Citizenship and the Right to the Global City: Reimagining the Capitalist World Order

Over the past five years or so, in the streets of places like Seattle, Washington DC, Genoa, Goteborg and Montreal, an extraordinary and diverse protest movement has been critiquing and resisting the dominant political-economic order. That order is characterized by (1) the increasing control of large corporations over material life and the persistent extension of capitalist social relations; and (2) an enduring Westphalian geopolitical order paired with a liberal-democratic model of citizenship. Demonstrators argue that this order has threatened democracy because it has increased the power of international corporations and decreased the power of ordinary citizens. Inside the academy, a similar critique has decried the increasingly authoritarian, uneven, and unjust nature of an ever more `neoliberalized' global political economy (e.g. Held, 1995; Hardt and Negri, 2000; Murphy, 2000; Swyngedouw, 2000). This article joins in that critique of the contemporary order. It argues that the traditional Westphalian geopolitical order and its liberal-democratic citizenship form (never very democratic to begin with) is too limiting a structure through which to resist the increasing power of capital over material life. The article's first main argument, then, is that in order to resist the growing dominance of capital in the global political economy, one critical project is to develop new notions of citizenship that extend the limits of politics and expand the decisionmaking control of citizens. Current research in social science reveals that such a project is already underway. New forms and practices of citizenship have proliferated in recent years (Baubock, 1994; Axtman, 1996; Isin and Wood, 1999; Ong, 1999; Yuval-Davis, 1999). Many of these new forms undermine the hegemony of the current model of citizenship, helping to loosen the traditional ties between citizenship and the nationstate, the national scale, and the nation. At the same time, the restructuring of the global political economy has itself also destabilized traditional forms of citizenship. This destabilization has opened greater political opportunity to imagine and realize new citizenships that offer alternatives to the current citizenship order. The article's second main argument is that Henri Lefebvre's concept of `the right to the city' is one particularly fertile set of principles on which to base such alternative citizenship forms (Lefebvre, 1968; 1973; 1996). Lefebvre's concept poses a radical challenge not only to the current citizenship order, but also to capitalist social relations Volume 27.3 September 2003 564-90 International Journal of Urban and Regional Research