Cities and Citizenship

Duke University Press, 1999
• 272 pages, 19 figures

Cities and Citizenship considers the importance of cities in the making of modern citizens.  For most of the modern era, the nation and not the city has been the principal domain of citizenship.  Moreover, the triumph of the nation-state over the city in defining this domain was fundamental to the project of modern nation-building itself.  This volume demonstrate, however, that cities are especially salient sites for examining the current renegotiations of citizenship, democracy, and national belonging.

Just as relations between nations themselves are changing in this current phase of global capitalism, so too are relations between nations and cities.  The essays in Cities and Citizenship propose that “place” remains fundamental to these changes and that cities are crucial places for the development of new alignments of local and global identity.  Through case studies from Africa, Europe, Latin America, and North America, the volume shows how cities make manifest national and transnational realignments of citizenship, how cities inscribe the consequences of these changes in the spaces and relations of urban daily life, how cities generate new possibilities for democracy that transform people as citizens, and how cities are both a strategic arena for these democratic possibilities and a stage on which these processes find expression in violence.

Cities and Citizenship makes available to a wider public essays previously published as a special issue of the journal Public Culture.  This issue won the 1996 Best Single Issue of a Journal Award from the Professional/Scholarly Publishing Division of the Association of American Publishers.  The collection features new essays and showcases a photo essay by Cristiano Mascaro.

Contributors:  Arjun Appadurai, Etienne Balibar, Thomas Bender, Teresa P. R. Caldeira, Mamadou Diouf, Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar, James Holston, Marco Jacquemet, Christopher Kamrath, Cristiano Mascaro, Saskia Sassen, Michael Watts, Michel Wieviorka