GLOBAL MOBILITY, SHIFTING BORDERS ANDURBAN CITIZENSHIP

摘要

Global migration has reached historic levels affecting every single country in the world. One of themost significant effects of this heightened mobility has been that a growing proportion of theresidents of migrant receiving places lack national citizenship and are thus deprived of effectivesociopolitical inclusion, representation, and participation in the localities where they have movedto for work, refuge or retirement. This disjuncture between the spaces of citizenship and daily life,in turn, has led to a devolution of citizenship claims-making from national to urban space. Thispaper begins by identifying four key political economic developments operating at the global scalethat have unsettled the established view of the close correspondence between nationhood andcitizenship. It then focuses on the uses and limits of the increasingly voluble discourse on 'the rightto the city' as a way to create alternative political spaces in which variously excluded groups ofurban inhabitants might empower themselves. Three strikingly different examples of widelydiverse group actions and state responses to illustrate the practical strengths and limits of 'theright to the city' discourse are narrated. We end by offering what we believe to be a more usefulway to envisage and analyse the interplay between global mobility and urban citizenship.