Research Topics : Citizenship in the Transnational City

A recent call for papers* provides (after some editing of its impenetrable prose)  an example of "big but somewhat focused" research questions in connection with a big topic: "urban citizenship in the transnational city."

One effect of global migration has been that many residents of the world’s cities lack national citizenship in the places they have moved to for work, refuge, or retirement. This has moved citizenship claimsmaking from national to urban scale. With this come calls for greater direct involvement of these people in reshaping the processes, institutions, and spaces that affect their life chances. 

The next volume in the Comparative Urban and Community Research book series will focus
on political organizations and coalitions that have pursued an expanded right to the city as a path to institutional changes that would empower global migrants as urban citizens. It will address questions such as

• What are the theoretical, political, and policy objectives of organizations working to restructure urban citizenship?
• In what spaces and at what scales do organizations seeking to restructure urban citizenship operate?
• What organizational resources do they mobilize and with what effects?
• Do they produce new modes of urban citizenship, and if so how so?
• In what ways do organizations change the meaning and significance of the right to the city?
• What coalitions are they forming, avoiding, or opposed to?
• What institutional changes have they effected, where, and why?
• What is the theoretical significance and practical impact of new modes of urban citizenship?

* posted on the Comurb_r21mailing list