Drawing from interviews and fieldwork with former dot‐com workers in San Francisco, this article examines how their spatialized consumption practices formed exclusionary places of privilege during the city's millennial boom of internet companies. I focus especially on the personalized deployment of uneven social power in situations where space is at stake. After considering how this group differed from a history of other urban newcomers, I develop a framework for addressing their spatial effects as gentrification involving privileged consumption practices that surpass residential encroachments. I argue there is an exertion of spatial capital that represents the misrecognition of territorial claims, enabling this cohort to literally take place. I show this through several consumption practices that convert to and from economic, cultural, and social capital. A concluding discussion reflects on the usefulness of this case and framework for reinvigorating key urban‐sociological analytics while confronting influential but unsociological characterizations of contemporary city life.

To explain cross-class spatial relations in 'post-neoliberal' Buenos Aires, this article develops the notion of microcitizenships, defined as group-specific quasi-legal relationships with the local state, entailing both recognition and service provision in order to grant exclusive yet temporary rights to particularized legitimate uses of urban space. This conceptualization contrasts in particular with prominent theorizations of liberal, insurgent and flexible citizenship. Microcitizenships capture the newly fractious, rather than merely fragmented, nature of social rights after the adoption of more inclusive and nationalist discourses in the recovery period following the neoliberal crisis of 2001-02. Argentina has been an icon of both neoliberal and post-neoliberal globalization, making its capital city ideal for the study of changing forms of belonging in the new political-economic context. Taking three central neighborhoods redeveloped in the neoliberal period (1989)(1990)(1991)(1992)(1993)(1994)(1995)(1996)(1997)(1998)(1999)(2000)(2001) which were landmarks of fragmentation, I find they are now characterized by clashes among groups negotiating very different claims of legitimate presence in the same sites. I use ethnographic and interview-based evidence to outline three types of conflicting membership: 'excessive', 'weekend' and 'transposable' citizens. All employ post-neoliberal idioms but invoke legitimizations specifically from disparate geographic scales to stake their claims. Thus, amid inclusionary rhetoric, ironically there are microcitizenships that embody spatio-temporally circumscribed, precarious and especially fractious forms of belonging in the city. Closing considerations address how this concept resonates with a range of contemporary urban contexts.

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Techniques of absence describe some of the potentially anti‐deliberative practices that haunt recently widespread participation‐based governance schemes. Techniques of absence remove certain kinds of people – on a spatialised basis – from crucial ‘democratic’ conversations. To illustrate these, I use ethnographic accounts from the implementation of a citywide participatory budgeting programme in three neighbourhoods across Buenos Aires, Argentina, modelled after the vaunted budgeting process pioneered in Porto Alegre, Brazil since 1989. I position absencing as part of an emergent urban governmentality related to participation. This allows for an analysis of the Buenos Aires participatory budget across very different areas of the city: Puerto Madero, Abasto, and La Boca. Discussion centres on dynamics of participation and non‐participation observed during extensive fieldwork in 2004 and 2005. The research aimed to establish intense co‐presence through participant‐observation, yet instead yielded an ethnography of absences, entailing analysis of how, why and with what consequences there was lacking participation in this participatory experiment. The phenomenon of absencing points to an emergent governmentality that enables ironically pernicious, territorialised regulation of difference, which must be countered to fulfil the promise of such widespread experiments.