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The Solidarity City movement that has emerged in Europe over the past few years shows the growing significance of urban policy coalitions for the struggle against the rightward drift and the ever more restrictive border and migration policies at the national and European level. In this context, the notion of urban citizenship has become an important point of reference when it comes to the question of how cities can counter repressive European border regimes and foster access to rights for non-citizens and cultural pluralism on a local level. Drawing from the authors’ empirical research on various European cities, as well as from the literature on global social inequalities, urban citizenship and radical cosmopolitanism, this chapter investigates the Solidarity City networks and the ways they envision new forms of citizenship.

In recent years, the concept of ‘urban citizenship’ has become an important reference for cities and municipalities positioning themselves in the context of the European border and migration regime. However, the reference often falls short. Especially in the case of urban policies focusing on ‘diversity’, the affinity to neoliberal ideas of citizenship is noticeable. The article analyses the European ‘Intercultural Cities Programme’ (ICC), in which more than 100 cities participate, as an example for this trend. Here, the meaning of citizenship is being shifted

In this symposium, we explore how urban citizenship is about expressing, if not producing, difference, and how fragmentation of claims affects urban citizenship and right to the city movements with their universal, all-inclusive ideals. Investigating social movements, political participation and conflicting diversities in public space in Tel Aviv and Berlin, we see a trend towards a diversification of interests, a weakening of movements, and even a competition over rights and resources rather than a development of mutual support and solidarities among various groups on the pathway to a livable city. This tension, we argue, deserves attention. Radical urban scholarship and politics need to better understand the historical and place-specific contexts that structure the formation of citizenship claims and the courses that citizenship struggles take. Celebrations of urban citizenship as a more contextualized, community oriented, and bottom-up framework (in comparison to national citizenship) should therefore be complemented by a careful investigation of their fragmented and fragmenting practices.

Since the first signing of the Schengen Agreement in 1985, Europe's borders have been changing profoundly. New actors, rules and institutions have emerged and transformed the character of the European border regime. This paper argues that cities play a crucial role in this process. They have become an important arena, where the re-categorization and re-scaling of spaces and borders, and the expansion and diversification of the modes of control and enforcement within Europe take place. These dynamics are contradictory, however, as examples from Germany and Italy show: on the one hand, local state agencies, as well as private and semi-private institutions on the local scale increasingly participate in the monitoring and in the enforcement of migrants' legal statuses. On the other hand, local actors and institutions are also carving out place-specific spaces of rights and recognition for migrants. This dual process turns the urban realm into a conflictive site of negotiating, shaping and interconnecting loca...

Over the past 25 years, Berlin has undergone a rapid process of neoliberalization. This article argues that the city’s transformation has been heavily crisis-driven and fueled by a strong political agenda. Two watershed events are crucial for an in-depth understanding of the dynamics at work: The collapse of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) in 1989, followed by a neo-conservative and nationalist, entrepreneurial strategy for the reunified German Capital; and the financial crisis of 2001, which brought a coalition between Social-Democrats and Socialists into power that strongly emphasized Berlin’s (sub-)cultural and cosmopolitan identity, but effectively put the city on a fierce austerity track.

A review of the book "The Point Is to Change it: Geographies of Hope and Survival in an Age of Crisis," edited by Noel Castree, Paul A. Chatterton, Nik Heynen, Wendy Larner, and Melissa W. Wright is presented.

The article reviews the book "Remaking Urban Citizenship. Organizations, Institutions, and the Right to the City," edited by Michael Peter Smith and Michael McQuarrie.

All along the European border, the year 2006 set new records: Spanish authorities reported 6,000 refugees dead, drowned in the Atlantic Ocean while trying to reach the Canary Islands, off West Africa.1 Hundreds more suffocated in containers, trucks, and cargo boats in the ports of London, Dublin, and Rotterdam, or froze to death in Eastern Europe. Others, locked up in one of the innumerable internment camps spread all over the heart of Europe and North Africa, desperately decided to end their own lives.2 At the same time, Europe reported the lowest rate in years of refugees officially seeking asylum. This list obviously doesn't point to a more peaceful world. What it indicates instead is that in Europe the criteria and procedures for securing legal refugee status have become so restrictive that most migrants no longer bother to apply for it. In 2006, Germany for example counted only 20,000 petitions for political asylum, the lowest number since 1977. If we include the member states of the European Union (EU), that number rises to 200,000.3 However, the real story of the border regime, and its constriction of the category for legal entrance and residence, is in the rising body countThis article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.