Abstract
This paper delineates urban political community from a statist logic of political community and membership, presenting three main arguments: Firstly, it asserts that cities differ fundamentally from states as political communities, characterized by the being together of strangers. This unique dynamic shapes community and membership, with urban political community defined by the proximity principle and membership grounded in indifference. Secondly, it argues that urban political communities are not mere segments of national communities, but distinct entities with different constitutive conditions. This understanding challenges traditional boundaries of citizenship both vertically, toward formal citizenship boundaries, and horizontally, toward territorial boundaries of political community. Thirdly, the paper advocates for cautious formalization of urban citizenship, recognizing the dynamic nature of cities in contesting boundaries and promoting democratic inclusion while highlighting that formalizing urban citizenship is ultimately boundary affirming: It maintains the boundaries drawn around cities by the state.
Introduction
Modern political thought previously regarded political membership in terms of the state. The civic distribution of rights and duties, and the demands they entail, were usually addressed to the modern institution of the nation-state and formalized in the legal status of national citizenship. This principled statism of our basic political concept of membership has recently been challenged, not only by supranational forms of political membership (e.g., European citizenship) but also by cities and urban social movements claiming a distinct form of urban political membership for an urban demos. We find these claims in cities around the world struggling against gentrification, for affordable housing or accessible public transport, and in policy innovations such as city ID cards that grant membership in so-declared sanctuary cities to all residents regardless of formal citizenship status.
From a political theory perspective, these attempts raise a number of fundamental questions: Do cities constitute distinct urban political communities that convey political membership? Who decides who a member of the urban political community is? And should urban citizenship then be constitutionalized as a formal citizenship status? To answer these questions, the paper delineates the urban from a statist logic of political community and membership and makes three main arguments.
Firstly, it holds that cities are political communities of a different kind from states. They are not a segment of the national community or the national community en miniature, but a distinct political community characterized by different constitutive conditions. Given that cities are socio-spatial entities characterized by porous borders, density, and the being together of strangers, they should be understood as communities based on proximity where membership is based on indifference. While the proximity principle has gained some attention in neo-Kantian theories of political community, 1 I anchor it in the sociospatial qualities of cities, which shape the constitutive logic of community and membership in the city.
Secondly, it argues that the constitutive logic of the city makes it a space of constant contestation of boundaries, as it enables ongoing practices of challenging institutionalized statist boundaries of membership and community: In a vertical perspective, patterns of urban community-building and practices of lived citizenship push against the formal boundaries of national citizenship, and in a horizontal perspective, they push against the territorial boundaries drawn around political communities by the state.
Thirdly, this amounts to a cautious case for formalizing urban citizenship. What formalizing urban citizenship can achieve is to provide a secure status for participation in urban cooperation schemes. But it must remain tied to residents only and ultimately maintain the boundaries drawn by the state. Nevertheless, the sociospatial dynamics of urban citizenship as a continuous practice expand beyond institutionalization, making cities spatial anchors for challenging and questioning the various exclusions that statist boundaries entail. This is essential for democracy to move ever closer to the norm of inclusion.
With this cautious case for formalizing urban citizenship, this paper contributes to the literature on urban citizenship with a nuanced perspective that judges the formal status of urban citizenship against the constitutive conditions of the modern city as a distinct form of life, underlining its inherent complementarity with the institution of the state. Political theory and the social sciences mainly discuss urban citizenship as related to migration and integration. 2 The focus is usually on questions of urban autonomy in migration policy—that is, whether cities should have the right to decide on the admission of migrants or whether a different admission policy from the state is justified. Underpinning much of the debate is both the implicit and more explicit normative premise that urban citizenship is only the first step toward a post-nationalization of political membership, and that cities can serve as harbingers of “cosmopolitanism from below.” 3
While I do not wish to judge this normative presupposition, I raise a caveat against the implicit postnational teleology that it inscribes into urban citizenship. As a formal status, urban citizenship must ultimately fall short of this normative claim because it leaves immigration status and the exclusive logic of national citizenship untouched. As I will argue, the formal status of urban citizenship maintains, rather than challenges, statist boundaries. Its normative upshot, however, is the reinforcement of the city as a distinct polity, ensuring a more inclusive community and opening institutional channels for the reappropriation of the city by its inhabitants.
The paper unfolds as follows: First, it frames the city from a social theoretical perspective as a space defined by the copresence of strangers and unique sociospatial dynamics. Second, it develops the constitutive logic of urban membership based on proximity and indifference, contrasting it with state-centric models. Third, it explores the democratic potential of urban citizenship practices in contesting national boundaries. Finally, it makes a cautious case for formalizing urban citizenship as a distinct, residence-based status, separate from national citizenship.
The City as a Place Where Strangers Live
The prototype of the modern city dweller is generally considered to be the stranger. In Richard Sennett’s seminal definition, the city is “a place where strangers meet.” 4 Following Sennett, we can distinguish two variants of the stranger: the stranger as alien and the stranger as unknown. Through immigration and migration, aliens meet in the city and have to negotiate their coexistence. At the same time, the city continues to produce strangeness from within, for example, through the differentiation of lifestyles. Even within autochthonous communities, city dwellers face each other as unknowns and remain strangers despite regular encounters. Living together in the city is not dependent on direct, personal acquaintance. Generally speaking, we do not know the tram driver, the baker, or the doctor personally, but we experience the other person in a specific role. It is this structural strangeness that makes cities attractive to immigrants, because beyond fulfilling one’s role, no further personal expression is required to participate in city life.
As Georg Simmel holds in his canonical text on The Metropolis and Mental Life, 5 city dwellers develop mechanisms of intellectuality, blasé behavior, and distance in order to meet each other as strangers in roles and functions and without revealing their personalities. For Simmel, the stranger exhibits a special mobility of thought and action. He saw the combination of spatial proximity and social distance as a prerequisite for an epistemic position, which he identified with objectivity, lack of prejudice, and freedom, and which “allows the stranger to experience and handle even the close relationship as from a bird’s eye view.” 6 It shows that strangeness has the potential for criticism, innovation, and dynamism, but also for conflict and indifference, which is echoed in more recent works that trace the city’s cultural and economic productivity to the coexistence of strangers in a certain place. Strangeness is associated with a certain cognitive dimension of urban life: “Living in a city in close proximity to many kinds of people, and needing to share and negotiate space with them, develops our skills at coping with complexity and difference.” 7
Although densification and differentiation create spatial proximity and functional interdependence of city dwellers, cities are characterized by loose sociability and point to the limits of community. It is clear that expectations of dense community in the sense of personal affinity and familiarity fail to recognize the constitution of the social in the city—Iris Marion Young once referred to such appeals to community as “anti-urban.” 8 And yet it would be wrong to reduce the urban way of life to the overcoming of an inherited community shaped by tradition and socialization in favor of a modern society based on reason and rationality, as the popular sociological juxtaposition of Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft suggests. Community continues to play a central role in thinking about the city. 9 However, this urban community is not about transcending strangeness, but promises a different kind of community that leaves difference and heterogeneity untouched: a community of strangers.
This alternative ideal of urban community was famously spelled out by Iris Marion Young. According to Young, a multitude of spatially and socially differentiated groups may coexist in the city and are linked to each other through space. Community in the city, therefore, can exist only in the plural. However, because urban life simultaneously generates multiple dependencies, shared problems, and conflicts to be managed, city dwellers have to interact across group boundaries: “In the city persons and groups interact within spaces and institutions they all experience themselves as belonging to, but without those interactions dissolving into unity or commonness.” 10 Like the classics of modern urban sociology, Georg Simmel, Louis Wirth, or Jane Jacobs before her, Young holds that urban space shapes the character of the people who live in it.
There are two crucial points to take from this social theoretical perspective on the city: First, city life is a distinct sociospatial relation of interactions and experiences mediated through space. Shared presence in dense urban space requires everyday negotiations of difference and demands some sort of interaction from city dwellers. Second, these relations remain structurally limited in terms of the function and scope of social roles within which city dwellers interact, and in terms of the space and interactions necessary to organize coexistence in that specific space. This double limitation is the precondition for the possibility that urban dwellers experience spatially mediated belonging without being expected to form common values. This points us to a particular social dynamic of community-building among strangers that is potentially inherent in urban life.
Decoupling Urban Membership and Community from the State
While the sociospatial patterns that hold the potential for the living together of strangers in the city have been widely acknowledged in urban studies, it is less clear to what extent these patterns translate into an alternative political concept of community and, in turn, an alternative concept of urban political membership. In political science and political theory, it is still common to approach the city from a state-centered perspective. A standard definition reads: “At its most straightforward, urban politics is about authoritative decision-making at a smaller scale than national units.” 11 This definition is emblematic because it takes the city as the local state: By focusing on political decision-making and thus on the classical institutions of urban governance, such as mayors and city councils, it not only fails to address spatiality and sociospatial interactions but could also lead to the somewhat hasty conclusion that the city is ultimately just another level—the state en miniature—but not a democratic space of its own. In the end, this would make it pointless to explore genuinely urban concepts of community and membership. In what follows, I take a different route and argue that in order to assess the distinctiveness of the urban community and membership, one must take seriously the constitutive logic of the city. 12 By constitutive logic, I mean the formative conditions of the urban political as circumscribed by the sociospatial patterns of strangeness in the city. I then develop a model of urban political membership based on indifference and of community based on proximity and draw the contours of these models against our standard statist models. In doing so, I use model thinking as an analytical tool for conceptual exploration, which enables the identification of typical features of an issue in a stylized, ideal-typical way, thus allowing theoretical comparison across contexts and clarifying normative presuppositions. 13
Indifferent Membership
When we ask about political community and community-building in the city, the first question to answer is who counts as a member. Membership determines with whom we live and make decisions, from whom we demand obedience and grant access to rights, to whom we owe welfare benefits and demand taxes. From a horizontal perspective, the concept of membership describes a “consolidation of social relations over time” 14 and thus a relationship between the members of a political association, characterized by the mutual granting of rights and the distribution of duties. Citizenship is a particular form of membership that expresses a vertical relationship between the state and the individual and is characterized by the three elements of “a status, a set of rights and duties, and an identity.” 15 The concept of citizenship is both conceptually and historically tied to the emergence of the modern nation-state. It denotes the legal status of being a member of a state and presupposes a collective identity, which was usually grounded in the nation. 16 With citizenship come rights and obligations: Citizens enjoy individual and political rights to engage in self-government, but may also have to carry the burdens of paying taxes, being conscripted, or serving on juries. 17 By contrast, the concept of membership is broader and opens up conceptual access to plural and differentiated forms of political belonging. Membership includes noncitizens who, by virtue of their permanent or temporary residence in a country, are equal participants in social relations and bearers of some rights and duties.
Despite this conceptual difference, we are accustomed to thinking of political membership primarily in terms of national citizenship, as the state is so far the most powerful agent that grants formal membership. It does so in an exclusive manner: Citizenship is conferred by birthright, either by descent (ius sanguinis) or by place of birth (ius soli). Additionally, it can be obtained through the naturalization process, the requirements for which are established by the national community. Michael Walzer once explained the national logic of inclusion and exclusion with an analogy to clubs and families: 18 States are like clubs that set admission criteria and leave the decision to the vote of the members. If these criteria are successfully met, new members are admitted. Moreover, states resemble families in that co-nationals feel a mutual bond and obligation toward one another, even though they have not chosen each other. This is the reason for the selective admission of members. In both cases, the constitutive logic of political membership is collective: existing members of the community decide on the criteria for the admission of future members.
In addition to these two analogies, Walzer distinguishes a third, so-called “indifferent membership,” which he explains by analogy with the neighborhood. He refers to substate units such as cities, where membership depends solely on the contingency of individual preferences and geographical mobility. This kind of membership does not build on cultural or national ties and does not perceive the individual from the perspective of the collective. On the contrary, it is based on individual freedom of choice and makes the place of settlement, and thus also membership in a local community, an individual decision.
Walzer’s analogy of indifferent membership and neighborhood is revealing because it refers to a particular spatial order between localities and the state. The modern territorial state emerged through the spatial mechanism of exclusion on the outside and inclusion and relative homogenization on the inside through bureaucratic and legal organization. Selective admission at the national border and immigration rules became “citizenship’s perpetual gatekeeper.” 19 The nationalization of the border freed substate units like cities from regulatory duties and led them to tear down premodern city walls. Thus, the territorial mechanism of exclusion gave birth to a spatial mechanism of inclusion that paved the way for the emergence of modern cities and indifferent membership. 20 Only as soon as states established exclusive membership, cities were able to develop a different, inclusive logic of membership.
Of course, this is not to deny that there are many socioeconomic boundaries in cities that create de facto exclusion and massively restrict individual freedom of choice, whether through price (rents and property prices) or real walls such as gated communities. 21 In political terms, however, the existing administrative boundaries of cities have lost the selectivity that is constitutive of borders. Cities cannot decide who is a member of the urban community. For this reason, Avner de Shalit has compared the city to a strainer: “People come and go, enter and leave, reside and move away. Cities depend on open borders and the free flow of people, goods, and transportation.” 22 The metaphor of the strainer points to different constitutive logics of political membership in the city and the state: While statist membership means belonging to a political community that spans generations and to which one is in the vast majority of cases bound not by individual choice but by descent or place of birth, local membership is related to the present, limited to a specific space and subject to constant change. National membership sustains a relatively stable political community in terms of the composition of its members, which is alien to cities.
To sum up, I suggest three dimensions that describe the constitutive logic of urban membership and lead to the continuous production of strangeness: First, membership in the city arises from the present fact of residence. This also implies a dynamic change in the membership structure, as membership automatically ends when people move away (temporal dimension); secondly, membership relates to the specific space of the city; urban membership does not give rise to claims against higher political entities such as the state (spatial dimension). And third, the openness of city borders implies a structural indifference toward potential members; cities are not entitled to exclude people. At the same time, members do not have to express their will in order to be accepted. There is an automatic nexus between residence and political membership (factual dimension).
The Proximity Model of Urban Community
How can we build a political community on strangeness, structural indifference, and temporal membership? To answer this question, I turn again first to our statist political imagination and develop against this backdrop in a second step an understanding of urban political community-building. A political community is characterized by a relatively stable, identifiable group of people (membership) that exercises political self-determination over a defined area (territoriality) and has developed appropriate coordination mechanisms (institutions). 23 Historically, political communities have gained stability and permanence within the framework of the modern state, so that the constitutive logic of the political community is usually thought of in terms of the state. There are two political-theoretical models that are used to justify political community within the state: the affinity model and the voluntarist model. 24
According to the affinity model, political communities are based on affinity in the sense of cultural, ethnic, national, linguistic, or religious ties that are said to foster a sense of community and justify mutual obligations among members. 25 Theories of nationalism, for example, describe the foundation of national communities as the kind of social relations that not only constitute but also justify certain special obligations and “reasonable partiality towards compatriots.” 26 What justifies this partiality is the special character of social relations between compatriots, which Miller describes as intrinsically valuable. These relations only arise where people share a fundamental affinity that goes beyond instrumental interests. Similarly, communitarian theories of political community share this claim. Assuming a principled embeddedness of the political, communitarianism emphasizes the communal bonds between individuals that precede the political. Political community is then rather an expression of these antecedent communities that politics cannot bring about on its own.
By contrast, according to the voluntarist model, political communities are based on rational interest, a consensual or contractual agreement to voluntarily engage in a political community. It emphasizes the autonomy of the political and its emancipation from prepolitical communities. This model takes the rational interest and voluntary consent of individuals to be part of a political community as the starting point for political community-building. 27 In a sense, this political voluntarism is the classic argument of modern liberal contractarianism. Whether the aim is to avoid conflict and maintain security, as in Hobbes, to secure property rights and neutral jurisdiction, as in Locke, or to establish a fair basic structure and distribution of public goods, as later in Rawls, the idea of the rational insight of individuals that they are better off by forming a political community is central. In this sense, the political community has above all an instrumental value in guaranteeing the rights, freedom, and security of the individual. The affirmation of voluntarism is something that republicanism shares with the liberal tradition of political thought. The voluntarist model echoes the republican idea of popular sovereignty, which also grounds political community in the choice of a particular group to delegate political authority to the body politic. Popular sovereignty evokes substantial political emancipation and the voluntarist idea that political orders are man-made, not divinely given. In both traditions, liberal and republican, political voluntarism justifies particularization. Like the affinity model, the voluntarist model establishes a distinction between those who are involved in the founding process—whether in the (imagined) contract or an act of popular sovereignty—and those who are not.
This is not the place to engage in a principled debate about the legitimacy and appropriateness of these models. My concern here is more modest; I want to highlight a particular normative logic embodied in these models that shapes our thinking about membership and community. Despite their different motives for political belonging, both models share the constitutive logic of foundationalism. That is, both the affinity model and the voluntarist model presuppose some kind of “authoritative beginning” 28 as the origin of political community. The hypothetical treaty, a constitution, constitutional moments, or historical events of nation-building function as historical or fictive founding moments that link past and present. The normative power of this intertemporal founding narrative serves as a principle of particularization to legitimately set political communities apart from one another. It enables a stable distinction between members and nonmembers of the community and justifies criteria for selective admission of new members.
However, these two models fail to capture political community-building in the city. With their inherent historicism and narrative character, as well as their particularist logic of inclusion and exclusion, they do not fit with the present orientation, spatial anchoring, and indifference of urban membership. Rather, in order to grasp the constitutive logic of political community-building in the city, the spatial mediation of belonging must be the starting point. To this end, I propose focusing on a third, less familiar model of community: the so-called proximity model. Originally developed by Jeremy Waldron, 29 it builds on the Kantian idea that we should seek community with those with whom we cannot avoid interacting. On this basis, neo-Kantians such as Waldron argue for an alternative model that transcends cultural or national affinity, emphasizing the conflictual nature of social relations and the need to unite diverse groups under a common legal order. 30 The proximity model is thus a response to modern societies characterized by migration and heterogeneity, where “communal affinity and cultural and ethnic solidarity are usually part of the problem, not the basis of the solution,” and the task is to enter into political community with those “with whom we are not already bound by ties of kinship.” 31
While neo-Kantians tend to translate the idea of proximity into the legal fiction of being subject to the same law and the need for a common legal system as a coordination mechanism for social conflicts, I develop the proximity model in a more spatial direction. I argue that the proximity model should ultimately be grounded in a spatial logic, in which the physical proximity of people within a limited space is crucial. 32 As the neo-Kantians also assert, the model expresses that “the most fundamental bond we (continue to) have with our fellow citizens is that they reside in our vicinity.” 33 This proximity not only gives rise to conflicts that require legal mechanisms to deal with, but also imposes an imperative of cooperation on those living side by side. It thus treats community as a constantly emerging practice.
Under conditions of spatial proximity, everyday interactions and encounters are unavoidable, offering a way of engaging with the other and the potential to overcome ignorance and mistrust among strangers. The daily experience of working things out might generate a certain solidarity among those living side by side. That holds true all the more for the city, where we are constantly exposed to diverse others with whom we have to negotiate our differences on different occasions in everyday life. It is this social practice of “doing membership,” as I would call it, to which the principle of proximity draws our attention. The fact that these interactions take place somewhere, and are therefore tied to a specific place, urges us to rethink spatiality as a category that transcends heterogeneity and expresses a fundamental commonality. The recent revival of topical thinking in political theory 34 reminds us that there are “important, normatively significant relationships between peoples and places” 35 and that it makes a difference where political action takes place. Around specific places and the obligations they impose on their inhabitants, we find “place-based collectives,” 36 which exhibit specific local patterns of cooperation.
Consider, for instance, the so-called “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy of sanctuary cities. Self-declared sanctuary cities refrain from inquiring about immigration status in certain situations and offer irregular migrants protection from national immigration authorities as the only way to maintain local cooperation schemes. For example, effective law enforcement and public safety require that crimes are actually reported and that witnesses are willing to testify. 37 However, if undocumented migrants are victims or witnesses and fear deportation if they cooperate with the authorities, they are unlikely to do so, jeopardizing the safety and well-being of everyone in the city. The recognition of equal membership to which sanctuary cities are committed, and the maintenance of the necessary cooperative relationships, are thus interdependent and illustrate the practical necessity of understanding the urban community as one based on proximity and indifferent membership.
With the proximity model, we find a practice-based concept of community that reflects the spatial embeddedness of these interactions. It proves analytically fruitful for understanding the constitutive logic of political community-building in the city for three main reasons: First, it raises the spatial question of where politics takes place and allows for a shift in perspective away from abstract norms, historical narratives, and generalizations toward decentralized spaces and substate agents of political community-building. Second, it is based on conflictual interactions that require a coordination mechanism, thus directing the gaze to concrete local practices and negotiations of coexistence. Third, it is inextricably linked to the question of recognition of space-specific individual and collective claims to membership.
Cities and the Politics of Boundary-Challenging
Having carved out urban indifferent membership and proximity-based community against the backdrop of our standard statist models, it remains to be answered what their political upshot is and in what sense they hold democratic potential. In what follows, I argue that the distinct constitutive logics of urban membership and proximity-based community make cities spaces of continuous boundary-challenging; they enable practices of questioning institutionalized boundaries of membership and community. They provide an opportunity to critically interrogate current arrangements and assess their appropriateness against lived experiences. In these lived practices, we can see democratic iterations of the concept of political membership. 38 What it means to be a member of a political community is questioned, contextualized, positioned, and reconfigured in cities. 39
The fact that the boundaries drawn by the state are constantly being challenged by local practices maintains an ongoing dynamic of boundary redrawing that is essential for democracies in their ongoing attempt to meet the norm of democratic inclusiveness—that is, that all members of society should be members of the polity. 40 This urban politics of boundary-challenging works in two analytically separate but practically intertwined directions: Vertically, it questions the boundaries of who should be considered a citizen from the perspective of the local state, thus challenging the formal boundaries drawn by citizenship law, and horizontally, it challenges the territorial boundaries drawn around political communities.
The Vertical Perspective: Challenging the Formal Boundaries of Citizenship
To illustrate what I have in mind when I talk about urban politics of boundary-challenging, let’s start with a recent example from the Swiss city of Zurich. Following the official decision of the Zurich City Council in November 2020 and the positive outcome of the referendum in May 2022, Zurich will be the first European city to introduce an official city ID card, the “Züri City Card.” Following the example of New York and San Francisco, the “Züri City Card” is primarily intended to provide access to services such as schools, hospitals, and libraries for the 10,000 or so irregular migrants living and working in the city, known as “sans papiers.” On the Canton level, the city is also lobbying for the introduction of voting rights for foreign nationals. Voting rights and a city ID card are at the heart of Zurich’s efforts to establish a concept of urban citizenship that includes all residents, which the city administration, activists, and social movements have been campaigning for in recent years. In its efforts to institutionalize a kind of urban citizenship as a status with certain access rights and entitlements, Zurich updates the constitutive logic of indifferent membership and political community-building in the city: The city council wants to position the city of Zurich as a solidary, diverse and cosmopolitan city and make it visible. All residents should feel at home here and help shape social, cultural, economic and political life within the scope of their possibilities and interests. They should benefit from the city’s services and offerings, regardless of their individual circumstances.
41
The growing political involvement of cities in citizenship policy reflects the broader “local turn” in migration governance. 42 While few initiatives are as comprehensive as Zurich’s, many cities are shaping their own membership policies and exerting pressure on states through transnational city networks. Research shows that these networks enable cities to act apart from their national governments. 43 Although “left-leaning” and “progressive” cities are often more active in these networks, empirical evidence indicates that city membership tends to remain stable across partisan changes in local government. The heterogeneity of local governing coalitions further complicates simple partisan explanations. Commitment to urban membership politics cannot, therefore, be reduced to ideological alignment alone. Instead, studies have identified various policy frames reflecting different political rationales for recognizing residents as members, regardless of their national citizenship status. 44 This is not to suggest that cities inherently promote inclusive membership. There are many counterexamples of cities resisting migrant inclusion. 45 Inclusive urban membership is a democratic potential but comes without a guarantee of realization.
But when cities like Zurich strive for it, they point to incongruities between legally formalized membership and lived membership practices. They refer to “the embodied, relational and lived experiences of being a citizen in everyday life.” 46 In doing so, these cities bridge the dichotomy of the formal statist concept of citizenship—to have or not to have the status—and draw our attention to constellations of so-called lived citizenship where claims to citizenship are raised, successfully recognized, or denied. 47 By distinguishing between the practice and status dimension of citizenship, it becomes clear that the formal legal boundaries are not necessarily congruent with the boundaries of political membership as lived and recognized in the urban everyday. 48
By pursuing their own membership policies, these cities challenge the Westphalian view that ties political membership to national citizenship. They create spaces where legal boundaries are questioned through lived practices. With their distinct logic of membership and community, cities may enable political experimentation that can challenge and transform national boundaries from below. We can refer to such processes as “citizenization”; 49 they signal the possibility of other forms of membership and community and realize them in everyday practices, making political membership a concrete experience. 50 In doing so, they lay claim to move closer to realizing the norm of democratic inclusiveness.
The Horizontal Perspective: Challenging the Territorial Boundaries of Political Community
This relates back to the city as a polity. As Michael Saward points out, lived experiences and practices of membership may take on a “polity-constituting” dimension, meaning that they do not necessarily embody a prior assumption about the appropriate political unit to address but potentially transcend the territorial boundaries drawn around political communities by state jurisdictions. 51 This is all the more applicable to proximity-based urban political communities. Consider again the basic features of the proximity model developed earlier: It anchors community in the dual relationship between people and between people and place. The proximity model holds that political communities form around spatially embedded cooperation schemes, which are a mechanism for resolving the conflicts that arise from living in close proximity. This points to a practice-based approach to community that emphasizes not shared values or national narratives but the daily negotiations of living together among strangers bound by virtue of their presence in a common space.
The proximity model is appropriate for cities where the constitution of the community differs from that at the state level, where the community follows the affinity and voluntarist model. Taking the spatiality of local cooperation schemes seriously directs attention to different forms of communities that are bound together by the shared management of the topical realities imposed on them by the space they inhabit. Take, for instance, a public space such as a park, the management of a water supply system, and other components of shared infrastructure, or jointly used educational services—they all connect people to each other and to the place. This gives rise to “place-specific role obligations” 52 in the sense that we all have a part to play in not overexploiting these spatial resources and in negotiating with others how they can be used for the benefit of all (e.g., using water responsibly, not littering the park, not polluting the air, etc.).
An important reason why the proximity model is instructive for understanding urban political community is that it suggests that communities should be organized around shared problems to be solved. Such a reading is invited by a pragmatist account of democracy as developed by John Dewey. 53 His theory of democracy is based on the idea that democracy is fundamentally about shared living and shared experiences beyond mere governmental institutions. 54 Rejecting the pursuit of certainty in democracy, Dewey advocates a democratic experimentalism that evolves through ongoing cooperation and communication, while allowing individuals to pursue their interests and goals. The democratic essence lies in the pragmatic and adaptive nature of cooperative problem-solving, rather than in the attainment of ideal norms or eternal truths. Dewey defines the public as those affected by indirect consequences to the extent that systematic care is deemed necessary. 55 His procedural definition illuminates the practice of cooperative problem-solving in spatial publics responsive to the evolving needs of society.
If we agree with the pragmatist reading of the proximity model that democracy is a transformative endeavor and that political communities emerge across multiple spaces, then it seems counterintuitive to tie them exclusively to the territorial boundaries of state jurisdictions. Problems that need to be solved through spatially embedded cooperation rarely follow jurisdictional boundaries. Think of communities that emerge around the shared management of a park or other public space. It may be that the city lacks the authority to respond to the problem. In some cases, it may even turn out that the city itself is not the appropriate political entity for addressing the problem. This may involve greater inter-regional cooperation, as these assets sometimes cross the jurisdictional boundaries of cities, bridging cities with suburban communities. Or, conversely, it may require smaller-scale neighborhood cooperation within the city’s jurisdictional boundaries.
The formation of political communities around spatially embedded cooperation schemes circumvents clear territorial boundaries and sheds light on the fact that urban political communities, although spatially embedded, do not need to coincide with the jurisdictional boundaries drawn by the state around them. To the contrary, the constitutive logic of urban community-building is characterized by a fundamental dynamism that constantly challenges fixed territorial boundaries and points to situations in which these boundaries prove inadequate to meet the steering needs of those living in the city. Urban communities of proximity address constellations of the “misframing” 56 of democratic representation within the state—that is, boundaries drawn by the state in a way that places relevant place-specific problems beyond the reach of those most affected.
The (Cautious) Case for Formalizing Urban Citizenship
In the previous section, I argued that urban practices of membership and community may challenge both the boundaries of formal citizenship and the territorial organization of politics. They expose exclusions from national citizenship and highlight spatial mismatches between legal boundaries and place-based problems requiring collective solutions. Building on this, I now ask whether these practices justify formalizing urban citizenship as a legal status that secures political inclusion and a stable position for all residents in urban cooperation schemes. My answer will be a cautious yes. While I contend that urban citizenship is crucial for reasserting the city as a distinct polity, it cannot fulfil the more ambitious hopes found in parts of the literature—namely, that it might transcend the state or usher in postnational political communities. 57 This is because the city’s relationship with the state is ultimately complementary. Urban communities are in the paradoxical position of being able to challenge the state while being dependent on it. With indifferent membership at their core, cities generate a spatially grounded form of inclusion and community. Yet this inclusive urban logic remains dependent on the state’s more exclusive legal framework. As such, legalizing urban citizenship also reaffirms the very state boundaries it seeks to contest.
Should all city residents, regardless of nationality, have full political rights in the city, including the right to vote in local elections? This question goes to the heart of the debate on urban citizenship. Recall Thomas H. Marshall’s famous triad of civil, political, and social rights as a way of characterizing the status of full citizenship: 58 In terms of many civil and social rights, residents are already largely equal in everyday urban life. Cities must be inclusive of all city residents, regardless of their formal citizenship status, and provide access to local assets such as education, childcare, health, and the many cultural, sportive, and social services. Conversely, all residents are equally obliged to pay municipal fees and taxes. Against this background, access to the franchise often remains the crucial distinction between lived social membership and full political membership in the city.
I agree with Rainer Bauböck and others that full political membership in the city should be based on ius domicilii, the principle that residence alone grants political rights. 59 This approach best reflects the inclusiveness, present-orientation, and spatial dynamics of urban membership. Unlike national models based on descent or birthright, ius domicilii communities are open to all residents, regardless of origin, and grant equal political status for the duration of residence without further requirements. This aligns with the city’s distinct logic of membership and promotes political equality between mobile and sedentary populations. Compared to the state level, where the distinction between citizens and noncitizens persists, this means a gain in political equality at the city level.
Urban citizenship, grounded in ius domicilii, offers a promising path toward more inclusive and egalitarian membership in cities. By drawing the boundaries of the demos differently at the local level than at the state level, it secures equal participation in urban decision-making and links everyday practices of belonging to formal political institutions, enabling the reappropriation of the city by all who live in it. In doing so, the status of urban citizenship points to the plurality and complementarity of democratic spaces within the state and secures its own logic “not as a claim advocating the demise of the nation-states and nationalism altogether, but on behalf of the decentering or ‘demoting’ the nation from its privileged status in political thought.” 60 Such a decentering of political thought is appropriate in order to recognize the already existing plural loyalties and identities of citizens to different communities. The formalization of urban citizenship ultimately strengthens the city as a polity in its own right. This is all the more important given the political powerlessness that urban dwellers face against the current neoliberal erosion of local governance in favor of private real estate interests. 61
Despite these normative reasons for urban citizenship as a formal status independent of national citizenship, there are some important caveats to make. To assert that ius domicilii communities are characterized by a high degree of inclusiveness does not mean that there are no exclusions at all. 62 Consider again the case of sanctuary cities such as San Francisco, New York, or Zurich, which have introduced city ID cards as a rather comprehensive sanctuary policy. These cities focus in particular on those migrants without a secure residence status, who in many cases have lived in the city illegally for years or even decades, work in precarious jobs, and contribute to the functioning of the city, be it through private childcare, construction, or catering. Should these irregular migrants also be granted formal urban citizenship?
This question goes to the heart of the relationship between city and state. The argument developed here suggests that a formal status of urban citizenship for noncitizen residents, along with their inclusion in the local franchise, is justified due to the indifferent nature of urban membership and appropriate for making urban politics more inclusive, even if political exclusion at a national level persists. However, this argument does not amount to a case for granting irregular migrants a formal status of urban citizenship. The principled indifference of the city toward would-be members and its open borders are only the flipside of national border regimes. The decision about the permeability of state borders belongs to the national demos, bound by the framework of human rights and supranational obligations. A city demos with its own admissions policy would lead to an unjustifiable situation of domination, where a national demos is subject to the decisions of an urban demos. The constitutional division of powers limits the scope of the urban demos. A formal status of urban citizenship is only possible within the constitutional framework of the state, thus maintaining rather than challenging the constitutional division of labor. For the status of urban citizenship to enable secure participation in urban politics, and thus the effective exercise of political rights without fear of repression or deportation, an enabling institutional framework, and hence state protection, is required. The status of urban citizenship itself is “contingent upon securing civil and political rights, which require sovereign state power,” as Nir Barak aptly holds. 63
Cities alone cannot guarantee this kind of protection. The emergence of substate units with open borders hinges on state borders and the associated distribution of admission rights and corresponding obligations. Against this backdrop, sanctuary city policies must remain an exception and a certain irregularity in the political system. Their potential is primarily contestatory: As a “particular site of resistance to particular forms of federal wrongdoing,” 64 they politicize injustices in (supra)state migration policies. Sanctuary cities shame national governments and offer protection against deportation by national immigration agencies. They consciously breach national law and challenge the exclusivity of national citizenship.
In addition to irregular migrants, formalizing urban citizenship as proposed here also produces other forms of exclusion, as it claims that urban citizenship should be limited to residents within the city’s jurisdiction only. All those who regularly spend time in the city for specific purposes or are in any way affected by the decisions of the urban demos, such as commuters, suburban residents, or property owners, should not be part of the urban demos. Political theorists have undertaken attempts to advocate an urbanized version of the all-affected principle. Lior Glick, for instance, argues that the extension of the urban demos to include the “located-life-interests” of commuters is crucial to securing individual freedom. 65 He argues that while the principle of residence is insufficient to capture these interests, it is essential to recognize the importance of both residence and work as integral to individual autonomy. And Jerry Frug and Richard Ford go even further, arguing for a radical shift in the concept of attachment to a city, proposing the abolition of the local ties of the urban demos in favor of a “deterritorialised local franchise,” 66 in which citizens are given multiple votes to be distributed across cities based on personal preferences, allowing individuals to choose their own urban attachments. 67
I believe that these suggestions champion an overly individualistic approach to the city, framing local elections as tools for advancing self-interest and reducing the city to a service provider. This economic model of politics makes it impossible to draw boundaries anyway, as the definition of located-life-interests is highly subjective. Cities would become local suppliers in a market designed to satisfy sectoral needs, while ignoring the collective, relational nature of urban membership emphasized by the proximity model. Residence remains the most compelling proxy for urban membership, as only residents are embedded in the shared fate of a place and its people and therefore in relations that cannot be reduced to individual interests.
Despite my skepticism about interest-based accounts because of their overly individualistic basis, their proponents raise an important point: The group of people who may take part in normatively relevant local cooperation schemes—and according to the proximity model, should be part of the urban community—may be wider than those who reside in the city. Cooperation may involve suburban populations, commuters, or other people who visit the city frequently, perhaps because they have a special connection to the city of their birth or for some other reason. 68 Thinking community through proximity allows us to capture the multiple interdependencies between people and places. It reminds us that cities are inherently deeply relational entities and that their boundaries are somewhat fluid. As such, they need not coincide with the jurisdictional boundaries drawn around cities.
Democratic innovations can provide institutional mechanisms to politically mitigate these dynamic boundaries and bring together proximity-based communities below the threshold of redrawing jurisdictional boundaries. Innovations such as citizens’ assemblies, participatory budgeting, or community land trusts can provide more problem-oriented and therefore more tailored solutions for institutionalizing cooperation schemes across jurisdictional boundaries. Participation in these democratic innovations is not limited to residents and can include a wide range of people and stakeholders. Their experimental nature makes them more flexible institutions to cope with the changing landscape of place-based communities.
This is not a call for constantly morphing and re-morphing the urban demos. As a formal status, urban citizenship will always lag behind the fluid, evolving realities of urban belonging. It remains boundary-affirming, limited by state-defined territorial borders and national rules of admission. Yet formal status cannot contain the more radical dynamics of urban belonging, which often challenge the static frameworks of legal and political institutions. Cities are sites of continuous acts of citizenship where residents negotiate coexistence, resist unjust state interventions, and enact belonging outside formal channels. By their constitutive conditions, cities serve as spatial anchors for democratic self-interrogation, sustaining practices that resist institutional closure and push toward a better realization of the democratic norm of inclusion.
Conclusion
This article sought to deepen our understanding of political membership and community in the city. It has distinguished urban political community from a statist logic by highlighting the different constitutive conditions of political community and membership. These constitutive conditions have been captured by two normative models: the proximity model of political community and the indifferent membership model. In proximity-based communities, membership is based on spatial presence and daily interactions, which supersede national membership status. I have argued that the unique constitutive logics of urban membership and proximity-based community render cities as arenas where boundaries are constantly challenged. This continuous challenge provides an opportunity to critically examine existing arrangements in light of lived experiences. In these urban contexts, the concept of political membership is not only questioned but also contextualized, positioned, and reconfigured. This amounts to a cautious case for formalizing urban citizenship as a status. While I argue for the importance of formalizing urban citizenship for reaffirming the city as a distinct polity, it falls short of expectations raised in the literature that it could overturn statist boundaries and foster postnational political communities. City and state are inherently complementary, leading a formal status of urban citizenship to ultimately reaffirm state-drawn boundaries. Therefore, formalizing urban citizenship reinforces state boundaries rather than transcending them.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
Previous versions of this article were presented at the ECPR General Conference 2021, at the Workshop “Beyond Territory and Sovereignty: The City in Political Theory” held during the ECPR Joint Sessions of Workshops 2024 in Lüneburg, and at a workshop on “Socio-political complexities of public spaces” at Frankfurt University in 2025. I wish to thank all participants of these events for their valuable and helpful comments. I owe a special thank you to Nir Barak, Rainer Bauböck, Avner de Shalit, Katarina Pitasse Fragoso, and Marta Wojciechowska, who provided detailed feedback and helped further improve the argument. I am grateful to the anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful and constructive feedback.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.