Citizenship Otherwise: Migrants’ Infrastructuring Work As Propositional Politics for a Decolonized Urban Belonging

Tying in with Lemaski’s ‘infrastructural citizenship’ (2017), this paper explores how state and citizens negotiate their relationship through infrastructure. We do this by focusing on the ‘infrastructuring work’ of people with precarious residency status in Brussels. In the Belgian capital of 1.2 million, a large and variegated group of nearly 100.000 people - particularly migrants - navigate, contest and reimagine conventional notions of citizenship tied to territorial boundaries and state-sanctioned frameworks of political membership, access to rights, and belonging, through everyday practices of accessing, making and using infrastructure. Hence, through 'infrastructuring work’, citizenship as an individual and collective subjectivity is performed, enacted and brought into being (Isin & Nielsen, 2008), even when formal citizenship is lacking. At the same time dominant, state-centered paradigms of citizenship are challenged, particularly their entrenched conceptions of legality and legitimacy, and inherent racialized categorizations.

As the building, provisioning and regulating of (access to) infrastructure is one of the tactics of governmentality, we argue that a better understanding of this ‘infrastructuring work’ is central to rethinking and decolonising dominant notions of citizenship. Moreover, we contend that this ‘infrastructuring work’ of migrants in collaboration with a myriad of other formal and informal urban actors, represents a form of 'propositional politics' (Lancione 2019), prefigurating other forms of citizenship and urban belonging that challenge dominant, (neo-)colonial paradigms of belonging.

At the intersection af architecture and ethnography, we utilize critical mapping methods to both unravel the migration regime’s governmentality, as well as the contestating performance of citizenship through rights making or taking. By mapping the embodied encounters of people with precarious (national) citizenship with, in and through infrastructure, we shed light on the diverse and overlapping geographies of citizenship-making in Brussels, offer a decolonial critique of established notions of citizenship and belonging, and start imagine a citizenship otherwise.