Cities and Citizenship

Abstract

Why cities? Why citizenship?Since the eighteenth century, one of the defining marks of modernity has been the use of two linked concepts of association-citizenship and nationality-to establisl1 the meaning of full membership in society.Citizenship rather than subjectship or kinship or cults hip has defined the prerogatives and encumbrances of that membership, and the nation-state rather than the neighborhood or the city or the region established its scope.What it means to be a member of society in many areas of the world came to be understood, to a significant degree, in terms of what it means to be a rights-bearing citizen of a territorial nationstate.Undeniably, this historical development has been both revolutionary and democratic, even as it has also been conservative and exclusionary.On the one hand, for persons deemed eligible, nation-states have sought to establish citizenship as that identity which subordinates and coordinates all other identities-of religion, estate, family, gender, ethnicity, region, and the like-to its framework of a uniform body of law.Overwhelming other titles with its universal citoyen, citizenship thus erodes local hierarchies, statuses, and privileges in favor of national jurisdictions and contractual relations based in principle on an equality of rights.On the other

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 181 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.