Professor of Anthropology
University of California, San Diego

This essay argues that contemporary globalization has increased the importance of cities in the making of citizens. It asks to what extent it makes sense as a result to consider the organization of a specifically urban citizenship. Although the nation and not the city has been the domain of citizenship for most of the modern era, the paper proposes that cities are the strategic arena for the development of new forms and forces of citizenship that address many of the consequences of globalization-not only of capital and labor but also of democracy itself as a globalized value of transformation. Among the consequences of the localization of global forces in cities are new immigrations and resulting class fractions, dynamics of socioeconomic inequality, criminalization of "marginals," forms of ethnic and cultural violence, diversity of identities and modes of life at odds with national mores, unstable combinations of the legal and the illegal, and circulation of rights discourse and corresponding mobilizations. Cities make these consequences manifest in their social (dis)organization, physical form, property relations, economic conditions, service and resource distributions, and daily life. These inscriptions make palpable and thus possible the experience of citizenship as people struggle over the conditions of urban life, mobilize around right-claims that focus on these conditions, and become new kinds of citizens. At the same time, these manifestations open up citizenship itself to reconceptualization as people use it to confront new situations and conflicts. In this way, the lived space of cities becomes both the context and the content of emergent forms of modern citizenship. I develop this general argument about urban citizenship by focusing on the propagation of new and diverse forms of illegality as one of the significant consequences of globalization manifested in cities. Through a variety of examples, I focus on widespread paradox, namely, that policy-based responses to this illegality often lead to new legal regimes and forms of citizenship. This paradox suggests a generalized consequence of globalization in cities. In reacting to the new conditions of illegality, the urban poor make unprecedented claims both on city resources and on the substance of citizenship. These claims are unprecedented because many of the urban poor are widely disqualified from substantive citizenship rights, resources, and practices through one form of discrimination or another-because of race, nationality, ethnicity, or others makers of membership. As urban policy-makers respond to these claims, the city's poor thus expand citizenship to new social bases.

In the process, these create new sources of citizenship rights and reform legal codes. They also bring together city administrators and residents (many of whom may not even be national citizens in the formal sense) around new agendas for a more social democracy. If, as this process of citizenship formation demonstrates, cities have a special role in defining an agenda of democracy that addresses the consequences of globalization, does it make sense to consider the possibility of defining a more autonomous urban citizenship as a distinct kind of affiliation, one of the city and not just in it, one that focuses specifically on urban democracy? The essay concludes by suggesting an outline of this complex consideration.