Remaking Urban Citizenship: Organizations, Institutions, and the Right to the City (Comparative Urban and Community Research) - Softcover

Smith, Michael Peter

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1412846188 ISBN 13: 9781412846189

Publisher: Routledge, 2012

Synopsis

Due to heightened global migration and transnational mobility, many residents of the world’s cities lack national citizenship in the places to which they have moved for work, refuge, or retirement. The disjuncture between citizenship and daily life has led to devolution of claims from national to urban space. Within nation-states characterized by structured inequalities, citizens have not reduced their social differences. This leads increasingly to calls for greater direct involvement of marginalized classes in reshaping the institutions and spaces directly affecting their lives.

These concerns—cities without citizenship and people without political power—inform the agendas of organizations that seek to restructure urban citizenship in more democratic directions. Remaking Urban Citizenship focuses on the uses and limits of such political organizations and coalitions, shows the various ways they pursue expanded rights within the city, and describes the institutional changes necessary to empower global migrants and popular classes as urban citizens.

Offering individual or comparative case studies of cities in the United States, Europe, and China, contributions to this volume describe the development of actual practices of organizations working to reinvigorate citizenship at the urban scale. Collectively, they locate institutional forms that help migrants lay claim to their cities, show how migrants can become politically empowered, and identify how they can expand their rights or find other ways to belong.

About this title

About the Author:

Michael Peter Smith is distinguished research professor in Community Studies at the University of California, Davis. He is co-author of the award-winning book Citizenship across Borders, and is the series editor of Transaction’s Comparative Urban and Community Research book series.  

Michael McQuarrie is assistant professor of sociology at the University of California, Davis. His work examines urban organizations and transformations in urban governance and authority.

Review:

"Rich and varied . . . Remaking Urban Citizenship offers an exciting framework and new foundation for considering . . . questions about contemporary urban citizenship, migration and social movements."

—Cuz Potter, Urban Studies Journal

“Smith and McQuarrie's new edited collection belongs in the bookshelf of every urbanist concerned with the possibilities, limits (and contradictions) of city-based claims and movements for greater inclusion and democracy in the current moment.  It is one of the best recent examples of a kind of engaged scholarship that has a politics without romanticism.  The original essays all show sympathy for challengers to the current order while remaining true to the kind of critical analysis these movements most need.  Based on carefully-detailed in settings from China to Europe to the United States, and bookended by rich theoretical reflections, the book powerfully makes the case that if cities are changing, so are their grassroots and the meaning of ever-elusive urban rights.” 

—Gianpaolo Baiocchi, Associate Professor of Sociology and International Studies, Brown University

About this edition

• Publisher: Routledge
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 1412846188
• ISBN 13: 9781412846189
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 246