Political membership in a community of strangers: The distinctiveness of urban citizenship

Modern political thought used to think of political membership and citizenship in terms of the state. The civic distribution of rights and duties, and the demands they entail, were usually addressed to the modern institution of the state. This principled statism of our basic political concept of membership has recently been challenged, not only by supranational forms of political membership (e.g. European citizenship), but also by cities claiming a distinct form of urban political membership. In policy innovations such as city ID cards, which grant membership to all residents regardless of their formal citizenship status, we find an attempt to decouple urban membership from national membership. From a political theory perspective, these political attempts raise a number of fundamental questions: Do cities constitute distinct urban political communities that convey political membership? Who decides who is a member of the urban political community? And should urban citizenship then be constitutionalised as a formal citizenship status? To answer these questions, the paper delineates the urban from a statist logic of political community and membership. I argue that unlike statist political communities, which rely mainly on voluntarist or affinity-based models of political community and related membership narratives, the political community of the city is best understood as proximity-based. While the principle of proximity recently gained some traction in Neo-Kantian theories of political community (see Waldron 2011; Huber 2020), I ground the proximity principle in the nature of the city as a distinct socio-spatial form of life. Given its porous borders, density and social relations based on strangeness, living together in the city is characterised by heightened conflict as well as mutual interdependence which makes political conflict settlement necessary. In such a community of proximity, membership is based on spatial presence and everyday interactions that override national membership status. It shows that the urban political community is not a segment of the national community or the national community en miniature, but a distinct political community characterised by different constitutive conditions. This amounts to an understanding of urban membership that is detached from national membership. On the basis of these conceptual and theoretical considerations, the paper provides reasons for formalising urban citizenship.