Who said that cities are the solution to the future?
Ada Colau 2016 (Mayor of Barcelona)
What is a less obvious way in which cities are important in a global world?
Planetary urbanisation (Brenner 2013)
How do cities interact with the state and citizenship?
- State = sovereign, thus of paramount importance
- City is the arena of substantive citizenship practices
- Yet does this make the city politically distinct from the nation state?
How are cities important to citizenship contestations?
Capital
- Made elsewhere
- Flows across and between borders and cities
Appadurai 1993
What is a cultural consequence of globalisation in cities?
“A global sense of place” (Massey 1994)
- Belonging is multifaceted
How is “Global Citizenship” usually seen?
In the economic context (Purcell 2003)
In what ways is an increasingly global influence on citizenship complicated?
- Opportunities for some
- Barriers for others
Sassen 2005
What is an issue with Young 1999 to redistribute power by rewarding more citizenship rights to those historically marginalised?
- What about mixed race?
- Also only creates a form of reward for past exploitation, without accounting for how similar exploitation continues today
Are urban economic theories universally applicable?
No, they are Eurocentric and essentialised (Lopez de Souza 2010)
Did the UN Habitat III (2016) include the Right to the City in the agenda?
No, it was vetoed by US and China
Give an example of a contemporary appropriation of Lefebvre’s right to the city
- World Urban Forum 2022
- Made Lefebvre’s ideas capitalist (e.g. microfinance loans)
- No political context to rights to the city
In what general ways is the right to the city idea problematic?
- Epistemological and ontological issues
- Western, liberal (?) and white focus
- Ambivalence to gender
How is segregation reflected in the city?
- If you are excluded from the city, a segregated society is created
- Physical space reflects the exclusions and segregations (Dikec 2001)
Why is integration not always brilliant?
If integrated into markets, then integration can be unequal because opportunities cannot be realised by many
(Samara et al 2012)
How can property be exploited for use value over exchange value?
- Squatting in empty buildings and homes
- Acts of citizenship and performing property
- Lefebvre in the most radical context
Vasudevan 2017
What are three critiques and alternatives to the right the city?
- Race - Blackpolis (Alves 2018)
- Gender (Fenster 2005)
- Migrants (McNevin 2006)
What is an issue with alternatives to the right to the city?
- Should be used to decentre, NOT recentre the right to the city thesis
- Rights focus moves too much away from capital
How are migrants excluded informally within the city?
- As “immanent outsiders” (McNevin 2006)
- Links to Dikec (2001) Banlieues
How does De Genova 2017 conceptualise the Mediterranean?
- Europe’s “deathscape” (De Genova 2017)
- At the periphery, outside Europe
- Supposedly not Europe’s problem
Why does the nation state come into conflict with transnational migration?
People who are not part of the nation state should be excluded through immigration control (links to race and citizenship)
Why is it ironic that (and thus viewed as necessary for) Europe to exclude outsiders?
- Neoliberal capitalism
- Should allow for migration to take place
- Also about how people want a right to where the capital they (might’ve) helped make ends up
What is the epicentre of the nation state vs neoliberal capitalist globalisation conflict?
Borders (Mezzandra and Neilson 2013)
What underlies exclusion from Europe?
Race, especially whiteness - an imagined community
Lombardi-Diop 2021
How do borders reify the human condition?
- Makes people illegal
- Nobody is inherently an illegal person, borders turn them into illegal people
