During the late 2010s, pro‐immigrant activists in the politically progressive municipality of Mayville, California (pseudonym) mounted a campaign to enact a radically egalitarian sanctuary city policy (“sanctuary for all”) that would have changed the boundaries of urban citizenship. The campaign crafted compelling and resonant mobilization frames, constructed a broad and diverse coalition, won the support of large majorities of the public, and targeted elected officials who were all supportive of the rights of immigrant residents. Such conditions, according to literature on immigration politics and urban citizenship, should have resulted in success, but this was not entirely the case. Elected officials did open the policymaking process in response to pressure from activists, but a far‐reaching policy never emerged. Drawing on the work of Pierre Bourdieu, this article develops the concept of the ‘bureaucratic field’ to explain how the distinctive and relatively autonomous power dynamics of a municipality shapes policy outcomes (despite advantages in the political field). The article concludes that without a robust theory of the bureaucratic field, contemporary theorists of social movements and urban citizenship cannot explain the disparity between highly advantageous conditions in progressive political fields and the paucity of transformative policy outcomes.
The management of ethnic diversity and its various forms of institutional articulation and implementation are increasingly taking place at the urban level. At the same time, urban scholars consider cities to be battlegrounds where competing groups contest the meaning and articulation of citizenship. In this article, I build on these insights to argue that competition over newcomer reception between different, linguistically divided political coalitions in the city of Brussels are mainly battles over establishing their own definition of citizenship and asserting their political influence. Building on an eighteen‐month ethnographic study in three reception offices (two Dutch‐speaking and one francophone) in Brussels, I analyse the different strategies these offices mobilize to recruit and retain newcomers. I argue that recruitment is a deliberate tool used to influence the political‐cultural demographics of the city and destabilize the linguistic power balance in Brussels. In this way, recruitment becomes a means to attract newcomers to the reception offices in the hope that they will develop a deep connection and loyalty to, and eventually identify politically with, the agency's respective political community. Theoretically, this article develops a perspective that regards the city as a field that becomes constituted in and through the contest between different urban institutions to ‘reel in’ newcomers. In this space, these institutions take up positions for and against each other and assemble strategies to influence the urban populations.
more » « less- PAR ID:
- 10125041
- Publisher / Repository:
- Wiley-Blackwell
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- International Journal of Urban and Regional Research
- Volume:
- 44
- Issue:
- 3
- ISSN:
- 0309-1317
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- p. 395-414
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
more » « less
Abstract -
more » « less
Urban political ecology has conceptualized the city as a process of urbanization rather than a bounded site. Yet, in practice, the majority of urban political ecology literature has focused on sites within city limits. This tension in urban political ecology evokes broader conversations in urban geography around city-as-place versus urbanization-as-process. In this paper, I bring an urban political ecology analysis to examine co-constitutive urbanization and ruralization processes, focusing on sites beyond city boundaries in three empirical case studies located within the broader hydrosocial territory of urban Southern California. By focusing on the rural components of hydrosocial territories, I show that each of the three case studies has been shaped in very different ways based on its enrollment within urban Southern California’s hydrosocial territory; in turn, the rural has also shaped the cities through flows of politics and resources. The paper demonstrates how urban political ecology can be usefully applied to understand rural places, illustrating how processes of urbanization can be involved in the production of distinctly rural—and distinctly different—landscapes. The cases demonstrate the utility of urban political ecology as an analytical framework that can examine co-constitutive urbanization/ruralization processes and impacts while maintaining enough groundedness to highlight place-based differences.
-
more » « less
Indigenous education increasingly seeks to reclaim the institutions of state assimilation as spaces for the dissemination and support of localized forms of knowledge and language use and the valorization of alternative citizenship identities. In this study, I compare two schools in Ecuador to show how divergent ways of teaching Kichwa promote or reject state policies of language standardization and the kinds of citizens foregrounded by them. By comparing the schools’ approaches to teaching Kichwa, I call attention to linguistic registers as they carry out or contest predominant forms of citizenship. These examples provide a pathway to study inclusive language policies and classrooms and to understand the multiplicity of ways that citizenship manifestsin communication.
-
more » « less
Abstract Attending closely to the lived experiences of people moving in and out of Medicaid‐funded institutions, I argue that “the streets” are critical to understanding healthcare in US urban poverty. Exploring the relationship between “the streets” and Medicaid‐funded institutions, this essay asks: How does the relationship between “the streets”—and in the words of my research interlocutors—“life on the other side” shape life in Medicaid‐funded institutions in the Northeast US city? How do the social and symbolic conditions of this relationship—conditions structured by anti‐Blackness—formulate the human in urban poverty? By joining Medicaid‐funded institutions together as a broader health‐governing network, I demonstrate how these institutions become boundary spaces that reveal the socially and symbolically interdependent worlds of “the streets” and life off them. Ultimately, this essay argues that “the streets” contain the social and symbolic conditions that dehumanize the poor through the logics of anti‐Blackness, thus defining the terms of humanization that Medicaid‐funded institutions afford.
-
more » « less
This paper reframes the motto of the right to the city by examining the colliding practices of place‐making among diverse residents such as displaced slum dwellers, rural migrants, and low‐income newcomers in a resettlement colony in Delhi's periphery. Moving beyond this conceptualisation of the “city” within the right to the city motto as an emancipatory and ideal one, I shed light on the “kind” of a city the diverse actors produce in Delhi's periphery. Refraining from suggesting a normative conceptualisation, I argue that the right to the city as practised on the ground is also a right to co‐create an ever‐emerging city with colliding trajectories of opportunities and constraints beyond an inclusive and emancipatory city, as generally perceived.
