Rights and the City

This paper attempts to delineate the relationship between rights and the city and explore how the notion of citizenship is articulated and contested in the urban setting. The concept of citizenship is widely perceived as undergoing a critical revival largely due to the emergence of new kinds of citizens and would-be citizens. In fact, the processes of urbanisation have clearly affected the locus of citizenship traditionally linked to the nation-state in the modern era. This paper addresses the role of urbanisation in the process of citizenship redefinition, in particular by focusing on the question of rights and rights-based arguments and the role they play in various conceptualizations of urban citizenship.