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.
Postcolonializing Berlin is an experiment in rethinking (Western) cities from the South. It embraces conceptual innovations from thinkers in African, Latin American and Asian urban studies to complicate the stories we tell about contemporary Berlin. My argument proceeds in four steps. I begin by asking what makes the North-South division in urban studies so problematic, and what needs to happen to shake up those categories. Then I share some of my own trials and errors in looking at Berlin-Neukölln through the lens of 'the South', before offering an alternative frame, which I call 'urban fabricating', as a way of inquiring into and perceiving changing urban settings. In the final part, gambling parlours in Berlin-Neukölln move into focus, where different forms of fabrication are at work: the regeneration officials' vision for the future of the neighbourhood, the inspectors' improvisations on the casino law, and the casino owners' ways of muddling through at the edges of the law. Rather than searching for the one new theory to shake up urban studies, fabricating is, I suggest, an unagitated approach to the actual processes through which cities are made.
The emergence of ‘situational awareness’ as a response to the perception of a new terrorism in European cities marks a significant shift in the conceptualization of security. Focusing on a recently introduced German Federal Police programme that trains ordinary officers in their capability to handle ‘complex life-threatening situations of police operation’, the article explores how situational awareness introduces a warrior logic into policing and urban subjectivity and modifies our understanding of security at large. It points us to the limitations of preparedness and concretizes the hitherto elusive call to resilience. Three analytical dimensions – space–time, sensing and connectivity – will be developed to render the situation thinkable for empirical research as well as to grasp security as a ‘live’ mode of government.
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