08th Nov2012

City and Citizenship (?)

by felixburgos

Something that concerns me about Sassen’s article is the observation she makes regarding the political character of the city. I completely agree that different political activities “become visible on the street” (p. 49). However, it is a fact that such the way politics is enacted in the city seems to be more difficult in the context of highly specialized (and corporate) cities. In other words, it seems that the space of the city (which is supposed to be public) is being challenged from “commercialization, theme-parking, and privatization” (p. 49). Therefore, political acts that are not sponsored by mainstream political and economical spheres could be excluded from the notions of political activism and social-spatial justice. If the resonance of the activities of political groups is stronger in the city, what happened with movements such as Occupy Wall Street? Although the movement was pretty strong last Fall and part of Winter, it seems that its power diminished because there was a broken link between the use of urban space and the politics of the new city. Is it possible, therefore, to recover the political character of the cities in the near future? and, for whom cities really matter?

It is impossible to read De Certeau’s “Walking in the City” with certain predisposition after reading Nigel Drift’s “Driving in the city.” I imagine that De Certeau writes in a time when augmented space was not as important as it is nowadays, and that is why Drift criticizes some of De Certeau’s reflections on the creation of urban space. However, reading this article and comparing it to Sassen’s makes me think about the concept of “citizenship.” I am not referring here to nation-state affiliation, but at the relationship between the individual and the space s/he creates when interacting with the city. If the current life of the city offers us highly specialized, and technologically complex spaces that emulate the global standardization of cities, then what is the meaning of this new type of citizenship? Is this concept related to consumerism? is it a way of interacting with others’ vision of space by means of mobile technologies? what is it?

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