Unequal urban rights: Critical reflections on property and urban citizenship

Abstract

In the fast-growing cities of the Global South, urban forms of citizenship and urban rights are unequally defined and locally negotiated. The aim of this paper is to add the themes of property, landownership and housing as perspectives in the understanding of urban citizenship and to demonstrate how the urban is an arena for the negotiation of rights. This is done by examining urban citizenship and the graduated system of locally negotiated rights, including the right to property, the right to belong to an urban community and the right to urban resources. The research is located geographically in Nepal, where a typology of different classes of citizenship is developed in order to explain how classes of urban citizenship have different rights in the urban. Central to this is an analysis of unequal rights and unequal access to essential urban resources and services. The paper finds that the definition of (new) classes of urban citizenship in Nepal is critically embedded in historical practices and social structures. This demonstrates the relevance of further research into exclusionary practices in urban areas in the rapidly urbanising Global South and adds to the discussion of different types of urban citizenship and unequal rights to the urban space.

Limited urban citizenship: the case of community councils in East Jerusalem

“…Moreover, the voices of the marginalized are often ignored by several layers of government institutions that exercise their authority to deprive residents of their right to the city (Bhan 2009). Indeed, the politics of citizenship are not necessarily benevolent, as citizens are often discriminated against based on ethnicity, race, economic status, or religion both in the national and urban spheres (Yiftachel 2009;Brøgger 2019;Blokland et al 2015).…”

The migration–urbanisation nexus in Nepal's exceptional urban transformation

“…However, migrants rarely possess all these resources on arrival, which is one of the reasons why on their arrival, migrants do not settle permanently but continue moving until they have found a secure location of settlement (Andreasen & Agergaard, 2016;Carlos, 2013;Sharma et al, 2014). Thus, the process of becoming urban is an extended process, not least because rural-urban migrants are regarded as "temporary" for a long time (Brøgger, 2019), and related to this, they continue to base their livelihoods on multiple strategies in and beyond the urban (Potts, 2011).…”

Collective Property Rights and Social Citizenship: Recent Trends in Urban Latin America

“…CLTs are key in doing so. They not only serve as a mechanism to provide housing affordability for low-income segments of the population, they also exist as political communities which provide avenues for building more localised forms of citizenship, or what we might term as ‘urban citizenship’ (Garcia, 2006: 753; Donzelot, 2011: 118; Subadevan and Naqvi, 2017: 77; Giband and Siino, 2013: 645; Brogger, 2019: 2).…”