Urban citizenship: Insurgencies and recognition

6 Urban Citizenship: Insurgencies and Recognition Key Issues and Themes The spaces of ‘national citizenship’, understood as a simultaneously legal, cultural and societal sense of belonging, have been eroded by the forces of globalization and neoliberalism. While the advent of globalization has undermined the primacy of state-centred citizenship, the resurgence of the local scale of governance and economic development has led to the re-emergence of cities and metropolitan areas as crucial spaces of contention over the recognition of minority identities and a variety of shifting positionalities. The city is the space in which a denationalized dimension of collective and individual belonging appears to be founded on truly cross-national relationships and socio-spatial practices. Urban citizenship, therefore, intersects with post-national senses of belonging and the everyday cosmopolitanism of international migrants. Along with the recognition of ethnicity and cultural difference, sexuality represents a contentious terrain for minority politics in contemporary cities. The negotiation of sexual citizenship typically reproduces the contradictions of the politics of recognition in a context of neoliberal urban governance. 158 Politics as Contestation 6.1 Introduction: the crisis of national citizenship The transformations of citizenship are central to contemporary reflections dealing with the changes associated with the shift towards societal configurations that appear to be more fluid and open, getting rid of the senses of belonging dominating in the twentieth century and in the broader course of modernity. In an era of advanced globalization and postmodernity, the terrain of citizenship becomes at one and the same time more dynamic and rich but also uncertain and ungraspable, being exposed – as this chapter will show – to the influence exerted by a wide range of political, social and cultural forces and related spatial entities, which are not always easily identifiable. Since the time in which the modern nation-state formed in Europe (approximately between the fifteenth and the seventeenth centuries), the idea and the experience of citizenship have been forged primarily by two closely interrelated allegiances: one based on belonging to the national community; another one relating to the jurisdictional order formalized in a state-led constitutional design. The modern and contemporary notion of citizenship thus powerfully evokes the sense of national belonging and the corresponding political, institutional and administrative layer of the nation-state, drawing on two sources of legitimization: the first is cultural, fostered by the inclusion in a national collectivity (linguistic, symbolic, imaginary); the second is political-juridical, built upon the assignment of rights and duties, which are distinctive of liberal democracies. The contemporary experience of citizenship in Western countries is not limited to the cultural and political-legal dimensions, tracing their origins back to the rise of the modern state and of a bourgeois civil society respectively. In addition to those previously existing, a third dimension has taken shape during the twentieth century: that of ‘substantive’ citizenship, which has laid the social foundations (material and no longer exclusively formal and spiritual) underpinning the linkage between citizenship and the national state. Indeed, in the last century the experience of citizenship has been intimately linked to societal well-being, pursued through the state-led provision of public services in the form of the so-called ‘welfare state’ (Marshall, 1950). The actually achieved prosperity has neither been socially homogeneous, nor has it been uniform and constant in time and space, not only at the world scale, but also within the smaller circle of the advanced capitalist countries. The variety of national models of capitalism and the related patterns of political-economic regulation have produced a strong diversification of the ways in which substantive citizenship has been pursued and has finally materialized. Spatio-temporal variegation aside, in the course of the twentieth century contemporary citizenship, understood as a sense of formalized belonging to a collectivity exceeding the boundaries of the proximate community, has been built on the contribution, on the one hand, and the benefit, on the other hand, that the citizen has offered or has reaped within the process of wealth Urban Citizenship 159 redistribution: the assignment of rights and duties has been accomplished through access to public services provided by the state (the rights) and through the payment of taxes and other obligations like the military service (the duties). The three-dimensional characterization of citizenship (cultural, legal and substantive), identified within the boundaries of the national state, has prevailed until the last quarter of the twentieth century. Since then, the primacy of national citizenship has been undermined, on the one hand, by the gradual shrinkage of the nationstate’s public sphere; on the other hand, by the increased relevance of extra-state decision-making processes, relating to politico-geographical scales that have acquired a renewed role in the globalized world (Sassen, 1996b). The formation of a ‘trans-scalar’ system of societal government is, therefore, the most visible effect, widely debated at the political and scientific levels in recent years, of the process that has led to the ‘creative destruction’ of the former political-territorial order (commonly defined ‘modern’ or ‘Westphalian’) and to the rise of a multi-level politicaljurisdictional form (Falk, 2000). The fiscal crisis of the state in the 1970s, the consequent decline of Keynesian regulation and, finally, the neoliberal counterrevolution in the 1980s opened the way for the shaping of an increasingly postnational citizenship regime, one in which the nation-state, however, still retains a pivotal role in distributing and rendering accountable powers of governance, upwards towards international organizations and downwards towards sub-national governing bodies (Hirst and Thompson, 1995). The coming sections of this chapter will analyse the constructive effects linked to the crisis of national citizenship, namely the ‘geographies of belonging’ that have arisen in this context and the related consequences for urban democratic politics. As this chapter will show, the rise of differentiated spaces of belonging should be seen as the result of the mobilization of unevenly empowered actors and subjectivities. In this context, cities and municipalities, which were major venues for the institutionalization of political agency until the formation of the modern nation-state, have become central to the reconfiguration of contemporary citizenship. 6.2 The promises of urban citizenship While the advent of globalization has undermined the primacy of state-centred citizenship, the resurgence of the local scale of governance and economic development has led to the re-emergence of cities and larger metropolitan areas as crucial spaces of contention over the recognition of minority identities and a variety of shifting positionalities. The renewed centrality of cities is the consequence of economic, demographic and cultural processes: first, cities’ increased role as directional centres in the advanced capitalist countries of the West as well as in rising economic super-powers such as China, Brazil and India; second, the rising rates of urbanization (understood as a demographic phenomenon) in the low-income as well as the 160 Politics as Contestation emerging countries of the Global South, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa and East Asia; third, the global expansion of urban lifestyles, especially those of Western origin, favoured by the diffusion of powerful information technologies such as the Internet in the first instance. These processes have led social scientists to emphasize the relevance of ‘urban citizenship’ in a context of declining nation-state. As anticipated, the rise of urban citizenship is related to that of ‘cosmopolitan’, or ‘post-national’, citizenship within public and scholarly debates. The contours of the latter, however, are still uncertain, and its experience is judged to be elitist and class-biased (Calhoun, 2002), despite international organizations’ endeavours to instil in their members a de-nationalized moral conduct, as the case of the European Union emblematically shows (Walters and Haahr, 2005). Conversely, the sense of affiliation with the urban community appears to be grounded in the everyday practices and acts of citizenship, otherwise exposed to the risks of displacement and anomy associated with globalization (Isin, 2000). In many respects, however, the idea of urban citizenship does not contradict that of ‘cosmopolitanism’. In fact, the city is the space in which a denationalized dimension of collective and individual belonging is founded on truly cross-national relationships and socio-spatial practices – for the concentration of international migrants and ethnic minorities in urban areas (Rogers, 2000; Söderström, 2006) – rather than on merely ideological statements or programmatic politics, such as those stemming from the liberal ideal of the cosmopolitan political community (see Archibugi et al., 1998). The celebration of the virtues of urban citizenship in an era of globalization has taken the form also of a neo-utopian thinking looking at the city as a space of co-presence and dialogue (Sennett, 1999) and as a terrain of democratic imagination going beyond the limits of representative institutions (Amin et al., 2000). An influential precursor of this optimistic attitude towards the progressive political qualities of the urban experience is Henri Lefebvre, whose writings on the city have been enthusiastically rediscovered over the last two decades within Anglophone urban studies (see Lefebvre, 1996). Lefebvre believed that the urban environment is most suited to the pursuit of an egalitarian and just society: as a spatial horizon in socialistrevolutionary terms, and as a site of contestation and struggle for the emancipation of subaltern classes within existing capitalist societies (Lefebvre, 1970). The decline of the national dimension of citizenship and the rise of post-national and urban forms of institutionalized or insurgent citizenship intermesh with the proliferation of senses of belonging to minority groups. An increasingly influential view in the social sciences holds that these changes should be ascribed to the broader decline of universalistic modes of thought, triggered by the neo-communitarian turn by which group-based claims and identities acquire renewed influence with respect to citizenship and the related set of rights and responsibilities as well as of behaviours and lifestyles (Maffesoli, 1988; Taylor, 1992; Etzioni, 1993). In spite of conservative and even reactionary degenerations, the neo-communitarian turn has been interpreted also in progressive terms by political theorists looking at the Urban Citizenship 161 mutations in citizenship and social belonging as an opportunity for the rethinking of emancipatory politics. In this context, Nancy Fraser has argued for the reconciliation of the politics of redistribution, received as a legacy of the twentieth century’s welfare state and the related form of substantive and universalistic citizenship, with the politics of recognition, customarily associated with the ‘post-socialist’ era, which focuses on identity-based claims and related demands for social inclusion posed by minority groups (Fraser, 1995a; see Chapter 5). Along with that of ‘community’, the key word of the contemporary political lexicon, as regards the changing meaning and experience of citizenship, is therefore ‘minorities’. The last three decades have witnessed the rise of a wide range of minorities struggling for the recognition of ethno-national identities, religious beliefs and sexual orientations. These groups are motivated to express their presence in the public sphere (and the related ‘rights to the city’) as a response to perceived discrimination and disadvantage, which frustrates the individual and collective aspirations of their members. Cities are not only the places where such claims are spelled out, but are also sites where allegedly fixed (‘essentialized’, as critical social scientists put it) group-based senses of belonging are destabilized. The distinguishing feature of what is commonly understood as ‘urban citizenship’ – the sense of affiliation with the urban community deriving Figure 6.1 Use of urban space for play in Santiago de Cuba (2004) Source: photo © Federico Rota 162 Politics as Contestation from the realm of everyday life – is the fact of bringing together, in either complementary or contradictory forms, the assertion and the hybridization of group-based identities and practices. From this perspective, the discussed notion of the ‘right to the city’, originally proposed by Henri Lefebvre and recently applied to contemporary debates on urban social justice (see Chapter 5), is re-conceptualized by urban scholars against the backdrop of group-based processes of mobilization, representation and subjectification. Some authors have thus suggested to pluralize the Lefebvrian notion of the ‘rights to the city’, understood as the spatialization of the ‘right to difference’ (Holston, 1998; McCann, 1999). The ‘rights to the city’ are not necessarily associated with demands for public services (housing, transportation, health care) or with the envisioning of an inclusive and just socio-spatial order, advocated by contemporary justice movements (see Chapter 5). Rather, their formulation is intended to assert the presence of ‘other’ subjectivities and their right to the appropriation of urban spaces and the negotiation of urban citizenship (Purcell, 2003). To put it differently, conflicts and mobilizations taking shape around the everyday meaning and practice of urban citizenship shed light on the importance of the ‘politics of Figure 6.2 A public space in Brussels, Belgium (2008) Source: photo © Alberto Vanolo Urban Citizenship 163 presence’ in contemporary societies (Phillips, 1998). In such a politics the recognition of the ‘right to be different’ is a crucial objective in the pursuit of urban democracy. The ‘politics of presence’ coexists and in some respects is closely interrelated with social-justice struggles, the former being more specifically focused on groupbased claims of recognition while the latter is concerned with social issues of potentially universal relevance. What urban justice and citizenship movements share is the search for an ‘absolute’ form of democracy, one in which life-related issues (the living politics of the city discussed in Chapter 5), claims of recognition, the contestation of the injustices of capitalism, the critical scrutiny of the contradictions of the neoliberal regime of societal governance and finally the autonomous institutional processes triggered by urban social movements constitute the essence of urban democracy. 6.3 The globalization of migration and the multiple geographies of belonging In the contemporary city viewed as a ‘difference machine’ (Isin, 2002), the sense of belonging that more coherently reflects the ‘spirit’ of the age of globalization and the socio-cultural changes associated with it is in many respects that of ethnicity (and religious affiliation). Historically, urban conglomerations have been favourite destinations for international migrants aspiring to settle on a temporary or permanent basis in the host country.The link between an ancient phenomenon such as that of human migration and urbanization (understood both as a demographic and socio-cultural process) took form in the second half of the nineteenth century, in the wake of the process of industrialization in Western countries and particularly in the United States. Since then, migrations have made a decisive contribution to demographic growth in cities and metropolitan areas of the industrialized countries: from the transoceanic migrations that brought hundreds of thousands of people from Europe to North America (a neo-industrial city like Chicago shifted from having 10,000 inhabitants in 1860 to almost two million in 1910) to the contemporary migratory movements expanding across the globe through international but also local and interregional flows. Illustrative of the more recent stages of migration processes is the case of Shenzen, which is in many respects comparable to that of Chicago and the other neo-industrial towns in the nineteenth century: located in the densely industrialized Pearl River Delta (currently one of the world’s leading manufacturing regions), in the South of China, the city has expanded from having 300,000 inhabitants at the end of the 1970s to about three million in the mid-1990s, with a vertiginous increase in the rate of ‘temporary’ residents, particularly of rural migrants moving to the city, which are reported to be approximately double the number of ‘permanent’ residents. In contemporary 164 Politics as Contestation China, internal migration has implications not only in demographic and economic terms, but also at the political-juridical level, as migrants coming from other regional contexts are discriminated, particularly as regards access to public services and civil rights: a form of denied citizenship based on ethno-cultural origin which has historically affected immigrants of foreign origin also in advanced capitalist countries such as Germany and Japan (Solinger, 1999). In the contemporary era of globalization, which has been influentially portrayed as the ‘age of migration’ (Castles and Miller, 2003), an increasing number of cities and regions which used to be almost exclusively places of departure have become magnets for domestic and international migrants: those in neo-industrialized China of course, but also a countless number of cities and regional spaces scattered all over the world, from Southern Europe to the Middle East and North Africa, from the emerging economies of East Asia to those in South Africa. In Southern Europe, Italy is illustrative of the changing patterns of international migration and the issues arising from these processes: while until the post-war decades Italy was mainly a place of departure towards the Americas and other countries of Western Europe, today this country is at the crossroads of the expanding migratory flows crossing the Mediterranean sea. The influx of migrants and their permanent settlement raises important questions regarding the assignment of political and social rights to the new comers and the ‘second generations’ and their process of social integration. Social problems such as housing precariousness and labour exploitation are most serious in those areas inhabited by immigrants that are affected by civil-rights discrimination, notably in the interstices of urban and metropolitan areas (in peripheral and inner-city neighbourhoods) as well as in the agricultural countryside of the ‘Mezzogiorno’ (see Cristaldi, 2002; Krasna and Nodari, 2004). Another major distinctive feature of contemporary processes of migration is the diminishing importance of colonial legacies and long-term routes of commercial exchange, which were still predominant in the post-war decades (as testified by the concentration of North and West African immigrants in France, of Indonesians and Surinamese in The Netherlands, of Indians and Pakistanis in the United Kingdom, of Turks and Kurds in Germany, and so on). Over the last thirty years, emerging routes and migration relations have taken shape: from the settlement of new ethnonational groups in the high-income countries (such as the Arabs in the United States, the Eastern Europeans in the Euro-Mediterranean region, and the South East Asians in Japan) to the expansion of diasporic communities (the best-known being the Chinese and the Philippines) and the formation of socio-economic and cultural networks associated with migration (especially in religious affairs and in the trade sector). The emerging dynamics and forms of international migration processes give rise to a complex ‘politics of belonging’, throwing light on the limits of citizenship exclusively identified within the boundaries of the nation-state (Castles and Davidson, 2000). Urban Citizenship 165 Ongoing mutations in citizenship are the consequence not only of the importance acquired by extra-national sources of belonging (gender, race, place of living, religion), but also of the fact that the migration experience is more fragmented and geographically mobile, compared to the past, when migrants were accustomed to associate their lives and those of the subsequent generations with the country where they first settled. Rather, contemporary migrations tend to have a temporary and circulatory character, being characterized by frequent back-and-forth movements and intensified exchanges between the host country and the home country, thanks also to the new information and transportation technologies (Vertovec and Cohen, 1999). In recent times, empirical evidence of such qualitative changes has been provided by the economic downturn of 2008–09, when a growing number of international migrants residing in previously booming national economies (for instance, the Eastern Europeans in Ireland and the United Kingdom, the North Africans in Spain) have decided to go back to their countries of origin. At the time of writing (November 2010), it is not clear whether these return flows are permanent or temporary. In any case, this decision has been imposed by the shrinking opportunities in the job market, particularly in the construction sector in which migrants were employed in previous years, which within a short space of time has shifted from being the engine of national economies to being responsible for the big credit crunch which has brought a halt to the process of globalization of the world economy. Return migrations should be understood not only in terms of defence responses to the effects of economic recession hitting the most vulnerable groups of the migrant population. In their policy documents, international organizations underline the shift from a dualistic migration process, based on the opposition between ‘here’ (the host country) and ‘there’ (the home country), to a more fluid and dynamic configuration forged by permanent exchange of information and experiences deriving from the circulation of the most qualified migrants in terms of human capital (Wickramasekara, 2009; cf. Vertovec, 2002). Migrant elites returning to their countries of origin, for instance in sub-Saharan African countries such as Ivory Coast and Ghana, after migrating in Europe or the United States, increasingly embark on projects of innovative entrepreneurship, while in the past being employed in the public sector (now saturated) was the common objective for return migrants (Ammassari, 2004). Acting as entrepreneurs within innovative sectors (such as information and communication technologies) demands being constantly ‘on the move’, using the country of origin (and return) as an interface node in transnational business networks, rather than as the permanent place of residence and work like it used to be in the past. Phenomena of incessant movement and circulation, along with those taking the form of diasporic networks and communities, are at the origin of the formation of material and immaterial spaces of ‘dual’ and ‘flexible’ citizenship, drawing on multiple senses of belonging and a variety of socio-cultural values (Ong, 1999). 166 Figure 6.3 Politics as Contestation Migrants at the border between Thailand and Myanmar (2009) Source: photo © Germana Chiusano BOX 6.1 URBAN FILMS ETHNIC BUSINESS AND COMMUNITY NETWORKS AS A POLITICS OF RECOGNITION – LA GRAINE ET LE MULET (THE SECRET OF THE GRAIN) (FRANCE, 2007, DIRECTED BY ABDEL KECHICHE) Finding it hard to integrate into the mainstream of the host society, immigrants rely on solidarity networks tying the members of ethnic groups. This is the key idea behind this film by the Franco-Algerian director Abdel Kechiche. The story is centred on food, and particularly on couscous, in an unnamed French Mediterranean Urban Citizenship 167 seaport city (probably Marseille). Slimane Beiji, a 61-year-old man, father of two sons and one daughter, is suddenly fired because of ‘flexibility’ policies, after three years of shipyard work under hazardous conditions. Finding himself in an unwaged status, he has to deal with a difficult family situation (he is divorced from his wife, living by himself in a room of his lover’s hotel). He is thus eager to improve his economic situation, by becoming an entrepreneur. His project is to renovate an old rusty ship turning it into a restaurant serving fish with couscous. In doing so, he has to negotiate a number of conditions with local institutions and private actors, such as the municipality, the banks (to get a loan), the port authority (for planning permission). Being a low-income, immigrant worker, the negotiation process proves intricate (despite the help of Latifa, his lover, who holds French citizenship). This leads him to mobilize his inner circle of close friends and immediate family members in support of his project, including his former wife (Souad), his children and above all his lover’s daughter (Ryn). The story revolves around characters showing dignity and humanity, but also behaving in contradictory ways under difficult circumstances. The film offers a realistic description of a close-knit community of expatriate Maghrebis in France, whose positionality within the host society transgresses long-established community boundaries essentially thanks to the symbolic power of ethnic food culture and of couscous most particularly. 6.3.1 The local spaces of citizenship: from ius soli to ius domicilii The multifarious configuration assumed by migration flows has contradictory effects on the conventional link between citizenship and nationality, but also on the ways in which this link becomes an object of contestation and contention. The nation-state remains the political-juridical entity entitled to exert control over international borders, to grant immigration visas and political asylum, to authorize temporary visits for business or tourism and finally to ‘concede’ legal citizenship. Nowadays, the nation-state, therefore, mostly retains its sovereignty concerning migration affairs, as the state’s jurisdiction over this field can be subjected only to international agreements which are reached on a voluntary basis. The situation of undocumented aliens (or ‘illegal’, as they are often labelled in public discourse) is illustrative of how national states remain the authorities entitled to establish the legal boundaries of citizenship. The phenomenon of undocumented migrants has expanded over the last twenty or thirty years, when countries attracting the largest shares of international migrants have toughened border controls and have enacted severe legislation against illegal aliens. In the United States, the historically positive attitude towards international migrants, which led to the approval 168 Politics as Contestation of the generous Immigration and Nationality Act in 1965, has been eroded by subsequent legislations: a bill approved in 1996 introduced the category of individuals being ‘illegally present’ in the national territory; in 2001, the Congress passed the Patriot Act in response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks, allowing amongst other surveillance procedures the pre-emptive detention of ‘suspected’ aliens, including those regularly residing in the US territory. In Europe, the adoption of the Schengen Agreement in 1985 and its implementation since 1990, on the one hand, has allowed the free travel of European citizens within the boundaries of the signing countries, giving rise to the so-called ‘borderless Europe’ (now consisting of 25 countries); on the other hand, it has strengthened the cooperation amongst national agencies involved in border controls, creating what has been defined ‘fortress Europe’ (Kofman, 1995), where the freedom to move for some (the citizens) coexists with the increasingly stricter restrictions being imposed on the ‘other’ (the international migrants aspiring to settle in Europe). In doing so, the ‘liberal paradox’ of economic openness and national political closure characterizing immigration policy in European countries over the post-war decades has been reproduced in the context of ‘unified Europe’ as an opposition between the ‘outside’ and the ‘inside’ (see Hollifield, 1992). In the global North, therefore, the last two or three decades have witnessed the expansion of the phenomenon of unauthorized (or ‘illegal’) immigrants (around 11 million in the United States and up to 8 million in the European Union, according to official estimates1), staying in the host country even for several years and frequently bringing in immediate family members. Apart from those born in countries recognizing birthright citizenship (such as the United States – see also below), the younger members of illegal migrant families experience the strongest sense of injustice, as they are denied access to social and civil rights in countries in which they have grown and have received their education. As Monica Varsanyi (2006) has shown with reference to Los Angeles in California, the problems created by the denial of formal citizenship can be alleviated by the local state’s provision of civil rights as well as of documents proving the identity of unauthorized migrants, through local non-citizen voting (in school-boards elections, for instance), in-state tuition for undocumented students and driver licences. Surveillance procedures that have been recently adopted at the federal level, however, are weakening the localadministrative pathway to citizenship. Driver licences, for instance, were used as a universally accepted form of identification until the approval of the Real ID Act in 2005, which established stricter standards for state-issued driver licences and other identification cards. In Western European countries, where regional governments and other localities have an established role as service-providers, the localadministrative pathway to substantive citizenship is even more clearly delineated than in the United States. In these contexts, urban citizenship is built upon local policies that represent a de facto consent for the formal membership of individuals who are already regular participants in the life of their immediate communities (see Rogers and Tillie, 2001). Urban Citizenship 169 The described phenomena shed light on the important link – conventionally unrecognized by national jurisdictions and international law – between place of residence and citizenship for undocumented migrants. While the national and federal levels of government witness the rise of exclusionary dynamics of formal membership, the opportunities offered by local states adopting progressive legislations towards residing migrants call attention to the emancipatory potential of ius domicilii (residents are entitled to social and political rights denied at the national and federal levels), as opposed not only to the conventional jus sanguinis (or right of blood, by which access to citizenship is conditioned upon the ethno-national affiliation of ancestors), which is historically prevailing in Europe, but also to jus soli (or birthright citizenship, important examples being the United States and France, but also Germany since 2000), which is more inclusive than the former but it persistently links the recognition of nationality and citizenship to the nation-state as a place of birth. 6.3.2 The practices of urban citizenship There is not only the local structure of institutional opportunities that grants access to citizenship rights for those being excluded from formal membership. Extra-state access to substantive citizenship can be also the consequence of the ‘politics of presence’ taking shape at the grassroots level, on the basis of ethnicity, gender and class, in the multiethnic spaces of contemporary cities and metropolitan areas. Minority politics can take the form either of organized urban social movements or of silent and invisible social practices, namely individual and collective behaviours reproduced in time and space fostering a sense of affiliation with the urban community. The environment of cities, and most notably that of globalized urban and metropolitan areas, is particularly favourable to the politics of presence. The so-called global cities, a term originally used with reference to the directional centres of the world economy (London, Tokyo and New York, according to Saskia Sassen’s 1991 pioneering work) and in more recent years applied to a larger number of cities across the world (see Chapter 1), are indeed crucial spaces in which informal social practices and explicit political claims coalesce under the banner of ‘post-national citizenship’ (Isin, 2000). The organized movements of ethnic minorities and the practices of citizenship do not take place in a vacuum, having to deal with a complex and contested politics of multiculturalism, which has become a pillar of contemporary political life within liberal democracies but also in numerous newly democratized countries. In Western countries, in particular, the recognition and the social and political integration of ethnic minorities are commonly held policy objectives for national governments and also local administrations (as shown in the previous section), even though these processes increasingly take place under conditions of ethnic and political tension. Inter-ethnic contrasts and conflicts have indeed arisen in numerous countries across Europe, including those that are not new to the immigration experience. 170 Politics as Contestation This situation has led scholars and policy analysts to signal the crisis of multicultural citizenship in Europe (Triandafyllidou et al., 2006). Examples of these tensions are scattered all over Europe. Cities in Northern England, in Britain, in 2001 and in minor subsequent events, witnessed violent incidents between British Asians and white youths, the latter being provoked by ultra-nationalist political groups such as the British National Party (Amin, 2003; Phillips, 2006), while the terrorist attacks on London’s public transportation system in July 2005 carried out by four unsuspected Muslim men living in the United Kingdom have exacerbated prejudice towards ethno-religious minorities. Similar feelings have emerged in the tolerant and cosmopolitan city of Amsterdam, in the Netherlands, following the assassination of filmmaker Theo Van Gogh and other minor episodes of Islamic radicalism (Uitermark et al., 2005), which have prepared the ground for the rise of the antiIslamic PVV (the Party for Freedom led by the charismatic Geert Wilders) as the third largest political party in the newly elected Parliament in 2010. Islamophobic sentiments are also behind recurring discussions over the use of the ‘veil’ (the hijab) by Muslim women in France, albeit justified by reference to Republican values of parité (sex equality) and laïcité (secularism) (Body-Gendrot, 2002). In the last decade, in France these discussions have taken place in a context characterized by continuous tension materializing in violent clashes between young proletarians of foreign origin (particularly of North African origin) and the police that erupted in the banlieues of the metropolitan areas of Paris and Lyon (see Chapter 5). Although they take less explicit and institutionalized forms compared to those in the West, minority practices and claims of urban citizenship are also present in emerging countries of the global South where politico-economic elites and the wider public alike are reluctant to recognize the distinctive identity of ethnic minorities, particularly of minorities allegedly threatening the state and the moral integrity of the nation. The latter is the case for cities in which ethnic divisions are linked to broader geopolitical conflicts. From this point of view, the Middle East, an area which is central to the understanding of contemporary international relations at the world scale, offers evidence of the complex politics of urban citizenship taking shape in ethnically fractured cities, particularly those in which there is one dominant national or ethnic group. With reference to this context, geographer Anna Secor (2004) has analysed the condition of Kurdish women of rural origin living in the Turkish city of Istanbul. In the absence of a government policy of recognition and social inclusion, Kurdish women mobilize a wide array of strategies and tactics taking place within the realm of everyday life, in the attempt to renegotiate their second-class citizenship. In Turkey, the national government does not recognize the regional and national identity of Kurds and the related linguistic, cultural and religious background (such as the Kurdish dialects forming a distinct macro-language). As Anna Secor points out, notwithstanding the discriminatory attitude towards this ethnic group, living in Istanbul – a large city of 12 million inhabitants in which about 250,000 immigrants settle every year on a permanent or temporary basis – offers Kurdish women the Urban Citizenship 171 opportunity to participate in a learning process of citizenship formation. Such a goal is pursued by developing socio-spatial strategies combining explicit claims of minority belonging (in the context of community life and participation in women’s associations) with uses of anonymity, especially within disciplined and institutionalized settings such as the school and the workplace. The combination of strategies claiming the right to be recognized as a nation with those aimed at exhibiting an apparent sense of affiliation with the mainstream national identity testifies to the complex and contradictory politics of citizenship formation in a country like contemporary Turkey deeply marked by the struggles of an ‘insurgent’ ethnic minority. An urban environment like that of Istanbul, therefore, proves to be fertile ground for the rise of ‘spaces of insurgent citizenship’ (Holston, 1998), owing not only to the conditions of anonymity characterizing metropolitan areas, but also to the opportunities for social emancipation offered to women of rural origin. Even though they have access to formal membership, the sense of affiliation with the urban community allows these women to escape a twofold destiny of marginality, deriving from the fact of being Kurdish and women respectively, while engaging in a process of ‘substantive’ citizenship claiming. Another example of minority politics taking shape in the Middle Eastern region is the Arab-Israelis (or Palestinian-Israelis, according to an unusual but in principle more correct definition) living in the seven ethnically ‘mixed’ cities in Israel, with a vast majority of inhabitants of Jewish origin (around 80 per cent): Haifa, Tel Aviv, Lydda, Ramla, Acre, Nazareth, Jerusalem. With reference to this context, Leibovitz (2007) has analysed the processes of political mobilization and the struggles for substantive citizenship in the cities of Haifa and Tel Aviv-Jaffa, where the presence of the population of Palestinian origin is recognized by municipal authorities, even though the process of recognition takes place – for instance, in the ‘red’ Haifa (the stronghold of the political left in Israel) – mainly at the symbolical level, while the effective representation of Palestinian interests and claims within the local institutions is limited. Being excluded from the institutionalized sites of local politics is only one aspect of the process of marginalization. In a densely populated and economically dynamic city like Tel Aviv, the Arabs – the vast majority residing in the Jaffa district – experience the highest levels of social exclusion, housing hardship and school drop-out. This condition of political and social marginalization, and of discriminated citizenship, has been denounced for many years by Palestinian civil-society organizations, both of Christian and Muslim descent, such as Harabitta, an association based in Tel Aviv, which has taken the lead in several political and opinionmaking campaigns advocating the rights of the Palestinian-Israelis since the late 1970s. Local authorities have responded to these mobilizations by relegating the radical organizations to the margins of the local institutional arena (and the related system of subsidies), while privileging dialogue with allegedly moderate and collaborative associations, in many cases of religious orientation rather than of political-nationalist (and secularist) background as in the case of Harabitta and others. In Israel, a formally liberal democracy, though deeply marked by the colonial domination over 172 Politics as Contestation the Palestinians (see Chapter 5), the politics of citizenship is therefore shaped by a contradictory dialectic between the local structure of opportunities and the selective incorporation of minority claims and interests, on the one hand, and the national scale of government, characterized by persisting geopolitical impasse with strong implications for international relations, on the other hand. The relatively advanced institutionalization of minority politics and particularly of the relationships between civil-society organizations and local governments thus differentiates the Israeli-Palestinian political arena from the Turkish-Kurdish one. Even though the Palestinians living in formally democratic Israeli cities such as Tel Aviv and Haifa are enabled to draw on political opportunity structures, while the Kurds and particularly the Kurdish women in Turkey are denied political participation, these minorities have in common a stance towards the city as the spatiality devoted to the struggles for substantive citizenship. The latter take place in the presence of state-level political systems leaving no room not only for their recognition as a nation, but even for their capacity to exert influence on broad politicaleconomic processes and for pursuing their aspirations to individual or collective emancipation. While for ethnic minorities struggling for recognition the risk of ‘normalization’ (through the cooptation within the dominant governmental rationality) lies in the institutionalization of their claims and discourses, for social movements forming around another major source of diversity such as sexuality the same risk lies in the commodification of their role and identity, which undermines the foundations of radical and dissident action. 6.4 Dissidence or normalization: the quandaries of sexual citizenship The previous chapter of this book has underlined the importance of I.M. Young’s theory of ‘the politics of difference’ for contemporary debates on social justice. In referring to the city as a venue for the politics of difference, Young (1990) argues that the encounter with the stranger characterizing everyday life in urban environments is an erotic experience, owing to our instinctual attraction towards the Other. There is no doubt that the urban experience of difference has been always associated with the intersected realms of the erotic and the sexual: in fact, prior to the arrival and the settlement in large cities of the contemporary ‘others’ par excellence like the migrants (even though migration is an ancient phenomenon, its urbanization and internationalization trace their origins back to the age of industrialization and to that of globalization, respectively, as previously said in this chapter) are sexual minorities that almost by definition embody the senses of ‘alterity’ and otherness attached to the urban experience, to be either stigmatized or celebrated by the established authorities and public opinion alike. Today, the ambivalent attitude towards sexual alterity takes the form of a contradictory politics, combining a proud assertion of the sense of belonging to the homosexual Urban Citizenship 173 community with the assimilation and cooptation within the spaces of institutional governance and the circuits of the capitalist urban economy. In order to appreciate the contemporary significance of the assertion of homosexual identity it is worth referring to a foundational moment in gay activism, namely the so-called ‘Stonewall riots’ (from the name of the nightclub where it all began), which erupted in 1969 as a protest over police raids on gay bars in the ‘alternative’ (and subsequently gentrified) Greenwich Village of Manhattan, in New York City. An act of insubordination and civil disobedience is thus at the origin of the gay movement, like other discriminated urban minorities (such as the African-Americans in the United States). In the following years, movements advocating the rights of homosexuals formed across the United States and in Western Europe alike, symbolically referring to the Stonewall riots. Since then, the gay movement has embarked on a complex evolutionary pathway leading to the recognition of its constitutive claims, but also to their institutionalization, with the formation of professional organizations representing the gay community and also with the proliferation of pro-gay initiatives promoted by local governments in collaboration with civil-society organizations (Cooper, 2006).The process of institutionalization has a number of positive aspects, as it brings to light needs and social issues relating to the situation of homosexuals, who are for instance still victims of acts of discrimination and harassment. However, the other side of the coin of the phenomenon of recognition is the normalization of homosexual subjectivity and its incorporation into the politico-administrative machine. Being aware of this danger, radical ‘queer’ movements have constantly renewed the ‘tradition’ of claiming the right to sexuality as an exercise of dissident citizenship and resistance against assimilation.2 Recent years, generally characterized by the rise of a worldwide movement contesting global capitalism and neoliberalism, have seen the production of non-institutionalized, autonomous queer spaces – in the form of improvised events and street performances as well as physical spaces (like squatted buildings) challenging conventional forms of sociality – in which the rituals of mainstream gay politics and culture are ironically deconstructed (Brown, 2007). The stubborn dissidence of large sectors of the homosexual movement does not stem only from sentiments of pride, but is also an active response to a growingly pervasive tendency to domesticate insurgent sexual subjectivities, for instance by making them instrumental in the revitalization of urban capitalist economies. Today, this tendency is fostered by the culturalization of an increasing number of realms of city life (see Chapter 2); a process encouraging the legitimization and celebration of gay identities within the public sphere and their subsumption within the urban capitalist process. A crucial sector in which the ‘integration’ of gay communities into the mechanisms of the urban capitalist economy becomes explicit is the housing market: as previously said (Chapter 4), this sector is central to the structuring and regeneration of urban capitalism, particularly in the context of the neoliberal deregulation of mortgage markets and the associated ‘financialization of home’ (Aalbers, 2008; see Chapter 4). The leitmotif of early debates on homosexuality within urban scholarship concerned the role of homosexuals (along with artists and other creatives) as gentrifiers of culturally attractive neighbourhoods. Despite the 174 Politics as Contestation stereotypes and even the ‘urban legends’ constructed around the gay–gentrification nexus (Lees, 1996), there is no doubt that in some contexts homosexuals have made a decisive contribution to broad processes of urban regeneration and more specifically to real-estate revitalization, particularly in neighbourhoods and areas of special significance for gay and lesbian communities: the already mentioned Greenwich Village in Manhattan and Park Slope in Brooklyn, both in New York City; the Marais, the old Jewish quarter in central Paris, and a host of culturally vibrant and tolerant urban areas located in the largest cities of the United States, Europe and even Eastern Asia (cf. Lauria and Knopp, 1986). In a book on sexual citizenship, British scholars David Bell and Joe Binnie (2000) have reflected on the ambivalence of the urban politics taking shape around the recognition of sexual minorities. Writing from the geographical standpoint, they reconstruct the multiscalar spatialities of sexual minorities’ senses of affiliation: from transnational sexual citizenship, produced by the globalization of culture and lifestyles, to urban citizenship, associated with the transformation of the contemporary city into a leisure and entertainment machine, one capable of increasing the value of sexual minority identities through the construction of Gay Villages, the organization of Gay Pride parades, and the invention of a number of spaces and events dedicated to the celebration of homosexual difference, enjoyed by tourists and other city users and consumers. Ironically, as a result, these celebrations lead not just to the recognition of sexual minorities, but to the desexualization of the ways in which sexual alterity is commonly represented, being reduced to a quickly consumable icon of the ‘creative city’. In a subsequent article dealing with issues relating to the urban governance of sexual citizenship, Bell and Binnie (2004) have engaged with the work of Iris Marion Young, questioning the romanticism of her thesis about the intrinsic eroticism of city life, while highlighting the difficult and dilemmatic process of sexual citizenship formation. On the one hand, sexual minorities struggle for the recognition of their community identity and for obtaining adequate civil rights; on the other hand, they deal with the temptation of becoming involved in the seductive and economically rewarding mechanisms of the entrepreneurial city, epitomized by the representation of the gay as a ‘good citizen’ in a neoliberal context of urban renaissance, like in Richard Florida’s theorization of the creative city. In their view, the dialectic between the recognition and the commodification of homosexual identities and subjectivities follows in the wake of the compromise that is at the origin of the constitution of a legitimate citizenship space for the queer movement: the assignment of rights and duties, on which the process of citizenship negotiation is founded, takes the form of an exchange between the act of recognition by mainstream society and the commitment by those being recognized (‘the minorities’) not only to behaving in a decent way, but also to actively contributing to the achievement of general prosperity and to accepting the ‘rules of the game’ as residents, consumers and economic agents. On the basis of the implicit compromise that is behind the negotiation of citizenship, there is a dynamic of selective legitimization of minority Urban Citizenship 175 spaces, practices and codes of conduct by mainstream society and the established authorities. The homosexual is portrayed as an active and responsible citizen, when he or she dresses the part of homebuyer, real-estate investor, wealthy consumer or creative professional. On the other hand, homosexual communities are seen as an intrusive presence, when they express a desire to display their bodies as a way of asserting their sexuality: in this case, local-government managers resort to segregated spaces (the ‘red light districts’), rigidly disciplined and regulated for sanitary purposes (Bell and Binnie, 2000). From the vantage point of sexual minorities’ ambivalent space of citizenship one can observe, therefore, the contradictions and the dilemmas of urban governance at the time of neoliberalism. The neoliberal practice of governance and citizenship is founded on the recognition that freedoms (of verbal and physical expression) and capabilities (‘capacities to act’) are key to the pursuit of the ‘right to be different’ (cf. Tully, 1999). The process of recognition produces selective dynamics of inclusion and institutionalization through an array of norms of behaviour, formalized rules and routinized conventions, underlying a complex politics of ‘distinction’. This observation brings us to some concluding reflections on citizenship and the practice of absolute democracy in the contemporary city. Figure 6.4 Italian government’s campaign against homophobia (November 2009) Source: http://www.pariopportunita.gov.it (Italian Ministry for Equal Opportunities; accessed November 2009) Note: The text on the left translates as follows: ‘Certain differences never matter in life. Refuse homophobia.’ The denser text on the right (on the back of the leaflet) reads: ‘Refuse homophobia, don’t be the different one.’ Note the ambiguity in the phrase ‘don’t be different’, which implicitly reaffirms the social stigma towards ‘diversity’. 176 Politics as Contestation BOX 6.2 URBAN FILMS BEING HOMOSEXUAL IN ISRAEL/PALESTINE – HA BUAH (THE BUBBLE) (ISRAEL, 2006, DIRECTED BY EYTAN FOX) The changing forms and dynamics of the politics of sexual citizenship across the world are closely related to the local politico-institutional context and to sociocultural specificities. Whereas Western cities generally witness an ambivalent process of recognition of sexual minorities and incorporation into local governance structures, sexual-minority groups living in cities in the South experience persistent dynamics of exclusion and stigmatization. From this perspective, Israel is a peculiar case of tolerant attitude towards the ‘insiders’ (the Israeli citizens) combined with the social and cultural marginalization of the ‘absolute outsiders’ (the Palestinians) as well as the ‘internal outsiders’ (the Arab citizens of Israel: cf. section 6.3.2). Ha Buah (The Bubble) is a film describing the impossible love relationship between two young men, the Israeli Noam and the Palestinian Ashraf. The urban setting is central to the narrative: on the one side, the progressive and cosmopolitan Tel Aviv appears as a bohemian space of freedom and fun, where the two young men are free to express their feelings in public. However, the actual situation of Tel Aviv is that of ‘a bubble’, an oasis of happiness and tolerance in an ethnically divided country where religious tensions and fundamentalisms are strong and where Palestinians live under conditions of apartheid. One of the two protagonists, Ashraf, is a Palestinian without a permit to stay in Israel and this forces him to keep his identity secret, using a fake name (Shimi). At the same time, being homosexual is hardly accepted by Palestinian society, even in the relatively large city of Nablus where he lives. When Ashraf ’s future brother-in-law, a Hamas activist, discovers that Ashraf is gay, he starts threatening him about revealing his secret unless he marries his cousin. Even Ashraf ’s sister, who is particularly close to him, hesitates to accept her brother’s sexual orientation. In addition to cultural prejudice, the political conflict between Israelis and Palestinians nullifies the very possibility of regular relationship. A bomb attack in Tel Aviv triggers a chain of violence leading first to the death of Ashraf ’s sister and subsequently to Ashraf ’s decision to commit a suicide attack in Tel Aviv – an extreme act of desperation that will lead to the death of the two lovers. Tel Aviv’s representation in the film challenges the stereotypical image of a Middle Eastern city, with an example of a cosmopolitan, 24-hour city, only occasionally hit by terrorist attacks (unlike Jerusalem which is under permanent terror threat). Urban Citizenship 177 Rather, Tel Aviv appears as a normalized space of exception, where the freedom to act and the possibility of presence (of being irresponsibly young, homosexual, anti-militarist) coexists with a state of permanent fear and constantly imminent suspension of the law. 6.5 Conclusion: the ‘common place’ of citizenship The illustrative part of this chapter has focused on the experiences of two social groups, the international migrants and the sexual minorities – leaving aside those of other disadvantaged minorities such as the disabled, children and the elderly – which are revelatory of the potential but also the ambivalent implications of the struggles over urban citizenship. While being at odds with the national state and the conventional spaces of representative democracy, these groups look at the urban realm as a venue for the process of claim-making, even though the issues they raise are not necessarily ‘urban’ in the strict sense, such as those relating to the access to social and political rights for migrants and the recognition of alterity for sexual minorities. Migrants and sexual minorities view the city as a space of belonging challenging the constraints of group-based identities as well as a shelter space, which arises from the assemblage of experiences, social practices and claims. This role of the city as a source of ‘relationality’ (cf. Massey, 2005) and ‘protection’ for the excluded and marginalized minorities is not played by other political spatialities: neither by the legitimate space par excellence such as the nation-state, which is responsible for the vast majority of injustices and absences for which disadvantaged groups mobilize, nor by the space of the ‘international community’, which is still evanescent in political-juridical terms, being either powerless or under the yoke of national interests. In an era of advanced neoliberalism, the urban realm is fertile ground for democratic politics, but is also a space being governed in systematic and sophisticated ways, through the selective recognition of freedoms and the redistribution of capacities to act. Processes of incorporation are enacted not only by local and national governments, but also by the forces of post-Fordist capitalism, those capable of mobilizing powerful mechanisms of seduction and cooptation of alternative subjectivities and the related affective qualities and institutional potential. This implies that the contemporary city, with its public sphere attracting subjectivities located in a fluid space at the crossroads between contestation and participation within processes of urban government and wealth accumulation, should not be seen as a space of innocence, where the lost ideal of democratic citizenship, betrayed by the decline of the nation-state and by the fading cosmopolitanism of the elites, lastly resurrects. 178 Politics as Contestation Rather, the city is a ‘common place’ (see the notion of the common in Hardt and Negri, 2009), at one and the same time ordinary and unpredictable, which contributes to the pursuit of egalitarian and democratic politics by collecting a multifaceted repertoire of citizenship practices, hanging between the search for autonomy and the temptation of political, economic and cultural normalization. Notes 1 Data for USA from http://www.census.gov ; data for EU from Eurostat (2010), p. 192. 2 Literally, queer means strange, unusual, but nowadays this term is commonly associated with homosexual people, relating in particular to activist movements challenging monistic understandings of gay culture and identity. A related term, which takes into account the pluralism of homosexual culture, is LGBT (Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender). Activists and radical intellectuals – such as Michael Warner (1999) – lay emphasis on this term as opposed to those positions accepting the normalization of homosexuality, for instance through the recognition of gay marriage, a widely debated issue in the United States and other liberal democracies. In theoretical terms, a major source of inspiration for the queer movement is the work of Judith Butler and her critique of gender essentialism and dualism (especially Butler, 1990).