Contesting Urban Governance. New Forms of Citizenship and the Power of Protest across Institutional Contexts. Part I

Cities across the globe are dealing with challenges of increasing density, growing inequality, environmental harm, and a democratic deficit. How city administrations deal with these issues depends greatly on their specific institutional context. Cities have in common, however, the fact that citizens develop a multitude of formal and informal practices to contest urban governance. This panel seeks contributions that analyze various modalities of emerging citizenship, built around new practices deployed by citizens of diverse socio-economic, ethnic, class and religious backgrounds to contest urban governance. What types of citizenship emerge when people contest top-down urban governance; and are some forms of citizenship more likely than others to alter rather than reinforce existent urban inequalities?

Participatory processes are a common mechanism to deal with urban challenges. These processes have been criticized for their inability to engage diverse citizens. The formal procedures of citizen participation seem to have an inherent bias that excludes citizens from lower socio-economic, racial, or migration backgrounds. In contrast, citizens who claim their right to the city at a larger territorial scale or through alternative discourses, frequently organize themselves at the margins of these formal procedures. Especially in participatory processes, these forms of citizenship are neglected.

We are specifically interested in forms of citizenship that emerge on the boundaries of formal procedures of citizen participation and how this resistance affects existing power relations. In this regular session we will compare across institutional contexts, we are thus specifically interested in analyses from cities both across the Global North and South.