently produces effects that are socially and politically exclusionary as much as they are symbolically creative.
The city’s emergence as a progressively more important scale of social life has consequences for strategies of urban governance as much as global governance. While cities may be increasingly influential nodes in the composition and reach of world space and world politics, the politics of urban space within a city is now an equally significant terrain on which new sociospatial relations and exclusions are constructed and contested. Entanglements of urban imagery, economic space, inequality, place identity, and patterns of development mean that struggles over history, representation, and belonging inevitably surface. Questions around the production of space and spatial identities, which have become integral to very deliberate programs of urban renewal and regeneration, are also crucial to how urban life is lived and experienced in terms of access to space and inclusion in public cultures and to the kind of “rights to the city” residents are able to expect and claim.
Economic prosperity, creativity, myths of place, charm and questions of taste, social inclusiveness, all interweave as desires, demands, and decrees. These overlapping modalities of urban governance play out as contradictory dynamics in the ebb and flow of processes of spatial formation. To depict the city as anything like a singular, unified, or pregiven spatial order overlooks the juxtapositions of difference that constitute urban life, along with the “circulatory matrices” (Gaonkar & Povinelli, 2003) that traverse its topology and continually add to that spectrum of differences. This means that a city can rarely be understood simply by analyzing its visible landscapes, institutions, or infrastructure (its buildings, monuments, public spaces, etc.), or the official face it presents in marketing and policy documents, advertisements, and tourist guidebooks.
Within a city there are a host of imagined spaces, hidden geographies, contested narratives, along with obvious and not so obvious political, social and cultural histories. The challenge, as Ash Amin and others have put it, is to develop a relational perspective of space that can capture these “multiple registers of urban formation” and “consider the consequences of such forms of co-presence in terms of the politics of urban management and citizenship” (Amin, 2007, p. 104; Massey, 2004, p. 5). In a similar vein, Holston and Appadurai (1999, p. 2) argue that “with their concentrations of the nonlocal, the strange, the mixed and the public, cities engage most palpably the tumult of citizenship.” This tumult of citizenship includes both political protest and grassroots activism as well as the range of everyday antagonisms that occur when sociospatial relations and inequalities are negotiated and contested. It also includes more mundane feelings associated with a sense of belonging and urban sociality, as well as the ordinary activities of urban dwelling, such as access to housing: the range of banal though essential ways of life through which communities are actually sustained.
Within urban landscapes, including within the often neglected and overlooked spaces of the city, urban subjects normally marginalized or excluded from the national imagination can establish forms of local membership in very concrete ways (Ang, 2002, 2004). For immigrant groups in particular, especially those who are unable to access legal citizenship, the city offers the opportunity to both develop and express a sense of belonging that is denied to them at the national scale. This form of belonging is predicated not so much on the exercise of formal equality and membership rights but on the right to claim “presence” in the city. The practices of actually taking up residence in and inhabiting the city, and thereby participating in the creation of urban processes and community formations, and making claims to its spaces, services, and streetscapes, provide the grounds for a distinctive relationship between the city and the urban citizen and for a new understanding of political membership. Indeed, because the city is often the most immediate and specifiable environment in which individuals form communities and make political decisions and lifestyle choices, Nikolas Rose (2000) in fact suggests that “the city can take over from the state as the primary reference point of citizenship” (p. 99).
Yet rather than simply concentrating at a monoscalar level on which the city appears to have now eclipsed the nation-state, we can instead identify the construction of fluid, multiscalar and competing forms of citizenship (Guarnizo, 2012). In large metropolitan centers, for example, we can identify the emerging dimensions of an experience of citizenship that diverges from national identity and formal citizenship, and frequently contests dominant narratives of national culture and history, and which we are calling in this Special Issue urban citizenship. This is a form of citizenship that is embedded in the reconfigurations of identity and belonging that are unique to the everyday settings of urban life. And it is precisely because this kind of citizenship is anchored in concrete realities, and in lived physical and social spaces, that provides its connection to those substantive experiences of struggle and competition within the city that also have the potential to create new public cultures, and also new political claims. As Michael Herzfeld (2001) has put it, “Cities, often created in part to monumentalise the permanence of the nation-state, can easily become the seat of challenges to its vision, when the idea of cultural purity yields to the richness of multicultural experience” (p. 146).
Citizenship, of course, is a term that has most commonly been linked to the nation and is usually taken to represent a formal affiliation to the nation-state, an identity conferred as a nationality, as well as the set of rights derived from this allegiance. This liberal-democratic model of citizenship confers rights to the “citizens” who live within the nation’s borders and submit to the state’s political community, excluding the “foreigners” external to these boundaries. But complex patterns of mobility have made the assumed isomorphism between state, territory, and citizenship increasingly difficult to sustain. Emergent transnational and diasporic cultures, for example, in which identities are multiple and loyalties are dispersed across a number of political communities, frequently challenge formal expressions of a singular national identity. Indigenous and migrant communities also complicate traditional categories of identity and difference, especially within national spaces already fractured by discontinuities between community and culture. After all, the sheer variation of urban cultures disturbs the very notion of a shared community and common culture as the basis of citizenship.
The cultures and economies of certain cities are also themselves often at odds with wider national policies and ideologies, especially when the city acts as a cultural and economic agent of its own, connecting with global traffic that sometimes completely bypasses the framework of the nation-state. The multicultural identities of cities also sit uneasily with more mainstream national imaginaries. With its heterogeneous populations, plurality of forms of belonging, and ever multiplying lines of flight to places and institutions far beyond it, the city, then, gives rise to a significant “unsettling of national citizenship” (Holston & Appadurai, 1999, p. 2). It is this unspectacular, ordinary, yet transformative potential of the city that differs from, and frequently undermines, the more monumental, singular, and unequivocal narratives of nationhood. In other words, the city is a lived, experiential space where the everyday business of both getting by and getting on (with all kinds of others and with neighbors as much as strangers) is worked out—an existence that defies explanation within a “national frame” that can only really consider cultural complexity as a loss of social cohesion and unity. For Kevin Robins (2001, p. 89), this means that “one ‘belongs’ to the city in a very different sense from that in which one belongs to the nation.”
It is clear, then, that the experience of belonging to a city “goes well beyond the question of formal legal status” (Smith & McQuarrie, 2012, p. 3). But in today’s cities, negotiations over “who belongs” are routine, often unavoidable, and increasingly fraught (Anderson, 2000). The governance of belonging in diversity-rich but often infrastructure-poor urban settings has become complex. For while cities may be emerging as powerful centers of creativity, opportunity and innovation, in line with the Richard Florida formula, they are also sites of frequent conflicts over resources, representations, and rights. Newer formulations of citizenship therefore suggest that substantive experiences of citizenship require more than legal status and formal rights bestowed by the state. Rather than simply equating citizenship with a legal definition or category, there is now broad agreement that citizenship must be seen as a practice; a “social process through which individuals and social groups engage in claiming, expanding or losing rights . . . [where] the emphasis is less on legal rules and more on norms, practices, meanings and identities” (Isin, 2000, p. 5). These new formulations also relate fundamentally to the capacity of the citizen to shape or control the particular circumstances of the urban environment, including opportunities to participate in the production of urban space and processes, what Lefebvre (1996) calls “the right to the city.”
The most significant aspect of this acknowledgement of the role of urban practices is the more inclusive reformulation of citizenship that it implies: for Lefebvre, the right to the city is not based on formal citizenship but on inhabitance, and should be enjoyed by all those who reside in the city. As Kofman and Lebas (1996) outline, Lefebvre argues that “we must reformulate the framework of citizenship such that the right to the city brings together the urban dweller (citadin) and the citizen” (p. 34). Everyday life—the daily routines associated with living in the city, of creating, inhabiting, and appropriating its spaces—underpins the right to the city, which is both a right to participate in the production of space, fully and completely, and also a right not to be excluded from urban life nor removed from the city’s renewed and revitalized centers. The city should not just be reserved for “capitalist speculators, builders and technicians,” or for consumption, tourism, and exchange value but must also include the ordinary “users” of urban space (Lefebvre, 1996, p. 168). Lefebvre formulated the idea of the right to the city in the context of major urban transformations in Paris that had resulted in the displacement of working-class groups from the centers of the city. The theme of exclusion is therefore central to his analysis of urban change, as are the shifting relationships between centers and peripheries, integration and segregation, across urban space. The right to the city in Lefebvre’s terms, however, entails more than just access to or usage of space; it also requires a profound transformation of social relations.
Of course, as Lefebvre recognised, it is obvious that different groups do not by any means compete on equal or just terms for citizenry rights in the city. Social differences, divisions, and injustices are spatialized—physically inscribed in the organization and control of space—and social exclusion is not just synonymous with spatial exclusion but frequently enacted through spatial segregation and marginalization. The city is therefore not a space of cozy togetherness, nor a “container” within which struggles over space occur, but rather what Isin (2002) following Lefebvre calls “a battleground through which groups define their identities, stake their claims, wage their battles and articulate citizenship rights and obligations” (p. 50). Importantly, neither groups nor identities exist before they take up a presence within the city; rather, these differences—“citizen,” “foreigner,” “worker,” “immigrant,” and so on—are constituted immanently in the process of the dialogical encounter between groups.
If the city is a battleground for the production of new identities and new forms of social and political mobilization this in turn raises a series of questions: How do new kinds of citizenship actually emerge? What forms of belonging can be identified in such a situation? How do migrants establish a sense of belonging to a city that is not yet their own? Do inhabitants of the globalized city still identify with a nation? How does belonging work when both urban and national allegiances are multiple and dispersed? If the openness of the city defies the closed territorial borders of the nation-state, what kinds of exclusions and omissions accompany the formation of specific city identities? In other words, what is closed off, closed down, or left out in the very attempt to achieve, create, and engender openness?
This issue of Space and Culture seeks to respond to such questions via the prism of a number of specific case studies focusing on two self-declared “open” cities, Berlin and Sydney. The theme of the issue—“Open Cities?”—itself arises from an international research project of the same name undertaken by two interdisciplinary teams of researchers based in the two cities. 1 However, while both cities were brought together in the kind of close investigative proximity enabled by the framework of a single research initiative, the project was not so much concerned with establishing a “compare and contrast” comparative approach than with exploring the different dynamics at work in urban settings revealed by a shared lens of enquiry. Wary of the urban essentialism reinforced by much comparative work on cities, the researchers opted to distance themselves from a method intent on comparing “this city” with “that city,” preferring instead to locate the starting point of the analysis not at the level of the city itself but rather with a question or premise motivating a specific path, or indeed paths, of investigation. The perspective of urban citizenship offered a useful contribution for rethinking citizenship beyond (national) schemes of integration and assimilation in societies that are destined to only become more plural and complex (Beauregard & Bounds, 2000; Holston & Appadurai, 1999). This was also a conceptual pivot central to the development of the wider research project as a whole, and it underpins the different case studies presented here.
While the project was reluctant to engage in comparativism, the idea of a conversation between two cities not normally thought about within the same frame of reference presented a more fruitful mode of enquiry. This allowed the project to decenter the usual axis of comparison regarding “global” cities whose list of iconic names we know so well through an almost constant iteration—London, New York, Paris, Tokyo—while also displacing the focus within much urban studies on stereotypical cities which are taken to represent the contemporary condition in some way (Edward Soja’s “it all comes together in LA” or Fredric Jameson’s work on the same city). It was also a conscious response to Jennifer Robinson’s (2005) call for accounts of cities to both “multiply the spatialities they attend to” and “encompass a greater diversity of cities” (p. 757). The idea of a conversation between Berlin and Sydney thus enabled the researchers to explore the specific differences of regional contexts—a European Union (EU) context and a Pacific Rim context—while still identifying the similar influences on identity and citizenship both cities experience as a result of interconnected systems of globalization.
To focus on the politics of belonging in one city alone is to risk conceiving tensions over difference within a problematic that is internal to the city, or to the history or culture of that city. The project was thus positioned “in between” two contexts, rather than one that looks inward to a single reference point. Moreover, both cities officially proclaim their status as “open cities”—cosmopolitan spaces in which cultural diversity is integral to their identity and regional significance. Sydney, for example, is increasingly referred to as a “global” or “world” city. “Sydney 2030,” the city’s recent urban renewal strategy, repeats this claim. For Lord Mayor, Clover Moore, “Sydney 2030” will create “a city that is dynamic, responsible, exciting, gritty and inclusive,” and it will be motivated by the theme “Green/Global/Connected”. Yet while Sydney makes claims for status as an international metropolis, one with distinctive multicultural success and economic power, it has also looked to Berlin for lessons in urban and cultural planning. In fact, Berlin has long been a source of inspiration: in the 1940s, the Australian painter Donald Friend said that one part of inner-city Sydney had a “genuine Berlin air . . . where everybody is wicked.” 2
The idea of an open city has special resonance in Berlin. Divided, it was the icon of a divided world, reunified it has emerged as a leader in a new Europe. In fact, in both official and popular accounts it has been named “the Open City,” with the definition: “Open means ready for change, receptive, forward-looking, open to what is strange, different, new . . . a redesigned European metropolis of mediation, communication and exchange” (Berliner Festspiele, 1999). Yet it is apparent that while both cities may announce that they are “open,” they are also divided along multiple fractures, socially and symbolically. As the articles here illustrate, Sydney is increasingly divided—by income, education, employment, religion, race, and ethnicity, and a host of other variables. In Germany, “multiculturalism” in particular is a term with mostly negative connotations: it has recently been declared to have “failed utterly,” with some politicians claiming that the age of multiculturalism is now over (“Der Ansatz für Multikulti ist aber gescheitert”). 3 The debates over leitkultur, integration, and parallel societies, which are discussed here in some of the essays, have arisen precisely because of the perceived problems related to policies of multiculturalism, and to the increasingly racially, ethnically, and religiously diverse nature of German cities. The politics of place and belonging in both cities is also demonstrated by the similar debates about immigration and “border control” and conflicts over shared spaces and ways of life.
In this sense, while cities may be critical sites for the “repositioning of citizenship” (Sassen, 2003), they are also places in which these processes find expression in new forms of segregation, marginalization, and violence, as well as new (in some cases expansive, in some restrictive) notions of membership and solidarity. Employing the city as a “tool for thinking” in different ways about such questions of cultural interaction, the articles here examine everyday urban settings as important sites of social change and the negotiation of national culture in light of widespread global shifts and upheavals. They also reflect that approaches to the urban framed by the recentering discourses of both national culture and globalization cannot account for the complex specificities of local settings. So rather than a “sociological accretion of data,” these analyses incorporate the margins and peripheries, the minor and neglected, and include “the litter and not only the monuments of urban experience” (Holston, 1999, pp. 168).
This attention to everyday multiplicity and emergence, to litter as much as to monuments, is a common feature of the articles assembled in this collection. Anja Schwarz, in “‘Parallel Societies’ of the Past? Migrants’ Claims to Citizenship’s Commemorative Dimension in Berlin’s Cityscape,” engages with the ambivalent position of migration history in Berlin’s urban fabric. Schwarz focuses on the difficulties surrounding the incorporation of immigrants, especially those who are not formal citizens, into the civic and commemorative landscapes of cities. She argues that dominant narratives of modern German history, which tend to focus singularly on the Holocaust and binary identity formations of victims and perpetrators, have marginalized the country’s rich histories of immigration. Schwarz explores this commemorative void in relation to Berlin and its long history of Turkish settlement, which is absent from most official accounts of the city’s history. She also addresses how Berlin’s cityscapes have provided sites of belonging—and hence sites of urban citizenship—that have been denied to Turkish communities at a national scale. Through an examination of a celebration that took place in Berlin in 1965 to mark the anniversary of the founding of the modern Turkish republic, Schwarz argues that such subaltern claims to memory and history are indispensable to claims to citizenship, which, in turn, can work to contest and reframe dominant national narratives. The article reveals the layers of history that coalesce around the site of the celebration, demonstrating the complex claims to memory, history, and identity for the multiple “victims” of racism and forced expulsion. Schwarz also connects the voids in Berlin’s commemorative culture to debates about the place of Indigenous and migration histories in Australia’s national culture and shows how enlarging the opportunities for more diverse migrant urban histories also opens the possibilities for more diverse conceptions of national identities and futures.
Sarah James picks up where Schwarz leaves off and focuses on the difficulties Australian Indigenous people face when contesting patterns of major urban development in Sydney, Australia’s largest and most diverse city. In “A Question of Inhabitance: Indigenous Heritage and the Limits of Urban Citizenship,” James addresses the consequences of reducing Indigenous groups’ claims to rights to the “recognition” of culture and heritage at the expense of a “redistribution” of economic and political equity. James focuses specifically on the multiple, conflicting claims to urban identity and heritage in the context of turning Sydney into a “global city” with higher levels of immigration and population growth. These claims have become particularly contentious in relation to the planned housing redevelopments taking place on the city’s peripheries, in places that have considerable heritage significance and meaning for Indigenous groups, both in the past and the present. This is a valuable case study for exploring how urban citizenship actually works “on the ground” and in relation to different, and frequently incompatible, claims to land use, belonging, and heritage within the context of rapid urbanization, globalization, and the ongoing dispossession of colonized groups. James demonstrates that many strategies for ensuring “inclusion,” especially those premised on cultural recognition, actually reinforce long-standing practices of marginalization and systems of inequality. In another context, Mark Purcell (2003, p. 565), extending Lefebvre’s work, argues that “the right to the global city” now constitutes the most useful framework for challenging the neoliberalization of the global economy and growing corporate control over the lives of urban citizens. But, as James shows, the right to actually participate in such discussions cannot always be guaranteed for Indigenous groups that have long been denied basic rights and means of representation.
In “Ghosts of the Open City,” Fiona Allon examines some recent social and spatial transformations in Berlin, including the increasingly entrepreneurial urban development strategies aimed at rebranding Berlin a “creative city.” As Allon argues, this reinvention of urban space has entailed the forgetting and deletion of certain marginal cultural identities at the very same time as other “sexier” urban pleasures have been promoted. The determined erasure of East German history and memory, for example, pursued primarily via the renewal of the built environment, has not only created a void of belonging for many East Germans but also invalidated four decades of life history and memories. Allon focuses specifically on the redevelopment of waterfront areas along the River Spree and explores contested patterns of urban development, regeneration, and gentrification. But, as she argues, current conflicts over the right to the city in Berlin, especially those led by new social movements challenging neoliberal urban policies, often mask the endurance of old forms of exclusion as well as the formation of new kinds of dispossession. They also neglect to consider the highly uneven and differentiated ground of citizenship that is increasingly characterized by the disarticulation of citizenship from rights. Formal citizenship does not guarantee access to certain urban spaces, in the same way that calling for a right to the city does not necessarily mitigate against exclusion for all groups. Migrant groups, for example, have been absent from most of the demonstrations against gentrification and redevelopment, as indeed they are from most of the celebrations of “cosmo-multiculturalism” in the city.
With “Trouble Comes to Me: The Mediated Place of the Urban Citizen,” Justine Lloyd returns the lens of urban citizenship to Sydney and explores the role of media production, and community arts projects in particular, in struggles over the right to the city. The article focuses on the new media projects produced by the western Sydney–based organization Information and Cultural Exchange, and argues that these projects differ considerably from traditional public broadcast models and the scales of national identification they presuppose. Community-based media forms, Lloyd suggests, both arise from, and articulate with, a new geography of mediated urban citizenship that cuts across both the space of the nation and specific bounded localities, gives rise to new points of intersection and new levels of interaction between the self, the community, and the urban polity. Lloyd describes a number of locally made films that engage with the ways young people from Arab and, particularly, Lebanese, backgrounds are positioned on urban peripheries and struggle to access and move across urban space. Analyzing the multiple restrictions on the spatial mobilities and movements of the young people in western Sydney represented in the films, she argues that these media practices not only demonstrate new practices of urban citizenship, in the sense of expanding the public sphere and its representations, but also provide a way of doing “place” differently by reconstituting “local space in a far more radical formation.”
Finally, in “Contextures—Inscriptions of Urban Space in Inner City Berlin,” Russell West-Pavlov explores Berlin’s heavily graffitied urban spaces, weaving together theoretical reflections on citizenship and language with passages that recount the author’s own modalities of urban belonging and peripatetic meanderings through the city. Both serve as simultaneously semiotic and spatial enunciations/inscriptions of civic subjecthood. Through these observations of the city as a scriptural economy that subjects perform, inscribe and erase through movement and spatial practices, West-Pavlov demonstrates how the urban fabric is an interface between text, subjectivity, and the built environment, and an unstable space that is constituted by codes other than those associated with the nation-state. But the city is not merely a blank page on which scripts and subjectivities are inscribed. Rather, as West-Pavlov shows, all are mutable surfaces within the folded urban fabric. The city can therefore be seen as a site that, like the experience of urban citizenship itself, is activated and reactivated according to the rhythms and movements of urban space.
The connections between the city and citizenship are long and extensive. As the articles in this issue demonstrate, today’s city is the primary arena for the negotiation of global movement and engagement, a role that in many ways suggests a return to the past. Yet rather than a neat historical evolution from the city-state to the nation-state and back again, or the progressive models of citizenship such as that advanced by T. H. Marshall (1977), the articles here suggest the benefits of addressing instead the multiplication of different dimensions of citizenship, including the endurance of geopolitical scales, which were assumed to have long been transcended.
The concept of the “right to the city” has reemerged as both a “working slogan and political ideal” (Harvey, 2008, p. 40) in many different contexts, from protests against anti-immigration legislation, specific coalitions of community-based groups, and new social movements, to the worldwide demonstrations and occupations of space during the Occupy Movement. Claims to the city, as Samara (2012) argues, articulate a distinctive sociospatial referent for politics and for a new (but also old) political subject—the urban citizen.