Urban Citizenship and Right to the City: The Fragmentation of Claims

Self Cite

The inflow of African migrants into Tel Aviv's southern neighborhoods has aroused much resentment from long-term residents. Contesting the uneven burden sharing, which exacerbates already poor conditions at the local level, southern residents have aimed their grievances at municipal and national policymakers as well as the city's more affluent northern residents. In analyzing the contestation, this article challenges traditional conceptions of migrants as the binary opposition to residents of the host city, intruders on the shared and socio-culturally homogenous urban arena. We build on recent theorizations of urban citizenship as an agency-centered process to think through the ways in which city residents articulate their identities relationally and hierarchically against new and old 'others' and argue that international newcomers have destabilized long-conceived social relations. Using narratives of long-term southern residents, we illustrate how the uneven geographies of African migrants' settlement in Tel Aviv have (re)set in motion a process of urban citizenship formation by southern residents, thereby adding new layers of contention to what was already a highly stratified realm.

Section: Urban Citizenship In a Diverse City: A Theoretical Preludementioning

confidence: 99%

‘There are Really Two Cities Here’: Fragmented Urban Citizenship In Tel Aviv

Cohen

Margalit

2015

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“…Despite their different histories and national contexts, Berlin and Tel Aviv share many similarities—with each other and with other cities (see also Blokland et al ., , in the introduction to this symposium). They both portray themselves as ‘global cities' and struggle with urban problems such as rising rents, gentrification and neighborhood change, the contested use of public space, politics of privatization, questions around the inclusion and exclusion of immigrants, and so on.…”

Section: Claim Making and The Politics Of Participation In Berlin Andmentioning

confidence: 99%

Between Neoliberal Governance and the Right to the City: Participatory politics in Berlin and Tel Aviv

Kemp

Lebuhn

Rattner

2015

Self Cite

Based on a comparison of Berlin and Tel Aviv, this article investigates the ways in which ensembles of participatory instruments mediate between neoliberal urban regimes and political agency shaping differentially the meaning of participation and the types of claims that can be advanced. The article gives an overview of the recent history of both cities through the lens of participatory politics. Two in‐depth case studies further examine the relationship between participatory politics and claim making in each setting: the recent conflict over a social center in the district of Friedrichshain‐Kreuzberg in Berlin and the Levinsky tent city of 2011 in Tel Aviv. In the concluding section, the article suggests that, rather than assuming that participatory tools either co‐opt movements or can be appropriated by them, we need to rethink the relationship between participatory tools, rights and recognition, and ask how participatory structures and political agency constitute each other in interwoven dynamics.

“…This article thereby contributes to scholarship on urban governance that seeks to examine how power relations and local articulations of class difference produce uneven access to resources and service provisioning (Galvis, ; Blokland et al ., ; Allen and Hofman, ; Cornea et al ., ). Uneven ability to claim rights and entitlements can only partially be understood through a focus on policy, elites, and formal governance mechanisms (Geddes, ).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 98%

The Familiar Face of the State: Affect, Emotion and Citizen Entitlements in Dehradun, India

Jakimow¹

2018

Municipal Councillors (MCs) are the 'familiar face of the state' in Dehradun, India: the first port of call for citizens seeking to claim entitlements from the state. The way MCs respond to the requests of their constituents is a major factor in the uneven distribution of government welfare and services. This article seeks to contribute to understandings of citizen entitlements by drawing attention to the role of affect and emotion in shaping the interactions between MCs and voters. I examine the ways citizens consciously or unconsciously engender emotions and affective responses, and the effect these have in mobilizing MCs. Attention to the, at times, involuntary nature of these responses suggests a need to go beyond the instrumental and calculating motivations of municipal councillors, to consider the way they are compelled and animated to meet the demands of some citizens, but not of others. The capacity to affect, and the ways one is affected, are tied to the social identities and self-making projects of both the MC and the voter, resulting in an uneven (mal)distribution of state resources. A focus on affective configurations in urban governance thereby reveals heretofore overlooked determinants of unequal access to urban resources and services.