Navigating Urban Citizenship: Claiming Access to Urban Space, Community, and Collectivity in a Global and Long-Term Perspective (18th to 20th Centuries)

For long, research on citizenship has acknowledged the paradox between citizenship as a legal status and citizenship as an active contribution to society. Recent scholarship transcends this state-society ambivalence and its almost exclusive focus on the national level. On the one hand, citizenship has been grounded in the local and dissociated from the exclusive domain of the nation state. On the other hand, research has moved beyond legal prescriptions and social norms of citizenship and looks at the ways in which citizens get access or claim the right to the city by focusing on the practices and the multilayered institutions and mechanisms they use.

This workshop builds on these insights and wants to shift the attention to people in urban settings who are not covered by legal frameworks of citizenship, and need to claim access to the city and negotiate their citizenship. We will do so by exploring the boundaries of citizenship, by looking at the informal and formal ways by which groups, individuals or their intermediaries claim their right to urban territory, urban institutions and urban life; and by localizing the sites and spaces of aspiring, claiming and practicing citizenship. We assume that local practices of navigating urban citizenship combine attempts to get access to the urban community (citizenship as legal token), attempts to get access to the urban collectivity (citizenship as social agency), and practices of getting access to urban space (spatial practices of aspiring and obtaining citizenship).

The first focus is on obtaining access to the urban community. Different forms of registration and identification, specific rights and privileges, and instruments of policing and control define the boundaries between legality/illegality or acceptable/inacceptable and set the scene for unequal treatment of particular groups and individuals, who encounter more or less obstacles to obtain citizenship or access to the city.
Parallel to that, practices and mechanisms of belonging through the establishment and membership of associations and other kinds of gatherings can facilitate access to the urban collectivity. Social participation in city life can be stimulated by informal (or incidentally formal) networks of mutual support and solidarity. The focus on the social component of citizenship reveals how people are treated and tolerated and under which circumstances their status as a newcomer or outsider is used by themselves and/or others to facilitate and/or prevent their access to the urban collectivity.

We also draw attention to the spatial dimension of navigating urban citizenship or getting access to urban space. The city dwellers under scrutiny are confronted with spaces of threat and of denied access on the one hand; and with spaces of shelter, support and protection on the other hand. They can settle in spaces of hiding or illicit settlement, or in spaces of accredited settlement. Likewise, the spatial layout of the urban environment is both reflected in and a reflection of the spatial practices of city dwellers. Disputes over property, ownership and right of shelter mark the division between formal and informal, between scales of agency and levels of governance, between social networks and spatial strategies, and thus become an arena for negotiating the boundaries of urban citizenship.

Particular attention goes to people and groups who claim a degree of freedom and use or shape loopholes in the system in order to navigate between regulations and arrangements on different scales and levels of government, thereby manipulating levels of control. Navigating citizenship thus combines the three dimensions of this workshop, referring to the agency to obtain, aspire or claim urban citizenship, or put otherwise to get access to “papers”, space and the urban collectivity.

The workshop thus combines locally embedded case studies on urban citizenship from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. By collecting case-studies on cities around the globe, we aim to get insights in the ways people and groups encounter difficulties or are supported in their attempts to get access to urban space, community and collectivity, and how it differs over time and place.
The workshop is a co-organization of the Collaborative Research Centre (SFB) 1199: “Processes of Spatialization under the Global Condition” (Leipzig University) and the Scientific Research Network (WOG) “Urban Agency: The Historical Fabrication of the City as an Object of Study” (coordinated at the University of Antwerp). The aim of the workshop is to launch a book project in the framework of the WOG, to be published in the Routledge book series “Routledge Advances in Urban History” (RAUH).

Organizers:

• Hilde Greefs, Centre for Urban History (Department of History), University of Antwerp
• Johan Lagae, Department of Architecture and Urban Planning, Ghent University & Fellow at the Institut des Études Avancées, Paris
• Geert Castryck, Collaborative Research Centre (SFB 1199) ‘Processes of Spatialization under the Global Condition’, Leipzig University

If you want to participate in the workshop, please contact Geert Castryck at geert.castryck@uni-leipzig.de.

Programme:

Wednesday, 9 October 2019

13.30 – 13.45          Registration

13.45 – 14.15          Welcome and Introduction
Geert Castryck (U Leipzig), Hilde Greefs (U Antwerp) & Johan Lagae (U Ghent/IEA Paris)

14.15 – 14.30          Coffee Break

14.30 – 16.45          Panel 1: Access to the Urban Community

Janet Polasky (U New Hampshire), “Cosmopolitan Citizenship Improvised Locally: Marx in Brussels”
discussant: Hilde Greefs (U Antwerp)

Ayfer Erkul (VU Brussels), “Policing Mobility: Daily Interactions between the Brussels Police and ‘Marginal Migrants’, c. 1880–1914”
discussant: Luce Beeckmans (U Ghent / KU Leuven / U Antwerp)

Johan Lagae (U Ghent/IEA Paris), in collaboration with Jacob Sabakinu Kivilu (U Kinshasa), “Policing the Colonial City: Urban Planning and the Politics of Order in the Port City of Matadi, Belgian Congo, 1928–1960”
discussant: Rose Marie Beck / Irene Brunotti (U Leipzig)

19.00 – 21.00          Conference Dinner

 

Thursday, 10 October 2019

9.00 – 10.30             Panel 2a: Access to the Urban Collectivity

Dmitri van den Bersselaar (U Leipzig), “Igbo Urban Migrants and Citizenship in Colonial West Africa: From the Diasporic to the Local and Back”
discussant: Hilde Greefs (U Antwerp)

Donatien Dibwe dia Mwembu (U Lubumbashi), “Les immigrés kasaïens et l’accès à la citoyenneté urbaine à Lubumbashi (RDC)”
discussant: Rose Marie Beck / Irene Brunotti (U Leipzig)

10.30 – 11.00          Coffee Break

11.00 – 12.30          Panel 2b: Access to the Urban Collectivity

Geert Castryck (U Leipzig), “Swahili Urbanity in East Central Africa: Translocal Responses to Ethnic Exclusion and Global Incorporation”
discussant: Rose Marie Beck / Irene Brunotti (U Leipzig)

Aiala Levy (U Scranton / U Princeton), “Theatergoing as Urban Citizenship in Early Twentieth-Century São Paulo, Brazil”
discussant: Luce Beeckmans (U Ghent / KU Leuven / U Antwerp)

12.30 – 13.30          Lunch Break

13.30 – 15.45          Panel 3: Access to Urban Space

Regina Campinho (U Coimbra / U Lorraine), “Negotiating Power and the Power of Negotiation: Macanese and Chinese Entrepreneurship in the Colonial City, 1850s-1880s”
discussant: Hilde Greefs (U Antwerp)

Christiane Reinecke (U Osnabrück), “Claiming Urban Territory: A Socio-Material Approach to Informal Settlements in Mid-Twentieth Century Paris and Algiers”
discussant: Rose Marie Beck / Irene Brunotti (U Leipzig)

Rachel Lee (LMU Munich), “In the Foyers of Bombay: Hotels as Spaces of Urban Collectivity”
discussant: Luce Beeckmans (U Ghent / KU Leuven / U Antwerp)

15.45 – 16.15          Coffee Break

16.15 – 17.00          Closing Discussion