Urban Citizenship In a Turbulent Era: Comparative and Relational Perspectives

This paper presentation session builds on our current book project Urban Citizenship in a Turbulent Era. There, contributions will reflect theoretically on the implications of a variety of intensifying globalized transformations related to i.a. housing, care crisis, mass tourism, or climate change for urban landscape of rights, belonging, and participation. This session – guided by seeing difference not only as empirical variations but as theoretically constitutive (Robinson & Roy 2016) - extends this inquiry by offering specifically comparative, including relational analyses of how existing and new forms of lurban citizenship unfold in distinct ways. Urban citizenship constellations emerge namely not only as parallel responses to shared pressures, shaped by particular institutional trajectories, cultural contexts, or geopolitical location. They also arise from relational processes (Hart 2024; Söderstrom 2014; Le Galès & Robinson 2024) through which urban political actors are increasingly oriented towards practices, policies, and struggles of ‘others’ and ‘elsewheres’, treating them as models or cautionary tales, and responding through emulation, translation, or disavowal. Crucially, such relational constitution extends beyond institutional policy transfer (Peck & Theodore 2015) to encompass social movements, practitioner networks, and emergent actors whose identities and repertoires are partly fashioned through awareness, of, inspiration from, or deliberate distancing from urban struggles in other places. Contributions could examine the making of local urban citizenship landscapes through analyses of i.a. trans-national or trans-local shaping of concrete municipal responses to f.e. mass tourism or land insecurity, or constitution of particular urban political subjectivities through engagement in cross-national civil society networks, etc.